Villa Terrence Malick

Rehearsing the Unexpected
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-27804-6
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

Terrence Malick's debut film, Badlands, announced the arrival of a unique talent. In the 40 years since that debut, Malick has only made 5 films, but they are distinctive in their beauty. This book is not meant to be a biography of Terrence Malick. The purpose behind the book is to introduce readers to the extraordinary universe of his film-making and to aid them in understanding his work. And to do this through the words of his closest collaborators - cinematographers, set designers, costumers, cameramen, directors, producers, and actors such as Sean Penn, Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek and Jessica Chastain. As their words flow from one to another, they form a fascinating, kaleidoscopic vision of American film and specifically Malick's artistic world. who make up a film. This book is the fruit of a journey began years ago when Luciano Baracaroli, Carlo Hintermann, Gerardo Panichi and Daniele Villa made a documentary on the work of Terrence Malick, which led to the making of this book as well.

Daniele Villa, Carlo Hintermann, Luciano Baracaroli, and Gerardo Panichi worked together in the Italian publishing house Ubulibri under the guidance of the late Franco Quadri. After having edited books on Otar Ioseliani, David Lynch and Takeshi Kitano, they chose to make a documentary about Terrence Malick since his films served as a prism through which they could view American cinema. They met Malick in Milan in 2001 at a screening of the restored copy of Badland and, in 2002, the film Rosy-Fingered Dawn: A Film on Terrence Malick, directed by Luciano Baracaroli, Carlo Hintermann, Gerardo Panichi and Daniele Villa was presented at the Venice Film Festival.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Villa, Daniele

Leseproben

Badlands

Badlands was inspired by a tabloid story: a killing spree by one Charles Starkweather who, after killing the parents and the two-year-old sister of his under-aged girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, fled with the girl on a blood-tainted honeymoon pursued by the police, committing seven other more or less gratuitous homicides. The Starkweather case caused a sensation in the media, fixing itself in American culture as the first case of random murder, and as a doomed love story.

Holly (voice-over)

My mother died of pneumonia when I was just a kid. My father had kept their wedding cake in the freezer for ten whole years. After the funeral he gave it to the yardman. He tried to act cheerful, but he could never be consoled by the little stranger he found in his house. Then, one day, hoping to begin a new life away from the scene of all his memories, he moved us from Texas to Ft. Dupree, South Dakota.

[…]

Little did I realize that what began in the alleys and back ways of this quiet town would end in the Badlands of Montana.

JACOB BRACKMAN

After Lanton Mills, Terry embarked on Badlands. He had to get it done – he had to. It was so obviously a critical point in his development and the thing that he did of raising the money in dribs and drabs, working on the script and getting it cast – you know, the whole thing is kind of the myth of how somebody becomes a filmmaker, but actually Terry is the only person who ever did it!

Badlands as a debut is compared to Citizen Kane. But at the time that Citizen Kane was made, Orson Welles was a world-famous radio and theatre director, everybody knew of him as a major talent. Whereas with Terry, absolutely nobody knew about him, he had no theatrical history of any kind. In a way, he came completely out of nowhere!

ARTHUR PENN

I don’t remember in detail what we spoke about when I met Terry. It was such an American story, a strangely American story. Two, almost children really, living in that part of the country which is really not very populated, very restricted in terms of outlook, religion and so forth. But it seemed like a compelling story. And it had only a little relationship to Bonnie and Clyde. Bonnie and Clyde were from the same kind of background, only they were very different – they didn’t just go out killing people. They were bank robbers. Many people associated Bonnie and Clyde with Badlands, but the protagonists of my film were living during the Depression, when the banks were closing, when farms were being taken away by the banks. The two protagonists of Badlands are from the ’50s: it’s twenty years later. It was a very different country in the ’50s. We had been through the war, and that generation had come back from the war. It was both tighter and a little bit wilder. I still don’t know the motive for these two people in Badlands. Do you know what made them do it? I think it was the sense of adventure, the sexual freedom that they must have found in it. We have to remember that America is a very sexually repressed country, particularly out in the Far West. And there’s a certain thing about that film which is that once they get the taste of freedom – admittedly it’s freedom to kill people – but it’s also freedom to live without restrictions. And that was unusual in that time.

