The Thin Red Line is a 1998 American epic war film written and directed by Terrence Malick. It is the second screen adaptation of the 1962 novel of the same name by James Jones, following the 1964 film. Telling a fictionalized version of the Battle of Mount Austen, which was part of the Guadalcanal Campaign in the Pacific Theater of World War II, it portrays U.S. soldiers of C Company, 1st Battalion, 27th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division, played by Sean Penn, Jim Caviezel, Nick Nolte, Elias Koteas and Ben Chaplin. The novel's title alludes to a line from Rudyard Kipling's poem "Tommy", from Barrack-Room Ballads, in which he calls British foot soldiers "the thin red line of heroes",[3] referring to the stand of the 93rd Regiment in the Battle of Balaclava of the Crimean War.
New York-based producer Bobby Geisler first approached Malick in 1978 and asked him to direct a film adaptation of David Rabe's play In the Boom Boom Room. Malick declined the offer, but instead discussed the idea of a film about the life of Joseph Merrick. Once word got out about David Lynch's film of The Elephant Man, he shelved the idea. In 1988, Geisler and John Roberdeau met with Malick in Paris about writing and directing a movie based on D. M. Thomas' 1981 novel The White Hotel. Malick declined, but told them that he would be willing instead to write either an adaptation of Molière's Tartuffe, or of James Jones' The Thin Red Line. The producers chose the latter and paid Malick $250,000 to write a screenplay.[4]
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Malick spent years working on other projects, including a stage production of Sansho the Bailiff and a script known as The English-Speaker, spending $2 million of the producers' money, half of which for writing.[4] In 1990, he met with James Jones' widow Gloria and Jones' daughter Kaylie about adapting The Thin Red Line into a film.[7] By January 1995, Geisler and Roberdeau were broke and pressured Malick to decide which one he would complete. They approached Malick's former agent, Mike Medavoy, who was setting up his own production company, Phoenix Pictures, and he agreed to give them $100,000 to start work on The Thin Red Line.[4] Medavoy had a deal with Sony Pictures and Malick began scouting locations in Panama and Costa Rica before settling on the rain forests of northern Australia.[8] In April 1997, three months before filming, Sony pulled the plug while crews were building the sets in Queensland, because new studio chairman John Calley did not think Malick could make his movie with the proposed $52 million budget.[8] Malick traveled to Los Angeles with Medavoy to pitch the project to various studios. 20th Century Fox agreed to put up $39 million of the budget with the stipulation that Malick cast five movie stars from a list of 10 who were interested.[8] Pioneer Films, a Japanese company, contributed $8 million to the budget, and Phoenix added $3 million.[8]
Casting for the film became a hot topic. When Sean Penn met Malick, he told him, "Give me a dollar and tell me where to show up."[5] Scripts were also sent to Robert De Niro, Robert Duvall and Tom Cruise. In 1995, once word went out that Malick was making another movie after many years, numerous actors approached him, flooding the casting directors until they had to announce they wouldn't be accepting more requests. Some A-list actors including Brad Pitt, Al Pacino, Gary Oldman, and George Clooney offered to work for a fraction and some even offered to work for free. Bruce Willis even went as far as offering to pay for first-class tickets for the casting crew, to get a few lines for the movie. At Medavoy's home in 1995, Malick staged a reading with Martin Sheen delivering the screen directions, and Kevin Costner, Will Patton, Peter Berg, Lukas Haas, and Dermot Mulroney playing the main roles.[4] In June of that year, a five-day workshop was scheduled at Medavoy's with Pitt dropping by, and culminating with Malick putting on the soundtrack of Where Eagles Dare and playing Japanese taiko drums. Malick met with an interested Johnny Depp about the project at the Book Soup Bistro on the Sunset Strip.[4]
Edward Norton flew out to Austin and met Malick, who had been impressed by the actor's screen test for Primal Fear. Matthew McConaughey reportedly took a day off filming A Time to Kill to see Malick. Others followed, including William Baldwin, Edward Burns, Josh Hartnett, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Stephen Dorff, and Leonardo DiCaprio; the last of these flew up from the Mexico set of Romeo + Juliet to meet Malick at the American Airlines lounge in the Austin airport.[6] Before the casting was finalized, Nicolas Cage had lunch with Malick in Hollywood in February 1996. Malick went off to scout locations and tried calling Cage that summer only to find out that his phone number had been disconnected. Tom Sizemore, however, was offered a more substantial role in Saving Private Ryan and, when he could not contact Malick for several days, decided to do Steven Spielberg's film instead.[6] Actors Bill Pullman, Mickey Rourke, and Lukas Haas filmed scenes for the movie but were cut from the final film due to time constraints.[9] Publicity stills of Pullman (as Sgt. MacTae, in a scene opposite Brody and Chaplin) can be seen online, Haas is pictured in the booklet of the CD soundtrack, and one of Rourke's scenes was restored for the Criterion Blu-Ray/DVD release of the film. Malick wrote a part specifically for Oldman, but the character was eventually scrapped before production began due to too many characters being in the film. He was later thanked in the credits along with Lukas, Viggo Mortensen, Sheen, Rourke, Pullman and Jason Patric.
