"the new world" (terrence malick film)

this subject is ripe for so many divergent (and potentially interesting) treatments.

will this be a displaced meditation on the meaning of america and "civilization"?

This sounds good though.

I hope George Clooney doesn't pop up in the last scene of this one.

Vollmann's Career = Revenge of the Nerd, April 6, 2002
Reviewer: A reader (Austin, TX)

William Vollmann is like the nerdiest person you knew in college or high school. He grew up to become a novelist who gained notoriety by writing in great detail about his experiences with prostitutes and having the audacity to claim that it took some sort of moral heroism for him to smoke crack with them in roach-infested transient hotels. Of course, it wouldn't do to be slumming all the time -- otherwise he'd just be another John Rechy or Bruce Benderson. So he adds Ivy League intellectual patina to these books by positioning them as meditations on the history of North America, or as reflections on how "all loving relationships are really forms of prostitution." He writes long, long books hoping that you'll be very, very impressed with him.

Folks, read this book or any other book by William Vollmann and keep in mind that this is an author with a profoundly stunted emotional growth. There's nothing cute about celebrating prostitution as the "most honest form of love" -- it's sickening writing, the babbling of a man still stuck in the fantasies of adolescence who will never understand that real love transcends economic exchange into a pure giving of oneself to another. He pats himself on the back for his "ferocity," when in fact he's never really outgrown being a journal-scribbling teenager who thinks every word he scribbles needs to be published and admired. His writing amounts to one big infantile gesture of lashing out at his Mommy and Daddy -- he admits as much in his interviews -- but at the same time hoping all these books he writes will make his parents love him. It's sad.

The fact that Vollmann has a big crowd of admirers says a lot about the sheep-like mentality and the moral vacancy of too many people who like cutting-edge literature. Read the bombastic praise Vollmann receives that is printed on the dustjackets of his books, and reviewers envious of his lifestyle just look like fools with the pumped-up praise that lavish on Vollmann. Go to a Vollmann reading and look around -- the people there are the sort who are hip, cynical, wear funky glasses and hate their parents, and whose main worry is keeping up with the latest slick novels and edgy CD's to hit the shelves. They have no ability to think for themselves and they are bored with life -- so they are profoundly impressed by this guy who writes about his experience with prostitutes. If you recognize yourself in this description, you need to get a life.

There's a certain sort of bourgeois person who believes their life can be redeemed by writing a novel in which they'll "show 'em all" -- the 'em being Mommy and Daddy, the cool kids who rejected them in high school, the jocks who called them nerds, etc. Vollmann is the "patron saint" of this sort of misfit. I read an interview in which Vollmann stated confidently that he is as important as Shakespeare or Faulkner. He doesn't seem to understand that the self-absorbed navel-gazing of a well-read prostitute's john doesn't quite cut it as great literature, no matter how many big words and descriptive phrases he tries to pack into his sentences. Vollmann's delusions are as bloated as his books, and his vision lacks even a hint of the universality or breadth or understanding that literary importance requires. Nobody but a few misfit loners and antiquarians will be reading Vollmann fifty years from now. Vollmann is a Montherlant in the making -- that is, an irrelevant curiosity that even most highly educated people will not have heard of.

Please think for yourself and don't buy this book just because you think it's kind of neat and edgy that this guy writes about his experiences with prostitutes. Don't engage in the sad spectacle of living vicariously through William Vollmann's sad, warped world. You'll just put yourself one step closer to moral oblivion. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title

(also I really want Sterling Clover to read that.)

internal affairs you lunatics!!!

(whatever happened to jim mcbride?)

we are talking about him because he wrote a book that is basically this movie, slocki.

as for new malick, hooray! I smell some lovely cornfields at dusk!!! amber waves of magic hour pilgrim grain!

that's what I'm saying

I suspect that "the new world" will be far less vicious than Vollmann in condemning the whole of the colonial project.

i wonder how many voice overs there will be in this one

p.s. i love terrence malick

i hope there is another chorus of voice overs. (esp since I can't see farrell being interesting there by himself).

ok i just read the thread again and this cracked me up.

http://www.moviepublicity.com/image_assets/NW-DF-06762.jpg

IMdB tells me she is related to Jewel.

I've never seen a Malick film.

not to say that Heidegger is required for liking or understanding the movie (it stands on its own as a great movie) but when you consider the final scenes, esp Witt's death, and think about the death chapter in Being and Time it really adds resonance that is pretty powerful.

p.s. often trailers use random music that isn't in the film when it's finished. i suspect that's the case here.

x-post

what does that mean?

it means that, as in 'the thin red line', there is a voice-over, which meanders.

