A wise man once said that art is a negotiation between the found and the made. That negotiation is on display in an early shooting script for Terrence Malick's "The New World,” recently posted online at MoviePage.com.
This early script does leave a lot of room for interpretation during production and editing, and gives the major characters, John Smith especially, some lengthy onscreen monologues that would later be converted to voice-over or excised altogether. At times it reads more like a novel, or an extended screenplay treatment with dialogue, than a typical ready-to-shoot script. The movie’s final 10 minutes, which are considered strong even by detractors, have no strict equivalent in this written version.
But the opening section depicting the first meeting of the English and the Native Americans is remarkably similar to what viewers saw in theaters. And a good portion of the dialogue seen on the page did end up being spoken onscreen, virtually word-for-word. (“I would be wrong to hold you back,” Rolfe tells Pocahantas near the end. “I was a fool. In my vanity I thought I could make you love me. You cannot do that, or shouldn't. In any case, you have walked blindly into a situation you did not anticipate. I must help you, whether you ask it or not. I will not rob you of your self-respect.”) Nearly all the major events you saw in both theatrical cuts are present in this early script, with some striking differences in execution -- for instance, the script has the daddy-ostracized Pocahantas going to the fort by herself, where the movie has her being delivered there by an expedition party. Throughout, the description is written in a dense, flowing, poetic, sometimes florid style, the prose equivalent of Malick's montage-driven Transcendentalist filmmaking.
Saturday, April 01, 2006
"The New World" when it was new
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8 comments:
don't know if you've seen this, but this is a pretty interesting article on Malick (pre-The New World):
http://www.eskimo.com/~toates/malick/art5.html
Fascinating. In the first thirty pages of this early draft is perhaps more dialogue than exists in the whole of "Days Of Heaven". Interesting too is how Malick's early use of voice overs becomes in "The Thin Red Line" and now "The New World", a more purely reflective device, used to convey Malick's philosophical leanings. Though, from what I've read of this early draft so far, I haven't yet seen any of those lofty, internal musings. As I said elsewhere, I prefer dialogue over solipsistic reflection. This is, of course, purely subjective, a position Malick himself would appreciate, no doubt.
kj says, "Interesting too is how Malick's early use of voice overs becomes in "The Thin Red Line" and now "The New World", a more purely reflective device, used to convey Malick's philosophical leanings." Yeah, that's true, but having just seen DAYS OF HEAVEN again on a big screen, I'd have to say that Malick's use of voice over in his first two movies doesn't really different drastically from the voice over in his last two. Aside from the fact that BADLANDS and DAYS OF HEAVEN have single narrators and TTRL and TNW have multiples, the differences in intent are not that great. In fact, structurally DAYS OF HEAVEN is strikingly similar to THE NEW WORLD, so close in fact that in certain respects THE NEW WORLD seems an exponentially larger remake of DAYS OF HEAVEN, right down to the central love triangle and the emphasis on a woman's social and romantic evolution.
Meaning Malick's VO in the last two movies is more brazenly philosophical than in the first two, but the philosophical aspect was always there -- it was just a bit more coded.
Brett: it's weird, but... That article that you posted recounts a phone conversation that the journalist (Joe Gillis) had by chance with Malick years ago, which consisted basically on the journalist declaring his admiration for Malick and Malick dodging one question after another. But the weird thing is that, months ago, Jeffrey Wells posted in his column a conversation he had (or claimed to have) with Malick, under nearly identical circumstances and with almost the same content; see:
http://www.hollywood-elsewhere.com/archives/2005/11/bring_it_on_sho.php
Anyone knows what's up with that?
I'm pretty sure they're the same guy -- i..e, Joe Gillis was Wells' pseudonym when he wrote for Los Angeles Magazine, Spy and other places.
Aaaah. See, I didn't know that.
For Malick, scripts are just blue-prints. He adds all the VO later in post, after he sees what he has captured on film and how it fits together. The script for TTRL is incredibly long and isn't nearly as interesting as the film.
Malick is a visual genius, so reading his scripts is just a curiosity. Still, thanks for the link. It was interesting.
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