16 Things You Need To Know About Terrence Malick’s ‘The Thin Red Line’

3. While “The Thin Red Line” is notorious for all the actors that were allegedly “cut” from the film, like most legends, most of this information is inaccurate or overstated
Yes, several very well-known actors and stars read for “The Thin Red Line” and/or actively sought parts or had conversations with Terrence Malick, but around only three “major” or well-known stars were cut from the film.

They include Mickey Rourke – as seen on the Criterion DVD extras (watch a clip from one of his scenes below), Bill Pullman (see photos in this article) and Lukas Haas (photos exist on the Criterion DVD). According to that very thorough and extensive 1999 EW article, a part was written for Gary Oldman, but then he was told not to show up before shooting began. Billy Bob Thornton (who is not in the film) recorded a voice-over (reportedly three hours of it) for the film that was never used. Actors like Martin Sheen, Jason Patric and Viggo Mortensen are also part of the actors allegedly cut from the film, and while thanked in the credits, Mortensen and Sheen apparently only participated in customary read-throughs (as did many other actors).

However, actors that met with Malick range up into the dozens with folks like Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Nicolas Cage, Kevin Costner, Peter Berg, Ethan Hawke, Dermot Mulroney. Matthew McConaughey, William Baldwin and many, many more (Cage evidently insulted Malick by having a disconnected phone when the director called him back after a lunch sealing the deal for his exclusion from the picture according to Rachel Abramowitz’s excellent January 1999 piece “Welcome To The Jungle,” for Premiere magazine). According to the herculean Vanity Fair article by Peter Biskind (“Easy Riders & Raging Bulls“), Johnny Depp said to the director, “Let’s sign this napkin; you tell me where to show up, when, what to play” Depp, Pitt and McConaughey all wanted the Witt role that went to Jim Caviezel according to the same 1999 Premiere article — Leonardo DiCaprio flew from the Mexico set of “Romeo + Juliet” to meet with Malick for what was a “strained” meeting in the Austin Airport.

Tom Hanks declined an invitation due to his involvement in Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan.” Tom Sizemore was also offered a role in both ‘Private Ryan’ and “The Thin Red Line,” but after waiting too long to hear back from the elusive Malick, chose Spielberg’s WWII film instead. Malick saw the maneuver as treason. According to Premiere’s 1999 article, Malick went “ballistic” and an insider negotiating the deal before it went sour said, “[Malick] as if the covenant had been broken.”

4. Actors had to adjust to Malick’s challenging directing style which could be abrupt, spur-of-the-moment and/or far too abstract without little coaching. Communication was also an issue.
Actors had to be alert and malleable because Malick demanded a lot and might call on you to shoot an emotionally difficult scene with a moment’s notice.

“There was one part where it was a 45 second crane shot over two days – the most you could do was one set-up per day because you had to have all these explosive set ups and 500 guys and the camera had to swoop down everywhere and then zoom in on the character crying,” actor Kirk Acevedo recalled of his memorable death sequence. “So Terry goes, ‘ok Kirk, go ahead and start crying.’ And I’m like cracking jokes and playing chess with Woody Harrelson! So for some people, it was difficult. You had to focus rightaway because on any given day or any given hour you didn’t know what you were going to shoot, he’s very spontaneous, so you had to be on your toes.”

“When it came time to be one-on one with the actors and get inside people’s heads on the set and create the intimacy, it was like he just expected that stuff to come, “John C. Reilly said in the 1999 Premiere article.

“It took me a little bit of time to adjust to it, it took me a couple of weeks and some heart to heart conversations with Terry about what contribution I could make because I had never been involved in something [so big],” Sean Penn said in the 2002 Terrence Malick documentary “Rosy-Fingered Dawn,” much of that interview footage appropriated for Criterion’s DVD extras on the actors’ experience.

“Now Kirk, you’re on the ship and the beach is right there and you’re calling out into the abyss. And that’s what your motivation is,” actor Kirk Acevedo recalled, laughing at Malick’s abstract form of direction on the DVD extras. “But the funny thing is I did understand. His directing is very poetic and very, sort of, catching for fairies and butterflies, so to speak.”
The difficulties in communicating would extend even over to long-time collaborators. “I find working with Terry kind of exhausting,” production designer Jack Fisk, who has worked on every Malick film from the beginning, admitted in the 1999 Premiere article. “Because he’s the most difficult man to understand. Sometimes he’ll talk in metaphors. Sometimes he’ll show me a photograph or a painting. Sometimes he’ll just make a literary reference or talk about a piece of music.”

5. In particular, Elias Koteas had a very difficult time and a near-miserable experience.
At the last minute, Koteas’ character was changed from Jewish to Greek and he wasn’t aware until he arrived on set – weeks after the principal cast had already bonded. The experience left him disoriented and off to a bad start. ”It added to my angst, to my sense of not belonging, my sense of not knowing who I was and why am I here,” he said in a 1999 EW interview.

Part of this was because he didn’t even really want the difficult role at first and had to be convinced by his agents to take it. “[The character’s] men weren’t behind him, they didn’t believe in him, so I felt it was a thankless role,” Koteas admitted on the Criterion DVD extras.” [The character and I] get beat up, gets fired and then is sent home. So I thought, ‘Where’s the joy in that?’”

Exacerbating his anxiety was Malick’s directorial style which did not correspond with his acting approach. “I would say, ‘we need rehearsal,’ it was a bit of a running joke,” he said on the DVD. “For me personally it was tough because you come in with a bit of an ego, you have some idea of how to play it and when you’re told, ‘look to your left, now turn around, turn to your right, look up there, listen to the distant bird’ so you have this kind of hands on direction, it feels a little humbling. But ultimately you have to realize you’re part of a bigger vision and you have to surrender yourself to it.”

6. Malick is the master of either evasive answers, assuaging fears or both.
In a 2003 interview with Time Out, Nick Nolte recalled being amazed at an outcome of a a meeting that the actors had called. “So I watched all the actors talk about why they felt so discombobulated,” he said. “One complaint was that [Terry] didn’t finish scenes. Terry listened to everything, and at the end said: ‘Thank you, this has been a wonderful meeting, you’re absolutely right, and we must do what we’ve talked about.’ They’re all looking at Terry like, ‘We do it? What can we do?’ I’ve never seen a guy defuse a situation like that.”

Sean Penn notes that he too was concerned with his role. “There was a time where I was having a bit of a crisis with [the picture and my role] where I felt that, my understanding of it was that it was getting a little too black and white for me,” he said on the Criterion DVD extras.

“I explained this with a lot of energy and emotion to Terry and his answer — after I’d been up all night worrying about this two weeks into shooting – he just said, ‘Oh, I think we’re just fine.’ He didn’t really address those things, but that seemed ok with me [at the time],” Penn recalled with a chuckle. Ultimately, he realized questions weren’t going to be answered; one had to just surrender to the director’s opaque vision.

“If you love his work, you jump on board his train and you don’t ask where it’s going. If you do ask he’ll answer you, but it doesn’t help,” Penn laughed. “It’s not a destination you’ve been before.”

“He would say, ‘Your whole life has prepared you for this moment.’ And I’d be like, “ok, what does he mean by this?’,” Koteas said on the Criterion DVD articulating his frustration and confusion.