I'm worried that the voiceover will be annoying. Was it a studio mandating request? Does Malick have to play by their rules?

http://www.filmstew.com/Content/Article.asp?ContentID=13015&Pg=1

So when's it going into general release? Cuz I may go tonight then. Jams?

read many, many negative reviews today.

and one good one.

Days of Heaven is my favorite movie of all time. I like to think of it as a sister film to Kaspar Hauser, as they both have lots of grass swaying in the wind and there's a circus/carnival type scene in the middle and I had a bunch of other similarities in my head once.

Caviezel blew me away in Thin Red Line...I was dissapointed to learn he was a bit of a born-again crazy during the press for The Passion.

The Making of "The New World"
Sunday, January 8th at 4pm

A conversation with producer Sarah Green and production designer Jack Fisk featuring behind the scenes excerpts on the making of Terence Malick's THE NEW WORLD followed by a screening of the film.

Ticket prices: $10 for FSLC members, $12 for students and $15 general admission.

did you guys know i've seen t.m.? it was at a screening where his only words were, "hi, i hope you enjoy the movie. thanks."

shouldn't the behind the scenes be AFTER the movie? As cool as that sounds I don't want to sit there watching and talking about scene excerpts before seeing the movie!

*stories about such things always make me wonder: how quickly can they really print and distribute several dozen 35mm prints?!?!? i had thought this was a somewhat laborious process.(presuming malick was not offline editing several dozen prints at once! whoa.)

This re-editing story has been around at least a week, and it's two more before the "re-opening."

Kubrick did this kind of post-opening cutting twice: 2001 and The Shining; but I'm pretty sure he had final cut and Malick doesn't. (In May '80 I saw the original version that had a penultimate scene of the hotel manager telling recuperating Shelley Duvall they found no sign of Jack on the Overlook grounds; never seen since.)

My mistake: TNW is the first Malick film Jack Fisk hasn't worked on (he was art director on the first two).

that already makes that movie like 1,000,000,000 times better.

The colonists are the most convincingly starving and grotty-looking you've ever seen, which in a couple of instances (religious or rebellious delirium) teeters in the direction of Monty Python.

The producer said in the pre-screening discussion that Malick has edited a 3-hour version for the DVD, at which point he felt like returning to the 149-minute print I saw and tightening it up. I can't say I like all this multiplicity that the DVD has spawned, where we all have to clarify 'which' New World we saw.

http://www.cinematical.com/2006/01/18/interview-qorianka-kilcher-of-the-new-world/

having seen both versions, i cant make out much of a difference. it didnt really seem like anything was missing, and i noticed just as many new shots as i remembered shots that were missing. so not really a big change from what i can tell. i hope malick releases the longer version on dvd, since i can watch his movies all day when in the comfort of home.

anyway, it's still glorious.

q'orianka kilcher was fucking great.

She competed in the first season of the new "Star Search" (1983), hosted by Arsenio Hall, in the Young Singers category. She placed second overall.

Related to pop singer Jewel Kilcher.

Speaks German.

Manohla Dargis reviewed the new edit in the Times and said the only notable addition was Plummer talking about who the settlers were and why they came (sounds like a bit of a sop to Joe Blow).

INT. FLYING SAUCER - DAY(ISH)

[Saucer is in formation with hundreds of others, all racing at breakneck speed towards a rapidly approaching dot. As the dot grows larger, we see it's THE EARTH.]

PLERG (V.O.)
Sometimes, in a moment of weakness, the mind drifts. Sometimes I wonder. Sometimes I think, 'What if these peoples... are not the same, but same enough?'

[PLERG's eyes narrow; his hand pushes the accelerator glob forward]

EXT. SUBURBAN HOME - DAY

[CRUISE is playing basketball with FANNING in the driveway. CRUISE is dribbling, and the action turns to SLO-MO.]

CRUISE (V.O.)
She's so little. I wonder what she wants to be when she grows up. Does she even know what that means?

{CRUISE's eyes narrow. He does a head-fake and drives towards the basket, dunking the ball over FANNING so hard the rim rattles.]

CRUISE
BOOOOO-YEAH!!!!! Whoooo!!! ALl right!

I thought it was fantastic.

I loved seeing David Thewlis and Eddie Marsan. I really thought that I noticed David Schneider from The Day Today in one scene but he doesn't seem to be in the cast. ?

(xp)

xxp

1. i've seen better imax movies. as a fan of nature documentaries, the "nature channel", etc i didn't think the nature photography was particularly great.

2. the same nature shots didn't make a whole lot of sense, or add up to much.

