Terrence Malick

Terrence Malick (born November 30, 1943, Ottawa, Illinois, U.S.) is an American filmmaker whose reclusive, sporadic career is marked by films that are celebrated for their poetic beauty.

Malick was raised in Texas and Oklahoma and graduated with a degree in philosophy from Harvard University in 1965. After Harvard, he was a Rhodes scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, but he did not finish his thesis. Instead, he returned to the United States, where he worked as a freelance journalist for various magazines, including Life and The New Yorker, and briefly taught philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Interested in phenomenology, he translated German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s essay “Vom Wesen des Grundes” (“The Essence of Reasons”) for a bilingual edition of the text published in 1969. That same year Malick returned to school at the American Film Institute’s fledgling Center for Advanced Film Studies (now the AFI Conservatory), receiving an M.F.A. in 1971.

Malick first worked in Hollywood as an uncredited writer on Drive, He Said (1971), directed by Jack Nicholson. His own directorial debut, Badlands (1973), which he also scripted, starred Martin Sheen as a small-town hoodlum who persuades a naive teenage girl (played by Sissy Spacek) to run away with him as he embarks on a string of dispassionate murders. The film (one of several to be inspired by the real-life murder spree of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate in 1957–58) was hailed for its majestic cinematography and quietly haunting tone, and its prominent use of voice-over would become a hallmark of Malick’s work. His next film, Days of Heaven (1978), about day labourers in early 20th-century Texas, featured a similarly lush visual style and won even more critical acclaim, earning Malick the best director award at the Cannes film festival.

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The public would have to wait 20 years, however, for Malick’s next movie. With The Thin Red Line (1998), based on James Jones’s novel about the World War II Battle of Guadalcanal, he relied on an ensemble cast to present an existential meditation on war. Malick was nominated for best adapted screenplay and best director Academy Awards, though he won neither, and the film was largely overshadowed that year by another World War II movie, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.

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Several more years would pass before Malick’s The New World (2005) hit screens. The film, which portrayed the founding of the Jamestown settlement and starred Christian Bale and Colin Farrell, was noted for its historical accuracy. Malick’s next production, The Tree of Life (2011), was an impressionistic essay on humankind’s place in the universe, presented through the lens of a troubled family in 1950s Texas. The film, which featured Brad Pitt and Sean Penn, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival, and Malick was again nominated for an Oscar for best director. Appearing to ramp up his productivity as he approached his seventies, he soon followed with the romantic melodrama To the Wonder (2012). Although it was Malick’s first film set entirely in the present day, it echoed his previous work in its elliptical, atmospheric style. Knight of Cups (2015) chronicled the surreal wanderings and encounters of a dissipated film-industry professional (Christian Bale) in a series of chapters named after tarot cards. Malick followed up with Song to Song (2017), a whirling depiction of a love triangle between two Austin, Texas, musicians and a high-powered music producer. He then returned to World War II for A Hidden Life (2019), a drama based on the life of Austrian farmer Franz Jägerstätter, a conscientious objector who refused to swear an oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler.

Between writing and directing his own films, Malick occasionally worked on scripts for others, and in the late 1990s he cofounded a production company. However, he had little to say to the press or public, which made him an enigma among Hollywood’s elite directors.