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We’ve all been there. Cast as the lead in a meaty, dialogue-heavy role in a surefire masterpiece from one of the most unassailable geniuses of modern filmmaking, only to be reduced to sifting through the finished film on freeze frame occasionally shouting "Look! That’s my shadow on that fern!" or "Hey! That’s the back of my head near that egret!" The one comfort we can take when this inevitability occurs, is that we’re in fine company on the Malick cutting room floor. The only question is, whose lead will we follow in reacting to our role’s excision or drastic reduction?
Terrence Malick has a storied history with actors, one that can only continue to get more thickety as his output increases, and as the casts for his films expand. But it was really only with 1998’s gorgeous hymnal to the brutalizing effect of war on nature and humanity, "The Thin Red Line," that his propensity for entirely removing whole roles and performances found real expression, and since then the mythos of the roulette wheel one spins when accepting a role in a Malick film has only grown. It's a little unfair -- "The Thin Red Line" always had an enormous cast (it's about a war, after all); many of those often referred to as having been cut never actually filmed a scene; and others had roles that were only ever going to be cameos removed. The key factor is that many of the affected actors on that film and since then have been very high profile, but again, Malick seems to attract big names in droves, so in droves they will fall by the wayside.
Malick's latest, "To the Wonder," in theaters and on (sacrilegious!) VOD this Friday, has also made headlines for who's not in it as for who is. So we thought we'd take this chance to run through the list of actors dropped from Malick's films, or those who had their roles greatly curtailed, and the various ways they dealt with the disappointment. Read, and judge for yourselves who did it best -- that way you'll be prepared when that phone call comes to let you know that "Untitled Malick Project" will not, after all your months of shooting in that cornfield, boast your involvement at all.
Actor: Mickey Rourke
Film: "The Thin Red Line"
How Badly Was His Role Affected: Excised completely
Bitterness Level: 8/10 lemons
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What Happened & How He Reacted: On the one hand, it feels like Mickey Rourke has kind of one of the more legitimate beefs. His role wasn't just whittled down, not a single frame made it into the finished film, and his performance, which he called in a 2005 interview "some of the best work I ever did" really only exists for public consumption in a couple of deleted scene extras on the Criterion release. And like so many other actors on this list, he seems to have felt a little betrayed or badly used by Malick -- from that same interview: "I'd gone through a really bad time and Terry knew about it so he incorporated it into the character. It really worked."
On the other hand, a lot of his reaction seems out of step with what most observers would assume were Malick's actual motives behind the edit. While his track record makes it probable that Rourke was nixed for narrative purposes (Malick famously "finding" the film in the edit), Rourke claimed the reasons were much more personal: "There were political reasons why I was out of the movie. That really upset me... just because of the temperature of me and the industry, my scenes were cut." Even if Malick does not in fact float on a gauzy higher plane above the dirty dealings of Hollywood, it still seems unlikely to us that he'd have gotten rid of Rourke to satisfy someone else's whims, if he'd really loved his performance and felt it fitted within the film.
Actor: Adrien Brody
Film: "The Thin Red Line"
How Badly Was His Role Affected: Dramatically reduced from lead to support, dialogue down to a couple of spoken lines.
Bitterness Level: 7/10 lemons
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What Happened & How He Reacted: Adrien Brody, of course, is still in "The Thin Red Line," but his role was not the lead he expected, performed and read in the script and the book on which the script was based. Malick found his attention wandering from Brody's character in the edit and focusing instead on Jim Caviezel's, to the detriment of the former's screen time. We should remember that, significantly, this was Brody pre-"The Pianist" and it's clear he expected his role here to be his big break. In fact, he mentioned in a 2001 Independent interview (text here) that: "The pressure on that film was that I had to carry the movie with a cast of stars that I truly admired -- Nick Nolte and Sean Penn in particular. You hear horror stories about Sean Penn, that he can be a real bastard if he doesn't admire your work."
But after a grueling 6-month shoot in "a filthy costume which they wouldn't wash," only disappointment awaited. Again a sense of betrayal comes through: "I was so focused and professional, I gave everything to it, and then to not receive everything...in terms of witnessing my own work. It was extremely unpleasant because I'd already begun the press for a film that I wasn't really in. Terry obviously changed the entire concept of the film. I had never experienced anything like that..." He went on to suggest that Malick's own status as a filmmaker may be rather inflated: "You know the expression 'Don't believe the hype'? Well, you shouldn't."