2a. and when they did add up, it was pretty trite. pocahontas dies = jump-cut shot of an empty bed, bird flying in an empty sky.

3. white euro male camerawork. lots of indian bodies, lots of european faces.

4. not a whole lot explaining why smith like pocahontas. "she brings joy to all around her, and is universally loved" - except we never see any evidence of this, besides a shot where she is playing flute while the indians around her are curing skins and gathering wood. they seem to be ignoring her.

5. all the sex was off-camera.

things i liked

1. the indian costumes and sets were gorgeous. i liked the "last rites" bit, where pocahontas' brother is dying in the field, and the medicine man puts the little box turtle on the guys chest to crawl towards his face. the bit where the shaman gives him the death sentence is pretty frightening.

(i hereby request that on my deathbed someone put a cute box turtle on my chest to crawl towards my face)

(and also my appreciation for these bits is tempered by my suspicion that the last thing this movie / western culture needs is more aestheticized hollywood version of native american tradition)

i agree that the last rites bit was great.

Re Noah Taylor, apparently his part was just whittled down (much as Adrien Brody's was in TTRL). A promotional 'making-of' they showed at Lincoln Center also featured Ben Chaplin among the colonists, who I didn't spot at all (in the 150-minute version).

I'd say young people are used to narration that is redundant and/or overexplicit enough to tell them things they missed when they weren't paying attention (Desperate Housewives), not impressionistic musings.

mind you, i am a big big fan of "last of the mohicans"

Matt Zoller Seitz's (NY Press) impassioned rave on his blog:

http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2006/01/there-is-only-thisall-else-is-unreal.html

And his response to "anti-Malick jihadists," with discussion of narration and its uses:

http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2006/01/voices-in-your-head_113674126753707394.html

"Narration is not solely employed to fill in backstory or paper over plot holes, etc (uses to which Malick almost never puts it, as anyone who's actually paying attention already knows). It is also employed -- deliberately, carefully -- to frame the story as a literary, past tense work ("Barry Lyndon," "The Royal Tenenbaums"), to create emotional distancing effects ("Hiroshima Mon Amour"), to set up whopping surprises ("Fight Club") or to suggest ominiscence, thereby framing the story as a collective, civilization-wide event rather than a story that happens to just one central figure (the strategy in all Malick's films, particularly his last two). The above examples describe not passive, lazy narration, but active or contrapuntal narration...."

If yer talking about Michael Mann's, they already met.

malick's approach often seems pretty random, pointlessly pretty, and overly slow on first impressions, but after a few viewings it becomes apparent (to me anyway) that his style is in fact pretty rigorous. far from being random, many if not all of the "nature shots" are a pointed commentary on the main narrative. (obvious point i guess.)

"i didn't get the point of the random nature imagery" = now the burden of proof is on me, instead of malick - i must rigorously PROVE TO YOU that it didn't have a point, and not the other way around.

(xp)

Perhaps if it had been framed like all the Brokeback Mountain vistas that teh Bulletin Board Gays are cooing over --- OOH, PURTY SCENERY! -- no one would be asking that.

hat running streams run! and trees are tall and sunlight is pretty!

these strike me as pretty profound points! it's easy and lazy to reduce everything to tautology.

i agree with dr morbius but i DO think he's being a dick!

namely, the repeated images of kilcher reaching her arms upward, the woman's saying about trees, etc.

She competed in the first season of the new "Star Search" (1983), hosted by Arsenio Hall, in the Young Singers category. She placed second overall.

Impossible! Whateverhernameis is 15 years old! I SEE YOUR GAME AND WILL NOT PLAY IT.

Historical epic + Colin Farrell hasn't really worked so far so I am wary of this film. Movie + Colin Farrell actually hasn't worked at all.

Back to your regularly scheduled arguing.

And I don't think they mean Jewel because, as well we all know, Jewel was a homeless igloo-dweller who ripped apart bears with her own teeth and hands for the first 18 years of her life before vanning it to Hollywood. Get with it, everyone!

Wow, MZ Seitz on his second viewing declares TNW to be "a generation-defining event"! He also compares the differences in the two editions:

http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2006/01/just-beautiful_25.html

Kilcher was pretty incredible, though. I couldn't take my eyes off her. And not just b/c she's pretty, but she was such a magnetic presence on-screen.

Maybe that's what the problem is, me being Lutheran. Maybe something like Gertrud is just more my speed.

(Embarrassing is harsh, though. I'm only sort of "meh," which has been my first recorded reaction to every film by Malick upont first viewing, so I probably should've have even posted at all yet.)

i dont think this is necessarily true, tho the religious or spiritually minded will perhaps respond better than materialists. it helps to have read Heidegger and Stanley Cavell as well. or you could just take a look at Simon Critchley's article on The Thin Red Line, which goes in the right direction: http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n48critchley

reactions like "embarassing" to malick's films never fail to sort of wound me for some reason.

