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

7. Adrien Brody was fairly devastated that his lead role was reduced to a small side character. John C. Reilly was also a major character who was reduced to a few lines and moments.
Adrien Brody’s character, Cpl. Geoffrey Fife, was the lead role in James Jones‘ original book and the 198-page screenplay that Malick wrote, but come editing time (and earlier) that was all changed when Brody’s role was decimated down to a glorified extra with two lines and about five minutes of screentime. It was humiliating for the actor who was already doing press for the film and was being touted as one of its leads. Of course, he had yet to see the film.

“I was so focused and professional, I gave everything to it, and then to not receive everything … in terms of witnessing my own work. It was extremely unpleasant because I’d already begun the press for a film that I wasn’t really in,” Brody said candidly in an April 2011 interview with the Independent.

“Terry obviously changed the entire concept of the film. I had never experienced anything like that.” He said he learnt a valuable, if painful, Hollywood lesson. “You know the expression ‘Don’t believe the hype’? Well, you shouldn’t.” Maybe he should have just called Richard Gere in advance and prepared himself considering that actor’s experience on “Days of Heaven.”

“I am anxious,” Brody said in the 1999 Premiere piece, “Welcome To The Jungle.” In the script his character would make a huge transformation from cowardly to courageous. “I can’t wait to get to into the more aggressive, confident stage. It will be easier for me as a person,” he said. Sadly, if that moment ever came, it never ended up on screen.

However, Malick knew while he was shooting the film was about to change drastically. “The first cut of the film was about Whit. He shifted everything while he was shooting,” longtime Malick editor and collaborator Billy Weber said on the Criterion DVD. There was a good, understandable reason for this. Malick was becoming enamored with an actor whose performance was blowing everyone away.

“He just had a really strong connection with that character and Jim Caviezel,” co-editor Leslie Jones said on the DVD extras. “You could see it; new footage coming in with Jim and it was much more focused and powerful. He found Whit’s voice during production and elaborated on it later.”

John C. Reilly had a much bigger role in the original script as well, but he seemed more at peace with his major excision from the film (he barely has any lines in the finished product). “I was lucky, I [at least] got to work fairly often. There were really great actors there that spent a whole month just waiting. Coming in every day, getting ready and then waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting,” he said in an interview that took place at the University of California Davis. “It was an amazing, amazing confusing delightful experience.”

In a very recent interview with The Playlist about his upcoming film “Terri,” Reilly told us that, “Terry was a fascinating guy – of all the kind of legendary directors I’ve worked with, he seemed the least like a filmmaker.”

“The way I saw it, [he felt], ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, nevermind about all that,” Reilly said meaning the screenplay and the book. “ ‘I’ve got you all here now, and now I’m just going to see what’s happening for real. Like, what’s really happening today.’ Which is a crazy way to work for a producer, so he’s like ‘Okay, well we’re going to do the script so that I don’t get in trouble with the producer, but what I’m really doing is waiting for something real to happen. Then I’m going to collect it all, I go back and turn it into the story that it needs to be. Not what I planned on doing, not what the script said, not what the book said, not what I promised the producer; what I really had, and what seems like a really personal statement about what I experience when I was making this thing.’ ” Ballsy and far out.

8. There is no “legendary” five-hour cut. It was just the first assembly cut of all the footage.
Still even unmixed, without score and bare bones, “That five-hour version was very powerful, and you could see it was a very moving story back then,” Billy Weber said in an 1999 interview with the Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter.

But Malick had difficulty watching any assembly of the picture and had to be forced at near gunpoint to watch it by the editors who were about to revolt.

“We forced him to watch the first assembly cut of the movie which was five hours,” editor Billy Weber said on the Criterion DVD. “And we sat him down and I said to him, ‘I’m not going to work anymore. I’m stopping until you watch everything.’ So he did, we sat one day and we watched the five hour cut and I think he only watched the movie once from beginning to end and that was the first cut. I don’t think he ever watched it again from beginning to end.”

9. Hans Zimmer, by his own admission, may have gone a little nuts composing the music for “The Thin Red Line.”
Malick wanted Hans Zimmer to write the music before the movie was actually shot which is a highly unorthodox way of scoring films. Traditionally, composers watch the footage and score to picture, but this is Terrence Malick we’re talking about. He also wrote six hours of music, a fraction of which is used in the final film.

“I threw all my previous knowledge out the window and started again,” he said in an Inside Film interview from the late ‘90s. “I wrote for nine months without a day off. It was incredible pressure in the cutting room.” On the Criterion DVD he said that Malick moved into his studio for “a year, year and half before he even started on ‘Thin Red Line.’ ”

Zimmer never mentioned the mammoth script after he read it, feeling it was like the elephant in the room Malick didn’t want to discuss. “We spent an inordinate amount of time talking about colors, and these sorts of things,” he said. “Most of the time we having impractical, unpragmatic, philosophical conversations about films heading towards this monumental beast of a film [in] sideways and obtuse ways”

Zimmer became so neurotic about the experience that Billy Weber banned him from the dub stage. “I sound flippant about it [now], but it was six hours of music and it was hard work and I thought it was going to kill me,” he recalled on the Criterion DVD. “I remember going home, clutching my chest and going, ‘I don’t think I’m going to see Christmas’ and meaning it. I wasn’t joking.”

Zimmer and Malick then began to have heated conversations about absurd musical minutia that boiled over into huge arguments (according to the composer, Malick said the two men fought “like brothers”.). “It was so complicated, especially once we set upon this course of removing more and more dialogue,” he said. “I kept feeling the weight of the lack of words on my shoulders trying to keep the river running. After a while it became a mine field of my own neurosis.”
10. Casting the picture took over a year.
“The Thin Red Line” had a long-gestating period. Word got out in 1995 that Malick was working on a new film, but casting didn’t even take place until 1996 and 1997. Part of the reason why people like Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt and others didn’t appear in the film is simple. “Terry’s idea was; he didn’t want to work with stars, he wanted people you would just believe in the characters,” longtime Malick casting director Dianne Crittenden said on the Criterion DVD extras. “His way was to make it just as real as possible and to do that was to use people you didn’t recognize.”

On said DVD, there’s a litany of brief glimpses of people who auditioned including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Josh Hartnett, Neil Patrick Harris, Brendan Sexton III (“This Boy’s Life”), Luke Perry, Crispin Glover and many others. While he eventually didn’t get a part, Stephen Dorff, “Had to audition, he just had to,” Crittenden said. “He worked on it and worked on it and he was like, ‘please, can I wait for him?’ and he’d wait and wait and wait and he’d come in and we’d [audition] until 11pm.”

According to producer Bobby Geisler in the 1999 Vanity Fair profile, Malick became starstruck by all the A-list actors that were at bowing at his feet. According to Geisler he told Malick, “You’re going to compromise the movie” (this sentiment of Malick being initially enamored by Depp and Pitt is corroborated in 1999’s Premiere article “Welcome To The Jungle”).

Truth or fiction, regardless, Malick seemed to be of that thinking anyhow. A source in the VF article said he said he too was reluctant to include stars. “The audience will know that Pitt’s going to wake up after his death scene and collect his $1 million.”

“You don’t want egos and people who want attention,’’ Crittenden said of the casting process which meant no time for kid-gloves with actors who wanted special treatment. “He wanted a certain transparency, that the actor was willing to put their own ego aside and just inhabit the character. The kind of actor who works best with Terry is someone who is someone who is extremely flexible that doesn’t get hung up on lines and words,” she said delicately, knowing all too well many of those lines and words don’t actually make the final picture.