Techniques
Terrence Malick is a rarity in the modern film world in that he has almost complete artistic control over his movies, making his films extremely recognizable as well as very personal. His eccentric personality has led to many of the people he has worked with, such as James Horner, Christopher Plummer and Sean Penn, to speak negatively about the experience. Malick's signature skill and the main reason he is so acclaimed as a director is his incredible visual style as he regularly turns out works of startling aesthetic quality. Malick has earned both praise and criticism for his favoring of sights and sound over words, detractors argue this technique creates a weak narrative while supporters claim that the style creates movies more inherently cinematic than what traditional methods would allow. Similar to Stanley Kubrick , whos 2001 a Space Odyssey is the movie Malicks Tree of Life is often compared with, Malick often uses classical music in favor of a score created specifically for the movie. One reason for this is that Malicks extreme editing style often renders prepared scores obsolete. Another reason is that often times a certain classical piece will evoke a certain emotion or feeling better than any other piece likely would. Classical Music was put to particularly good use in the New World and the Tree of Life but has been used in all of his movies. As previously mentioned, Malick is notorious for spending months if not years editing his movies, experimenting with the narrative in every way possible. Malick shoots vast amounts of footage for his movies, enabling him to completely change the direction of a movie in the editing room if he wants. One extreme example of his editing came in the Thin Red Line where he completely changed who the main character of the movie was while almost eliminating the previous main character from the final cut (and famously not informing actor Adrian Brody of the change). Another one of Malicks trademarks is the relative lack of character-to-character dialogue with the majority of spoken dialogue coming in the form of whispered voice-overs expressing the ruminations of the main characters. This allows Malicks movies to delve deeper into the innermost thoughts of the characters as well as express some of the more philosophical themes in ways that dont require forced and unrealistic scenes between characters. Despite many actors not enjoying working with him, Malick has still been phenomenally successful at attracting large ensemble casts including some of the most in-demand actors in Hollywood. The Thin Red Line in particular has arguably the largest number of big-name actors ever cast in a movie (although many of them were cut completely out of the final version). One of the ironies of Malick attracting such big name talent is that he doesnt really use actors the way most directors do. Similar to directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Malick sees actors as almost another part of the landscape or as props and is not afraid to completely edit certain characters entirely out of movies if he feels the film should go in a different direction. One final trademark of Malick's films is his propensity for shooting in the "magic hour", the first and last hour of sunlight during the day. By shooting at that time of day, the color scheme becomes softer and shadows are reduced. Malick has done this in a number of his films, particularly in the Tree of Life where almost the entire film is shot during this time.