My main refs for Lutheranism are Bergman and Dreyer, Eric; are you saying Malick isn't austere enough?

Haha... I didn't say I was (raised) Lutheran, did I? I guess I didn't have to in this case.

are you saying Malick isn't austere enough?

I think he isn't ascetic enough. On the other hand, the only thing I actually throw down religious paeans over is great disco music.

I was in tears at the end.

During parts of the first third I was thinking, beautiful and malick, but not blowing my mind, but by the end...I was destroyed.

I always think of Herzog when I watch Malick movies. Their use of nature imagery, the pacing, and the music I find very similar. I'm never bored. I first made this connection when seeing the field of grass at the beginning of Kaspar Hauser. Neither are affraid of just showing you a beautiful scene and knocking you over with some killer music, while the dialog is minimal and barely audible. What's being shown is never about moving the plot forward, but about expressing the emotion behind the plot. Obviously many filmmakers do this, or think they're doing this. They just don't pull it off in the way these two affect me.

Colin Farrell didn't bug me as much this time, and a couple of his key line readings were spot-on ("Don't trust me" and "I may have sailed past [my Indies]"). Recognized Ben Chaplin this time. Also, Rolfe is never called by name in the film, just like Pocahontas isn't. And what is the white powder sprinkled on Smith before his would-be execution, and used by the Naturals in other scenes?

Still don't think it's any sort of great film (a claim I wouldn't make for any of his earlier stuff either), but things being what they are, certainly the best US release I've seen from '05 after Munich.

the only thing I actually throw down religious paeans over is great disco music.

I believe it -- no wonder you went so easy on Last Days!

http://www.takahashikan.co.jp/z_09/bgm_03.JPG

the "ick rule" continues to state that NO DIRECTORS WHOSE NAME ENDS IN ICK (WHO AREN'T ALEXANDER MACKENDRICK) are any good whatsoever -- it is time it wz once again tested i guess

one day also i must see barry lyndon for the same reason -- whenever anyone raves abt this at me it turns out they mean tom jones

Do you mean Morricone's or Tchaikovsky's?

the "ick rule" is full of shick.

(nor have i seen thin red line or indeed this, so obv as a theory it is languishing a bit behind easily available evidence)

re music: morricone def, i haven't seen the film for years but i catch myself humming it all the time -- also plus driving back from my dad's on tuesday there wz a big loud symphony thing on radio three and i wz like, what is THIS it is AWFUL, whose full-size orchestra stuff don't i know that well? can it be bruckner maybe? sure he is not this useless? and i had to wait through the whole thing to find out and it wz tchaikovsky of course -- incredibly clumsy and dreary)

(then there wz an interview w.this lady which wz really interestin)

"David [Gordon Green] said to me [Seth Rogen] the other day, 'Guess what Terrence Malick's favourite movie of the last 10 years is?'"

What?

"Zoolander! He knows every word, watches it every week."

yeah, and Bergman liked "Dallas" (not a joke).

When is that deluxe DVD of TNW due?

prob around the same time we see the 6 hour version of The Thin Red Line....(tho the criterion disc of Days of Heaven gives hope for SOMETHING)

i saw both cuts of TNW and far preferred the longer one.

This was the first film in years I've been unable to finish watching. And I made it to the end of It's All about Love.

!!!

One of the few ambitious 21st-century Hollywood films can't get the usual 900 words out of nabisco?

(the astonishing thing is you finished Brick)

http://www.dvdtimes.co.uk/content.php?contentid=68114

Extended Cut due in October, for those not bothered with the link.

Running time is now 172 Minutes.

freakin love this film

you jest.

I'm actually reasonably pleased at an extended cut; I liked this film, but after Thin Red Line I was definitely a bit disappointed at its brevity - not because I prefer long films to short films generally (far from it) but because I felt the narrative was missing something.

finally saw the extended cut on blu-ray and i think this film finally got to me. i loved the shorter versions but this one is far, far superior for me.

even noticed some lovely small details that had escaped me. at the end, as mother and son are playing hide and seek, and as Bale's voiceover informs us that she died we see the child looking for her and not find her, as the camera whips back and forth searching for her as well. it's so brief it's easy to miss. it's full of moments like that. what an extraordinary movie.

finally saw the extended cut on blu-ray and i think this film finally got to me

did you notice cars in the far distance during the scene with the indian in the palace gardens?

sort of unsure about this film but the english sojourn is great and as noted the coda is sublime

i've seen the standard DVD version of this maybe 3 times. felt it was almost a great film. saw the extended Blu-Ray version and kind of fell in love with it. as stunning as it looked, i'm chalking it up to the different cut.

trailer
― :| (....), Thursday, December 23, 2004 5:28 PM (6 years ago) Bookmark
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it's funny how some of those shots seem virtually identical to shots in "the thin red line"
― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Thursday, December 23, 2004 5:40 PM (6 years ago) Bookmark

haha in retrospect this is a key moment.