Pre-production went slowly. Weeks before filming began, Malick told Geisler and Roberdeau not to show up in Australia where the film was being made, ostensibly because George Stevens Jr. would be the on-location producer supporting line producer Grant Hill.[4] Malick told them that they had upset the studio for refusing to give up above-the-title production credit to Stevens. He did not tell them, however, that in 1996 he had a clause inserted in his contract barring the producers from the set.[5] Geisler and Roberdeau were mystified about this behavior; Geisler told Entertainment Weekly, "I didn't think he was capable of betrayal of this magnitude."[5]
The editing resulted in many of the well-known cast members being on screen for only a brief period. John Travolta and George Clooney's appearances are little more than cameos, yet Clooney's name appears prominently in the marketing of the movie. The unfinished film was screened for the New York press in December 1998 and Adrien Brody attended a screening to find that his originally significant role, "to carry the movie", as he put it, had been reduced to two lines and approximately five minutes of screen time.[17]
Editors is a 27-minute interview with editors Bill Weber, Leslie Jones, and Saar Klein, who all talk about the painful and long process of editing the millions of feet of footage. Malick apparently has an incredible ability in recalling certain footage that was shot and when editing a sequence together he could recall a particular moment involving something like a certain leaf that might film within a sequence, and then it was up to the editor to go through the footage and find it (thankfully all of the footage was precisely categorized by the sounds of it.) And not surprisingly there was a lot of improvisation in the editing rooms, and the film would change daily, but most interesting is where they all recall how hard it was to actually get Malick to watch what they had done. Apparently they had to force him to sit down and watch the first rough cut, which ran close to 5 hours, which was then cut away at to get it down to what he wanted. After that, though, it sounds like Malick never saw the full finished cut straight through, having just watched it in sections. Klein also talks a bit about the voice overs, which were literally made up on the spot, but again, could change day to day. Though all the supplements on this edition are fascinating, this may be the most intriguing one, as it goes into an incredible amount of detail as to how painful it must be to edit a film for the director.
Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line was his return to movie making after a 20 year hiatus.It is an adaptation of James Jones novel of the US assault against the Japanese on Guadalcanal in 1942.It is an abstract, lyrical even pretentious film without a coherent narrative and without any central characters.To understand the movie, you have to appreciate Malick's vision of cinema. Philosophical, meditative, haunting, transcendental. The nature of good and evil, the balance in the natural world.Imagery and emotion are strong focal points of the movie. Created by John Toll's lush cinematography among the long grass, the forest, the hills, the water and enlivened by Hans Zimmer's music.Malick had a mixture of unknown and known actors for this movie. Such was his reputation, actors competed to appear for just brief moments.John Travolta and George Clooney have cameos for just seconds. Nick Nolte and Sean Penn have juicier roles. Penn plays a cynical and broody Sgt Welsh who accepts that the army just wants the grunts dead.Nolte plays the veteran Lt Col Tall who is all out for full throated action and cares little about the number of casualties.Private Witt (Jim Caviezel) is the soldier who likes to go AWOL. He has a sensitive soul that appreciates the beauty of nature and the tribal people. Private Bell (Ben Chaplin) harks back to his life at home with his wife. He writes letters to her and receives one where she asks for a divorce. In his absence she has found another man.Future Oscar winners Adrien Brody and Jared Leto hardly have any lines. Brody had a substantial part in the movie but it was severely cut during editing. Other actors who appeared in the movie were excised altogether.This is not a film for everyone, more aimed for cinephiles than a general audience. It was released in the same year as Saving Private Ryan. Maybe this was the better war movie.
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