The Long Knight Redux

For those interested in a sort of "follow-up" to my comments the other day about the movie, Knight of Cups, written and directed by Terrence Malick, here is a sort of interesting article that Nell Minow sent me.

It's written by Jason Guerrasio for Business Insider.  And it largely focuses on talking with an actor, Thomas Lennon, who worked on the film for one day, to get a look at Malick's unique directing style.  Needless-to-say, working for one day doesn't allow for a huge amount of insight, though comments from others note that this is pretty much the way Malick tends to work.

The one line that leaped out to me was --

"Lennon learned, after talking to the director, that there was no script." 
 
For those who recall my comments about how disjointed and empty I found the the film...well, that quote sure explains a LOT.  And several other observations in the article explain even more.  Like Malick giving the actors a single line to ponder, and acknowledging that he himself wasn't sure what it meant.
 
Why I thought it a good part of the article was interesting is because it does give a fairly detailed look at that one day of idiosyncratic filming, and a sense of Malick's style.  But I say only "sort of interesting," because it was also sort of idiotic in some ways.  For instance, the author was breathless about how amazing it was that they only were able to get five minutes of screen time in the final film after 11 hours of work.  Seriously??  Five minutes for a normal day of shooting is HUGE.  Most normal movies maybe get about two minutes.  
 
And the actor is so awestruck about what a genius Malick (whose work he acknowledges he barely knows) is based on a) one day of filming, and b) his own misinterpretation of the main character.  (With just some short observations -- and no script, remember -- he describes the main character of the screenwriter as "shallow."  But having seen the movie myself, something Mr. Lennon hadn't at that point, nor knew the story, since there intentionally isn't much of one, there's no particular sense that the screenwriter was “shallow”?  Just that he was troubled and struggling to find meaning.  If anything, he was never satisfied with money, success, parties, beautiful women and more, which is the opposite of shallow?  Lost and foolish maybe, but I don’t know if he was “shallow.”)
 
Absolutely, what Malick does is a fascinating way of filming.  And the cinematography is tremendous, and short snippets are great.  But ultimately, as I said, I think it’s a pedantic mess.  (My opinion…)  And this article largely explains why.  And for those reasons, it's quite interesting at that to read.
 
This below is sort of companion video to the article in a way.  It's about "The Malick Process," with the cast talking about how great and brilliant Terrence Malick is and that this is the way moviemaking should be.  Well, of course they feel that way -- they're actors, they get to do pretty much whatever they want and say whatever they want, and show up in the middle of a scene at one (as star Christian Bale explains) that began filming without him and figure out what's going on.  It's fascinating filmmaking.  But resulted in a mess of a movie.  To be clear, his style worked for me in his previous film, Tree of Life, which I saw as a sort movie version of a classical music tone poem.  It all fit together.  But, for me, not here.