Have we had this interview linked somewhere? Pretty harsh by James Horner.

So he went out shooting the movie, went over time, and got beautiful images and everybody (said) “Oh god, this is so beautiful.” There were a couple of things that were pasted together by a couple of the experienced editors of the love scenes: “Oh, this gonna be great, absolutely great”. OK.

He had eight editors working for him—two prestigious, the rest out of the woodwork, and some assistants. There was so much film he was working on night on night, (that) there was a crew… When I first saw it, it was a mishmash of unrelated scenes, complete mishmash. I said, “Well Terry, you need to…” He asked me what I thought. “You need to cohere this. I mean this scene should be there” ... all kinds of editing things were wrong. It was the first assembly.

It was April and he was supposed to have a cut ready by May to look at, and that we missed. He missed his deadline and it was in the middle of June when we saw it. The studio saw it, and it was the same thing I saw two days after he finished shooting. It has gone through two and a half month’s work and it was in just the same state. This was when I first saw it and red lights started to go up everywhere because I’m getting close to my recording dates and this is unscoreable like this.

I played him scenes, I played him everything on the piano and I had the feeling he did not really know what movie music was. He didn’t have any experience with real film music being presented to him. Even in ‘Thin Red Line’ it was all cut up. Here I was writing music for him, which he would say was “beautiful and great” and sounded “great” on the piano. Whatever. But I knew - and I warned everybody - this man does not have a clue what to do with movie music or how it works, not a clue. He is gonna to hear his first cue and not know what to do with it and I warned everybody.

I begged him to watch several movies that have music in them (used) very effectively. Be it ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,’ I mean I showed him all kinds of films or asked him to see all kinds of films that had scores in them. He said he would, but he never did.

Slowly the editorial team started to disintegrate. The good editors left and they brought in more asisstants and it was cut by a bunch of incompetents. There was no real editor. He continued on in that way asking for opinions and we were approaching recording and there were no scenes to record, there were no scenes to time. I had my music editors assemble sequences as I thought they should be or as they normally (would) be, and we scored some of that and it was lovely, just what everybody had hoped would be intended by the film.

Terry saw it and immediately took it back to his editing room and cut it apart and we were still recording and I realized that it was just a waste of everybody’s money to keep recording, though we were commited because we had hired the orchestra. So Terry was making this movie that was incomprehensible.

Everybody told him it was unwatchable. Everybody! Everybody! And he had Final Cut, and when a director has final cut, everbody can scream and shout, but unless you’re willing to really go head-to-head in combat, you basically have to throw up your hands and say, “I have no control over this man.” The editor who had worked on “The Thin Red Line” begged Terry to fix the fim. It was a love story, and Terry doesn’t feel those feelings. All I can say is that Terry is on the surface a stone and he does not know how to tell love stories to save his life. When we scored the movie he completely disassembled everything. The score made no sense anymore and he started to stick in Wagner over scenes, and a Mozart piano concerto over an Indian attack. Everybody thought he was insane. By this time I was no longer on, I basically said, ‘futz you. So I just did say a four letter word. I’m out of here. I’ve done my score.’

I never felt so letdown by a filmmaker in my life….It was the most disappointing experience I’ve ever had with a man because not only did he throw out my score, he loved my score, he didn’t have a clue what to do with it. He didn’t have a clue how to use music. So what he started to do was, as I said, to take classical pieces, but not even pieces that would be transparent and lovely, he was taking Wagner like a thick blanket and putting it in his movie. I swear to god, on the dubbing stage everybody thought he was joking and he would bring up these musical solutions and take out the score and put in Wagner, or take out the score and put in Mozart.