EDWARD PRESSMAN

I can’t say I imagined the lasting value of Badlands as a film when we started, and the kind of significance Terry’s work would have to many people today. When we started, it was the exciting prospect of doing a film with a filmmaker who seemed talented and with a great, quiet confidence, and a know-how that seemed advanced to me, at the time. He was working with the help of Arthur Penn, George Segal1 and Warren Oates early on, so we were dealing with people whose confidence in Terry was reinforcing my own. These established figures were galvanized by Terry’s vision. I was a newcomer who’s feeling my way, whereas Terry had a maturity even then and was very impressive to me and gave me the confidence to support him. We didn’t go into it thinking this was a masterpiece. This was a movie we believed in, and the relationships and feelings we had shooting it have lasted all these years, just as the film has lasted. It was something that was very special and very rare at the time. I don’t think I realized that, as it was one of the first films I was involved with. For me it was the way filmmaking should be, but in retrospect, I see how unique and extraordinary it really was.

MIKE MEDAVOY

Badlands was mainly a project that Terry and Pressman put together. I had introduced Terry to Max Palevsky,2 who is a close friend of his now; I asked Max to put up some of the money. There was also a script that Terry wrote and was paid for, so he put up some of that money to finance the film. It was probably one of the first independent films. There had probably been other independent films, like One Potato Two Potato,3 but it’s a landmark film in the sense that it was thought of as a really important film, about a really difficult subject.

EDWARD PRESSMAN

I think when we started, the films that we did, we approached it with all innocence as if it was a Broadway play. We raised money through selling shares, $1,000 or $5,000 increments; we used our credit cards and I used my family’s toy company credit with the laboratories and the equipment houses. We owed money, but at least they left us for a time without having to come up with the cash. We were scavenging in the most primitive way: Terry brought in some financing from Max Palevsky and William Weld4 and some other people that he knew. On our side, I think my mother was the biggest help of all. She not only gave the credit of the family business, but also lent me money and was of great support. So it was not systematic by any means, every few weeks we were not sure we could cover the payroll. It was a total bet and we were doing it at the very same time as Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise, which was also going through difficult financial problems. So it was a great time, but it was economically out there on the edge. I remember while we were shooting, one of the production people who was working on Badlands was very dubious about the whole process because it was such an unorthodox approach to making a film. And he left, went back to New York and told my mother the film was a disaster, that she ought to just stop helping me right then and there, that she was throwing her money away.

ARTHUR PENN

When the film was finished, I remember I was up in California and Terry was showing it to the people who had put up most of the money, and when the film was finished I think they didn’t like it very much. But I said, ‘It’s a great film!’ So, I helped persuade them, I think, that it was a very important film.

EDWARD PRESSMAN

Arthur Penn is a very significant filmmaker, and at that time his offer to lend his name as an executive producer, from my perspective, was very important in giving legitimacy to the production as we tried to raise the financing. It was basically his offer to just lend his imprimatur to the film that was so important at the time; and then later he said, ‘If you don’t want to put my name on it, you can do whatever you want.’ I don’t even think his name was on the film when it came out. It was a real gentlemanly support, but in the early stages his involvement was one of the things that attracted me to the project and I could talk to other people saying that Arthur supported it; it meant a great deal. It also helped that Warren Oates5 came in early on, because he was such an important figure at the time. The films he was doing were right there on the cultural edge. When the film was completed, the plan was to show it to the likely distributors, which were the Studios. The key people that we wanted to show the film to were alerted by different friends that we knew, and we set up screenings for the ones who were the most receptive. There was a company named Cinema V run by Don Rugoff6 who owned some theatres in New York; he was a stalwart of the independent movement and a sort of forerunner of Miramax. They distributed Z, the Costa-Gavras film, and the early Milos Forman film The Fireman’s Ball. He wanted to buy the film, but then we showed the film to Warner Bros and John Kelly, who was running the studio, immediately responded. So there was a bidding war between those two companies. I can’t remember any other company wanting to do it, but I think Warners paid $1 million, which at the time was unprecedented in terms of independent films getting such an advance distribution. We went with them and Rugoff was very unhappy. At the beginning everyone worked for very, very little with the hope that if the film succeeded they would get more. We had deferred payments, and all the deferments were paid when the deal was done with Warners. I remember Warren Oates, who did more than fifty movies, some of them great successes, said, ‘This is the first time I got my deferment paid on a film that was not a huge success, but that was done for so little.’

The main characters of the film are Kit Carruthers and Holly Sargis, based on Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate. But the script, even though it essentially represents the various stages of the killings and the...