The punk band Terrence Malick listened to while cutting movie stars out of ‘The Thin Red Line’
Throughout Hollywood history, several figures have been labelled “genius.” Usually, that designation comes with some qualification, though, such as “mad” or “eccentric.” You see, the people critics and cinephiles like to place on pedestals tend to be inscrutable, unknowable types whose minds couldn’t possibly be comprehended by regular folk. Over the years, Badlands director Terrence Malick proved to be the most mysterious enigma of all, though, baffling even his own cast and crew. Take, for example, when the 54-year-old Illinois native confused everyone by listening to a specific punk band every single day in the editing room of The Thin Red Line – which often meant he couldn’t hear his actors’ dialogue.
In the late ’90s, Hollywood rejoiced in the buildup to The Thin Red Line, a World War II epic that would mark Malick’s return to filmmaking after two decades in stasis. He hadn’t directed a movie since 1978’s Days of Heaven, but his reputation as one of the industry’s most singular artists meant he had his pick of young Hollywood talent to choose from for the movie. Indeed, the cast list reads like a who’s who of male stars and character actors from that period, many of whom agreed to work for scale – or even for free – just because they wanted to be a part of the project.
The film supported the main cast of Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Jim Caviezel, Ben Chaplin, and Elias Koteas by also finding space for Adrien Brody, George Clooney, Jared Leto, John C Reilly, John Travolta, Woody Harrelson, John Cusack, and Tim Blake Nelson. Perhaps unsurprisingly, though, this unusually high number of stars proved challenging to cram into one three-hour film, and The Thin Red Line wound up becoming infamous for how many of Hollywood’s brightest young talents had their hopes dashed by having their roles cut down to a bare minimum – or even excised completely – in the final edit.
Famously, Mickey Rourke, Bill Pullman, Lukas Haas, and Viggo Mortensen all shot scenes that were removed entirely from the movie, and Billy Bob Thornton recorded three hours of narration that wasn’t used at all. Clooney saw his part mercilessly cut down to a solitary scene, and Travolta was left with little more than a cameo. Brody shot for three months in Australia and believed he had one of the leading roles in the film, but when he brought his parents to the premiere, he was horrified to discover he only had five minutes of screen time and two lines of dialogue.
So, what happened in that editing suite? Well, according to one of The Thin Red Line’s three editors, Billy Weber, Malick’s commitment to editing was just as enigmatic as his approach to directing. During the 18-month editing process, he watched precisely one cut of the film all the way through: a five-hour workprint that his colleagues basically had to force him into viewing. Aside from that, he would reportedly edit one reel of film at a time, with no sound, while listening to a CD by one of the most popular punk bands of the era. “I think he was listening to Green Day at the time,” Leslie Jones, the film’s second editor, told Criterion.
“His main objective was to lose the dialogue and create voiceover paths,” Jones explained, which sounds hilarious considering Malick used some voiceover, but also cut out everything Thornton recorded. In essence, Malick was looking for a “feeling” from the scenes, and he didn’t particularly care if he didn’t understand stretches of dialogue. After all, he’d simply replace them with voiceover or music. “There was an exploration when you work with him,” said Saar Klein, the third editor. “You don’t know what the scene is about, and he doesn’t know what the scene is about until he sort of plays around with it and finds out what it’s about.”
It all begs an important question: did the dulcet tones of Green Day somehow help Malick in his pursuit of that elusive “feeling?” Also, had the director known for convincing major studios to bankroll his idiosyncratic art films always been a fan of the world’s most commercially successful pop-punk outfit? Even more importantly, though, which Green Day CD was he listening to while deciding which major movie stars didn’t belong in his film?
The timeline would seem to indicate it was likely Nimrod, the band’s fifth LP released in October 1997. Billie Joe Armstrong’s outfit used that record to push the boundaries of their sound by throwing elements of ska, hardcore, folk, and surf rock into their usual three-chord blasts of catchy punk perfection – so maybe Malick recognised kindred experimental spirits? Or maybe he just loved ‘Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)’ as much as the rest of us.