It’s not like he fired me and I’m bitter. What happened was I’m bitter because he did not make the movie he promised everybody he would make. Everybody felt betrayed, from the film company down to the editors. Everybody felt betrayed, and this was the man who took the story that could have been one of the great love stories and was one of the great love stories in history, and turned it into crap, and it’s because he doesn’t believe in those things. He doesn’t understand them. And most importantly, he has not an emotion in his body. He’s emotionless.

link?

kinda feel like the wagner use in this movie is the best part!

this man does not have a clue what to do with movie music or how it works, not a clue

god what a fucking cunt

sorry, here's where I got that excerpt from: http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/archives/terrence_malick_almost_directed_che_-_eight_things_we_learned_about_the_new/

It links to the full original (which I haven't read), but it's on some forum you have to log into.

freakin love this film

Horner seems like the typical overblown ego who thinks he knows more than everyone on set/in post and can't believe no one else sees this. Whatta prick. I think TNW is lovely and moving.

this man does not have a clue what to do with movie music or how it works, not a clue

Well, Horner certainly knows how film music works:

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-one-category.tcl?topic=TitanicShack&category=My%20Heart%20Will%20Go%20On

I scored Bicentennial Man. I scored Deep Impact. I wrote 'My Heart (Will) Go On' for Celine. I conducted Jumanji. I know music.

TNW is cold and monstrous and the opposite of moving 4 me. lets be honest, horner's a much more formidable creative mind than malick... maybe if terry listened to him he would've made a decent movie for once

...joeks?

full interview btw:

DANIEL SCHWEIGER: The New World is done by Terrence Malick, a very esoteric director. Especially in terms of his music, and he has never used what anyone could consider a traditional score until The New World, what was it like working with the director who had such unique approaches to film music?

JAMES HORNER: I would sum up Terry as a brilliant photographer - and that’s where it stops. The images in The New World are stunning, in Thin Red Line are stunning. In Thin Red Line he was surrounded by a couple of.... three, four people: a wonderful editor and a wonderful sound effects person who guided him through the dubbing and a couple of other people. And on The New World they were not employed. And Terry shot The New World.

The whole idea of The New World was going to be a love story between John Smith and Pocahontas, and there is no reason in the world why it could not have been as great love story as Titanic was. That was the premise he got hired on, and that is the premise he promised everybody he was going to deliever.

So he went out shooting the movie, went over time, and got beautiful images and everybody [said] "Oh god, this is so beautiful." There were a couple of things that were pasted together by a couple of the experienced editors of the love scenes: "Oh, this gonna be great, absolutely great". OK.

He had eight editors working for him - two prestigious, the rest out of the wood work, and some assistants. There was so much film he was working on night on night [that] there was a crew, on day there was a crew. When I first saw it, it was a mishmash of unrelated scenes, complete mishmash. I said, "Well Terry, you need to..." He asked me what I thought. "You need to cohere this. I mean this scene should be there" ... all kinds of editing things were wrong. It was the first assembly.

He is a very, very nice man. It was April and he was supposed to have a cut ready by May to look at, and that we missed. He missed his deadline and it was in the middle of June when we saw it. The studio saw it, and it was the same thing I saw two days after he finished shooting. It has gone through two and a half month work and it was just the same state. This was when I first saw it and red lights started to go up everywhere because I’m getting close to my recording dates and this is unscoreable like this.

He also knew what the music was. I played him scenes, I played him everything on the piano and I had the feeling he did not really know what movie music was. He didn’t have any experience with real film music being presented to him. Even in Thin Red Line it was all cut up. Here I was writing music for him, which he would say was "beautiful and great" and sounded "great" on the piano. Whatever. But I knew - and I warned everybody - this man does not have a clue what to do with movie music or how it works, not a clue. He is gonna to hear his first cue and not know what to do with it and I warned everybody.

I begged him to watch several movies that have music in them [used] very effectively. Be it One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I mean I showed him all kinds of films or asked him to see all kinds of films that had scores in them. He said he would, but he never did.

Slowly the editorial team started to disintegrate. The good editors left and they brought in more asisstants and it was cut by a bunch of incompetents. There was no real editor. He continued on in that way asking for opinions and we were approaching recording and there were no scenes to record, there were no scenes to time. He had no structure, literally, no structure. Scene A that was should go to scene B to C to D a natural progression. He had it attached to scene Z and that was attached to scene X and that was attached to scene D. I mean, there was no way to score it. So what I did with the film company’s permission is that I made sequences for myself. I had my music editors assemble sequences as I thought they should be or as they normally [would] be, and we scored some of that and it was lovely, just what everybody had hoped would be intended by the film.

Terry saw it and immediately took it back to his editing room and cut it apart and we were still recording and I realized that it was just a waste of everybody’s money to keep recording, though we were commited because we had hired the orchestra. So Terry was making this movie that was incomprehensible.

Everybody told him it was unwatchable. Everybody! Everybody! And he had Final Cut, and when a director has final cut, everbody can scream and shout, but unless you’re willing to really go head-to-head in combat, you basically have to throb your hands and say, "I have no control over this man." And if we get the reputation of taking a director’s cut film from a director and recutting it ourselves and releasing it, no one want to make movies with us. So the studio company let him go along.

