“The Magic Hours”, the first comprehensive biography of Hollywood’s most mysterious movie makers, has hit shelves. British film critic and biographer John Bleasdale spoke to Euronews Culture on delving into the famously media-shy director’s hidden life.
In 1978, Terrence Malick was considered one of the brightest new talents in Hollywood. His second film Days of Heaven was an unalloyed masterpiece follow-up to his brilliant 1973 debut Badlands. Malick could have done anything next. Instead, as the Hollywood myth goes, he disappeared.
Malick made a seemingly miraculous return to the big screen 20 years later for his third film The Thin Red Line. Today, the enigmatic filmmaker is now prolific. Between 2011 and 2019, he released six films. A far cry from the decades-long wait for his third feature.
Yet even with the increased output, Malick has remained unknowable. He gave his last interview in 1979 to French newspaper Le Monde. He’s since never given a direct quote to the press and the only picture he’s allowed to be released is a grainy promotional shot of him directing The Thin Red Line.
“The picture is inevitably bathed in the golden light of early evening. The magic hour. It was taken by his father, Emil Malick. For all the arguments, Terry still saw himself through his father’s eyes,” reads the biography on the image. Coming in a chapter half-way through the book, it captures much of John Bleasdale’s mammoth task, bringing insight into both Malick’s humanity and unique approach to the filmmaking medium.
“The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick” is a sprawling biography that proves its meticulous research pedigree with intricate detail over the complexities of a life directing huge groups of people in-front-of and behind the camera. Bleasdale’s writing is also rife with newspaper clippings, quotes from collaborators, and his own personal feelings about the director’s oeuvre.
It’s the first time Malick has been biographed. Naturally, there’s a question as to whether Bleasdale was able to get access to the man himself. While he is quick to refer to conversations with long-time confidants such as production designer Jack Fisk and actors like Sean Penn, he bats off the suggestion of time with Malick with the explanation that he and the director’s team just shared some “very polite emails”.
But “The Magic Hours” delves deeper into Malick’s personal life than any single document has done before. Is any of this information direct from the horse’s mouth, even if it’s not quoted at his behest? “If there were, I couldn’t possibly say,” is the best I can get from Bleasdale.
Although the in-depth biographical details of Malick’s career are interesting – particularly the section around his wilderness years and how troubled time with producers Bobby Geisler and John Roberdeau served as inspiration for Knight of Cups – the best sections of the book are those explicating how Malick’s private life intersected with his career.
Bleasdale’s biography depicts Malick as a charming, deeply personable man, as prone to joking around as he is to deep philosophical inquiry. Even the recognition of Malick’s introversion is clear to put aside the legends surrounding his characterisation as the hermit of Hollywood.
As the myths are brushed away, information about Malick’s homelife comes forward. His troubled relationship with his father, the loss of his brothers, and his love life all feed into Bleasdale’s readings of his films and their relation to their releases.
“Tragic brothers go throughout his films, as are problematic fathers,” he notes. But although details of his marriage to Michèle Monete bring light onto To The Wonder, Bleasdale makes clear that his filmography isn’t just autobiography in disguise.
“I think he very much wants to disguise his life. Purely because I think he feels that’s a reductive reading,” Bleasdale says. Much like how his spiritual beliefs and early career in philosophy often serve as jumping off points to understand Malick’s filmography, Bleasdale thinks that misses the point. “I think he would feel that if someone takes [these things] as the key to all mythologies, as the key that will unlock all these films, it will stop them from experiencing them and just taking things out of them for themselves.”
If Malick purposely eschews the public eye as a Barthes-esque ‘Death of the Author’ attempt to stop his own life becoming central to audiences’ understanding of his films, isn’t a biography antithetical to his artistic aims? Perhaps that’s a misunderstanding of Malick’s separation from the press, Bleasdale argues.
“He would never read this book,” Bleasdale says. “He once said he’d never go to therapy because it would take his juice. He wants to look inside himself in his movies rather than in interviews.”
Much like his AFI course-mate David Lynch’s famous refusal to elaborate on the meaning behind his films, Malick’s concern when it comes to his public image is purely his films.
To engage with those films, whether it’s through a post-viewing conversation or indeed a biography, is part of his films entering into the world. “The aim of hopefully any book related to film is to send people back to look at the movies and see them in a deeper and richer light,” Bleasdale says.
“The Magic Hours” delivers on this promise. It engages wholeheartedly with how Malick has brought his biography into a filmmaking process that has advanced the form. That it can do so with Malick’s most divisive films is far more impressive than with the fan favourites. As Bleasdale explains in his chapter on To The Wonder, there’s far more to his filmmaking than simply the narrative’s ostensible connection to his second wife.
“It’s weird. It’s an autobiographical movie but it’s all told from Marina’s [Olga Kurylenko] point of view. Ben Affleck has like three lines in the whole movie. It’s almost totally her and Javier Bardem as this wandering priest.” Malick is formally inventive even at his most autobiographical, Bleasdale argues. “Autobiography isn’t necessarily about revealing your own thoughts. It’s about trying to look at other people’s perspectives that you’ve had in your life. And that’s a very generous thing to do.”
If Malick’s first three films were considered masterpieces and the fifth – the also very autobiographical – The Tree of Life cemented his return with the Palme d’Or at Cannes and Oscar nominations, his latter films have been largely criticised as meandering bores filled with droning spirituality and perfume-advert filmography.
Yet Bleasdale argues that even in his most oblique work, there is a sensibility of avant-garde artistry that has continued to be as influential to film as his earlier releases.
Of Malick’s seven 21st century films, five have been made with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (Chivo). Together they’ve developed a cinematic language that has defined the partnership.
Over Chivo’s first film with Malick, The New World, the pair worked out a “dogma” for shooting that included using “available natural light; underexposure was forbidden” alongside other rules that forbid zooming with “pans and tilts discouraged” in favour of moves “along the z axis”. It’s a set of rules that have come to define Malick’s films – sometimes to the point of parody – but have also bled into popular contemporary filmmaking. Chivo won his third Oscar for his work on The Revenant, a film with clear (bear) paw prints from Malick’s work.
Bleasdale lists films and directors who he can see Malick’s influence vividly. Paul Thomas Anderson’s films There Will Be Blood and The Master have a clear debt to Malick’s period pieces. On last year’s Oppenheimer, “you don’t get that kind of editing where you have two scenes divided through the entirety of the film, the rest of the storytelling is shots not scenes, without The Tree of Life”. Even this year’s Best Picture nominee Nickel Boys is “totally The Tree of Life” in its approach to montage and subjective camera work.
If his work is unpalatable to a mainstream audience, it’s because it’s at the forefront “experimenting in cinema with the language of story”, Bleasdale says. All of this is in aid of telling stories that connect with people in new ways.
Reading “The Magic Hours” as a non-convert to Malick, Bleasdale makes a convincing human argument for Malick as a filmmaker and a man more engaging without the shroud of mystery populated by the press.
As he quotes one of Malick’s collaborators: “We genuinely believed when we went into work in the morning that we were trying to reinvent the language of cinema.”
“The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick” by John Bleasdale is available now.