Actor: Christopher Plummer
Film: "The New World"
How Badly Was His Role Affected: Reduced
Bitterness Level: 7/10 lemons
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What Happened & How He Reacted: Christopher Plummer waited a good few years before letting rip, in amusing and quite public fashion, on Malick. Believing his role as Captain Newport to have been decimated by Malick's editing process, he said to New York Magazine in 2011: "[Malick is] fascinated by nature, and just cuts to birds." He also claims he wasn't alone in being disgruntled on that set: "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."
Plummer even compared himself with Adrien Brody, then-poster boy for the Let Down By Malick brigade: "...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 was awful to [Malick], but I did say I admired him. He’s an individual—also mad as a hatter." As much as he seem to soften a touch at the end, in 2012 at a Newsweek awards season roundtable, Plummer went even further, ranting (much to 'Thin Red Line' actor George Clooney's amusement, it seems): "I love some of his movies very much, but the problem with Terry is he needs a writer, desperately. He insists on overwriting until it sounds terribly pretentious… and he edits his films in such a way that he cuts everyone out of them... I was put in all sorts of different spots and suddenly my character was not in the scene that I thought I was in, in the editing room. It was very strange. It completely unbalances everything. And a very emotional scene that I had suddenly became background noise." Again he brings up the letter. “I gave him shit. I’ll never work with him again.” You can read more about the shooting of "The New World" in our comprehensive breakdown of the movie.
Actor: Sean Penn
Film: "The Tree of Life"
How Badly Was His Role Affected: Role reduced, and substantially changed from script stage.
Bitterness Level: 5/10 lemons
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What Happened & How He Reacted: Sean Penn, one of the actors who survived the Great 'Thin Red Line' Cull, obviously had developed some sort of relationship with Malick on the set of that film. "It took me a little bit of time to adjust to it, it took me a couple of weeks and some heart to heart conversations with Terry about what contribution I could make because I had never been involved in something [so big]," he said about it, in the 2002 documentary “Rosy-Fingered Dawn." So his disappointment and befuddlement at his role's alterations in "The Tree of Life" may have been all the greater. As he said to Le Figaro: "I didn’t at all find on the screen the emotion of the script, which is the most magnificent one that I’ve ever read. A clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact. Frankly, I’m still trying to figure out what I’m doing there and what I was supposed to add in that context! What’s more, Terry himself never managed to explain it to me clearly."
That last bit especially seems damning, but in fact his next sentence in that Figaro interview, less frequently quoted, roughly translates as: "But this is a film that I would recommend, if you can go in without preconceived ideas. Everyone can find there a personal, emotional or spiritual connection. Those who do generally emerge very moved." So it seems he himself may be admitting that it's his preconceived ideas of what the film might have been that find him less than in love with the finished product.
Actor: Michael Sheen
Film: "To the Wonder"
How Badly Was His Role Affected: Excised completely
Bitterness Level: 1/10 lemons
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What Happened & How He Reacted: Having let slip that he was excited to be working with Malick while on the press tour for Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris" few further details emerged about Michael Sheen's role until after it was cut. But Sheen's involvement seemed casual enough from the beginning, "I played Ben [Affleck]'s boss, but that side of the film got cut down so much," he said in interview. "I just went to visit my girlfriend Rachel [McAdams] on the set, and then Terry asked if I would do a day's filming on it, so I was like, 'Yeah, sure.' It was just that I was around, and at the end of the day, you know, it was only two scenes." And, showing similar equanimity to fellow Brit Rachel Weisz, he said of hearing the news he was cut: "The producer sent me a nice email just saying, 'This is what's happening...' But it wasn''t like I had gone through the whole thing of auditioning for a Terry Malick film and then saying, 'Oh, I've got the part!' That's happened to me before -- I've done films where a lot of it gets cut and then it's kind of really disappointing."
Malick is of course already in production on two future films, and next up after "To the Wonder" will be "Knight of Cups." With Malick himself reportedly saying to Affleck that "Just more and more I'm more interested in silences," will we be back here, furiously updating this post prior to that film's release? Nah, we're sure the svelte, low-rent, minimal cast, which includes Natalie Portman, Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Teresa Palmer, Joel Kinnaman, Imogen Poots, Antonio Banderas, Isabel Lucas, Wes Bentley, Joe Manganiello, Nick Offerman, Freida Pinto, Nicky Whelan, Shea Whigham, Michael Wincott, Thomas Lennon, Ryan O'Neal and Katia Winter have nothing to worry about.
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