He never did preview it but he played it for the studio and there were thirty-five people [that] would come to the screenings and slowly over the course of three hours, because it’s a three hour movie, they would walk out.

The editor who had worked on The Thin Red Line begged Terry to fix the fim. It was a love story, and Terry doesn’t feel those feelings. All I can say is that Terry is on the surface a stone and he does not know how to tell love stories to save his life. When we scored the movie he completely disassembled everything. The score made no sense anymore and he started to stick in Wagner over scenes, and a Mozart piano concerto over an Indian attack. Everybody thought he was insane. By this time I was no longer on, I basically said, "futz you. So I just did say a four letter word. I’m out of here. I’ve done my score."

I thought, 'what I have done was exactly what [I was hired for], exactly what the studio wanted, exactly what the film was supposed to be and the one who broke the bond was Terry. From the day he started editing to the final day when they kicked him off the dubbing stage, he was just spending hour-after-hour doing nothing. It was like shuffling the tiles in a Rubik’s Cube. There was never a solution. All he was doing was shuffling scene D over to scene X, or Y would go up to A. How's that? Let’s try putting up A after D and putting D behind J. There wasn’t any gift of telling the movie. Terry doesn’t so this. And that was something we all learned about the great Terry. I never felt so letdown by a filmmaker in my life.

DANIEL SCHWEIGER: Well, I think, it’s a listening experience. There certainly is no letdown.

JAMES HORNER: Well, the cd is as I intended. I said to myself "This is not worth it. I want to resign." I’ll get my money anyway, so to speak, but I don’t care about the money. I want to do what is needed in the film and make a wonderful film.

I kept telling Terry, "Terry, this does not have any emotion in it. Don’t you understand?" He looked at it and he would say, "I don’t know if emotion is important here."

The whole movie goes by without you knowing that this girl is even called "Pocahontas." I don’t even know if people noticed that. No one ever uses the word Pocahontas in the movie. I said, "Terry, people, this is the name of the girl." She got this name of her backer when she was hounded into the English fort. Nobody knew what her real Indian name was and this was the name of this women up to the end of this movie. You never knew she was Pocahontas. There was never really a love story, it was only alluded to. It was a complete mishmash and that's what was released. What is amazing is that fifty-million dollars later, what was released in the cinema was the exact version of the movie I saw when it was first assembled. The only thing different was they had spent forty-million dollars in-between editing, just moving the Rubik’s Cube. Out came the other end the same movie and all the important people have resigned and said "Terry, you’re out of your mind." That’s the story of The New World.

It was the most disappointing experience I’ve ever had with a man because not only did he throw out my score, he loved my score, he didn’t have a clue what to do with it. He didn’t have a clue how to use music. So what he started to do was, as I said, to take classical pieces, but not even pieces that would be transparent and lovely, he was taking Wagner like a thick blanket and putting it in his movie. I swear to god, on the dubbing stage everybody thought he was joking and he would bring up these musical solutions and take out the score and put in Wagner, or take out the score and put in Mozart.

The CD is what I wrote for the movie and it makes a lovely CD, but it’s the weirdest experience. He loved all the music, but he had not a clue. It’s not like he fired me and I’m bitter. What happened was I’m bitter because he did not make the movie he promised everybody he would make. Everybody felt betrayed, from the film company down to the editors. Everybody felt betrayed, and this was the man who took the story that could have been one of the great love stories and was one of the great love stories in history, and turned it into crap, and it’s because he doesn’t believe in those things. He doesn’t understand them. And most importantly, he has not an emotion in his body. He’s emotionless. He looks at a scene and it breaks everbody’s heart and there are fifteen people in the room crying. When we scored a scene, the orchestra came in because it looks so beautiful, its photography is so stunning and it was a scene we put together for scoring. It wasn’t Terry’s cut. It was more or less James Horner and his music editors’ cut so that we could have a structure to score to, otherwise it was just going to [play over] black film. There was no film to record to. It was a fifteen-minute sequence and literally there were like eighty people. We played it two or three times. He was in the room, all crying all thinking how moving it was, how brilliant it was, not the music, but the scene, and they thought the picture was so beautiful and the story and everybody was so excited and I thought surely that this would show Terry that he was on the wrong track. The primary editor, Richard Chew was there and it was so clear what people longed for in the movie and what the music brought out. But that’s not the movie Terry had in mind. He saw the reaction and he took that whole scene and, of course, but it back on the Rubik’s Cube stage and the whole thing was deconstructed and unwatchable again.

my favorite part:

I kept telling Terry, "Terry, this does not have any emotion in it. Don’t you understand?" He looked at it and he would say, "I don’t know if emotion is important here."

that is some sort of A+ rant, i have to say.

huh I searched in order to bump but it seems you started talking about this while I was watching it! Anyway I just finished the long (170 minute) version and I thought the first ninety minutes were beautiful and the last thirty minutes were escalatingly beautiful until I shed a manly tear or two at the end, a little sagging in the middle but I'll blame my tiredness. My question is, what do the shorter versions do? I'd guess they cut out the slow bits and go more narrative, which I wouldn't be so into, but I would maybe be interested in a version that's has an even higher meandering to storytelling ratio, as unlikely as that is.

Princess Tam Tam, you have lost yer gutdamned mind.

Horner is a grade A hack. But I;ve got to admit, I never noticed they never call her by her name in the movie. She's like Malick's Ewoks!

The montage when jack whatever and pocahontas are first getting to know each other is so so so incredibly beautiful. This is gonna sound ridiculous, but it's like first getting to know you're dog - no communication, but you've got vibes and you're feeling each other and totally connecting.

those last 2 minutes as well are pretty heart rendering. the rest of the movie didn't do much for me, as i assume the rest of the world.

i'd see this again

heheh feels like horner has been saving that one up for _years_

there is no reason in the world why it could not have been as great love story as Titanic was.

Dude is all up in Jim Cameron's junk. I believe he pissed off Michael Bay a few years ago, too.

"There's no reason Tree of Life couldn't have been as great a dinosaur movie as Jurassic Park was."

christopher plummer: “He’s fascinated by nature, and just cuts to birds,” he told New York Magazine earlier this year. “Colin Farrell kept saying, ‘My character, he’s a fuckin’ osprey. That’s how he sees me.’ You’d be playing a passionate scene, and he’d say in that strange southern voice of his, mixed with Harvard and Oxford, ‘Ah, jes’ stop a minute, Chris. I think there’s an osprey flying over there. Do you mind if I just take a few shots?’ I wrote him an infuriated letter because I saw the film and I was hardly in it—he cut my part to shit. And it recalled the story of Adrien Brody, the lead in The Thin Red Line. He went to the premiere, and he wasn’t in it! I wrote to Terry and said, ‘You need a writer, baby, you need somebody to follow the ­story.’ I was awful to him, but I did say I admired him. He’s an individual—also mad as a hatter.”

that rant upthread makes me want to see the new world more than ever

For anyone not bored with this sort of thing, I wrote blurbs for my picks.

whoops -- wrong thread!

I kept telling Terry, "Terry, this does not have any emotion in it. Don’t you understand?" He looked at it and he would say, "I don’t know if emotion is important here."

but maybe it isn't! yeah now i really want to see this as well, is it on the instant netflix yet?

i mean some of the things they (horner + plummer) say are not entirely wrong but i dunno the hubris of these dudes. frankly horner sounds like a clueless idiot. plummer just sounds pissed he wasn't in the film more. but the parts he is in--he's indelible! he makes a strong impression in a few brief strokes. so dude should be happy. but instead he's just there with a stopwatch counting how much screen time he has. pffft.

and yes 'pochahontas' is never mentioned by name which seems like a pretty deliberate decision on malick's part. it's not like anybody doesn't know who she is.

...joeks?

― Gukbe, Wednesday, July 6, 2011 7:16 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

i dont really know. horner's achievements:

• my heart will go on
• that crazy steel drum score from COMMANDO
• the spooky Cocoon music that was used so effectively in the Super 8 trailer

• ttrl
• badlands
• days of heaven

If Plummer was in every scene he'd be complaining the movie wasn't about him. Actors are stupid.

The Horner "Aliens" score is pretty good. But isn't that guy dogged with plagiarism claims?

Hah, just read that Horner's unflattering nickname is "Anvil Clanker."

haha, if you look up Anvil on wikipedia there's a section about horner's overuse of it. i didnt realize that clanging anvil sound in movie scores was a literal anvil all this time

neither of these guys sound like they have much of a clue about Malick's style or aims. i mean if you're expecting it to be a Titanic, yeah, he probably is doing it all wrong.

and lol at "you need a writer, baby"

Michael Bay: "Dude, Terry, if you want your movie to make fuckin' money, take out some of those fuckin' trees and put in some giant 3-D fuckin' robots!"

Po "did you find your indies, john?"
JS "i may have sailed past them"

colin farrell was surprisingly very good in this btw!

Having checked the formidable Criterion edition out of the library, I have a choice b/w three versions.