Author Pico Iyer on enigmatic filmmaker Terrence Malick

Like films such as Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, Terrence Malick remains an enigma words alone cannot penetrate.

Richard Gere, foreground, in Terrence Malick’s 1978 film Days of Heaven.

How can one not be fascinated with the great sand-blown Sphinx of modern filmmaking, Terrence Malick? A Rhodes scholar who went on to teach philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and to report on Che Guevara for The New Yorker, he fashions ever more private and oblique films that often dispense entirely with the words and ideas over which he has such formidable command.

Among the most revered of contemporary directors, able to lift us to the heavens as few but Andrei Tarkovsky or Krzysztof Kieslowski can do, the part-Assyrian raised in Texas has almost never allowed himself to be photographed and rarely given an interview. When someone in the street approaches an actor walking next to Malick, the director abruptly disappears.

After making two of the most memorable but quiet films of the 1970s, Badlands and Days of Heaven, Malick vanished entirely for 20 years before coming back with a titanic epic about World War II, The Thin Red Line, and, of late, a torrent of new works (The Tree of Life, To the Wonder, Knight of Cups). In the last of these, the philosopher who published a translation of Heidegger in his 20s gives us Natalie Portman, Freida Pinto, Cate Blanchett and Teresa Palmer flitting around in filmy dresses, and saying next to nothing.

Those of us who have admired the otherworldly beauty and impenitent wonder animating the Malick universe never know whether we wish to learn more about our elusive hero or less. So much of the man’s power arises from his sense of privacy, after all; it’s the fact that we know less about Shakespeare than about Ben Jonson or Christopher Marlowe that partly accounts for the playwright’s enduring magnetism. We can’t reduce him to biographical explanations or explain his work away as we might that of a Virginia Woolf or a Philip Roth.

Thus those of us who’ve watched Days of Heaven more than 30 times scan frantically through Carly Simon’s recent memoir to read about the time when she dated the famously thoughtful and soft-spoken director (in between Cat Stevens and Warren Beatty). We scribble notes on Martin Sheen’s reminiscence on the radio program On Being of how Malick, his “spiritual mentor”, saved him from a dark time in his life by handing him Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

Yet we also long to leave him in his inwardness, because we know that — as with his fellow mystic of the Texan plains, Cormac McCarthy — it’s Malick’s very distance from the spotlight that allows him to stage intense, uncompromising, almost Melvillean meditations about the relation of the heavens to human savagery.

Thankfully, Malickites can now afford to relax for a while, insofar as a huge new oral mosaic about him, put together by some devout Italian acolytes, leaves the enigma very much intact. In Terrence Malick: Rehearsing the Unexpected, Carlo Hintermann and Daniele Villa earnestly rehearse the expected for 400 pages of transcribed interviews with many from the Malick repertory company: actors and producers and cinematographers and friends (who, if they are good friends, will say nothing at all about their pal’s life or his secrets).

In this profoundly linear accounting of a deeply non-linear artist, one associate after another says almost exactly the same thing: the director is uncommonly sensitive, poetic and committed, and they will give up all their self-regard and time to work with him because being involved in a Malick project is a transfiguring lifelong rehearsal in which you learn to see the world a little differently and get to work on what one of the Taviani brothers (referring to his own films) called “the cathedrals of our time”.

Inevitably, in a book as bulky as this one, there are a few revelations: we see the teenage Malick, while taking a course from the theologian Paul Tillich at Harvard, rounding out his education by reading Winnie the Pooh; we watch him taking on the stunt driving in Badlands himself, unexpectedly in love with danger and the unknown. When Warner Brothers previewed that film, it screened it, we learn — as in some Monty Python skit — in a double bill with the flatulent and knockabout Mel Brooks farce Blazing Saddles.

And though John Travolta was considered for the lead in Days of Heaven (and Sylvester Stallone for the other male lead), Travolta was unavailable because he was working on the television sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter.

Indeed, on Days of Heaven alone — a perfect microcosm for all his work (which can feel like one enormous scroll unrolling forever) — Malick spent two years cutting a single scene of Richard Gere and Brooke Adams wandering randomly around a stream. He sent a cameraman off to catch images of buffalo and of “a pond of water with the wind coming across it”. He used circus people for some parts, and when he couldn’t decide between two actresses to play a teenage girl, he wrote in substantial parts for both (the voice-overs for the film were famously delivered by the 15-year-old Linda Manz, just riffing in a studio to Malick, after hearing someone in the house where she was staying read from the Book of Revelation).

Malick conceived the entire movie at times as a silent film, as if actors were just colours or shapes to play with, and the house at the centre of the action was based on the one in Giant (remember, the same Malick who planned a film based on the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was also responsible for large parts of the Jerry Lee Lewis biopic Great Balls of Fire). In the indelible words of Nestor Almendros, the cinematographer who won an Oscar for his work on Days of Heaven, shooting constantly in the magic hour, “It takes daring to convince the Hollywood old guard that the shooting day should last only 20 minutes.”

Malick’s longing, at every moment, is to catch real life unadorned; he has the believer’s faith, perhaps, that every random detail is a sign of divine abundance. He’s known for giving actors pages of gorgeously eloquent writing, and then telling them just to improvise; he likes to cast people who have never acted before and don’t know how to be anything but themselves; he tries to work only in natural light and — ­notoriously — loves to swivel the camera around to catch a passing bird, even as his actors are killing themselves to get a scene right. Mickey Rourke, admits a member of the Malick travelling show, “did some unbelievable scenes” in The Thin Red Line, but — like Billy Bob Thornton and Bill Pullman and so many others — he never appeared in the final film.

One of the things that emerges most strikingly, in fact, from the testimony of actors and cameramen and music directors is what a huge sacrifice is involved in giving oneself over to the Malick vision. Everyone has to be ready to do anything, all the time, and sets have to be opened out so that the camera can move 360 degrees at any moment.

Malick’s colleagues looked at “well over 10,000 children” to cast the three young boys in The Tree of Life, spending two years on the search, and for The Thin Red Line, his crew had to lay down 6km of road in a part of Queensland known for its dangerous snakes and crocodiles. While George Clooney, Travolta and other A-list actors were all but excised from the finished film, the voice-overs were largely delivered by a kid who had come to an audition to accompany a friend.

The films are written as fiction, as Malick’s wizardly cinematographer, Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, has been known to say, and then shot as nonfiction, with a roving crew constantly on the alert, as in a documentary, for stray ­moments. Then, over years with several editors working simultaneously, they’re turned again into fiction as the director, sifting through 1.5 million feet of film on The Thin Red Line alone, tries to catch moments as ineffable as memory or dream.

I think it’s best to understand Malick by seeing his films as works of music that, like any Mozart concerto, aim to catch certain emotions or intuitions beyond the reach of words, that can elevate and pierce us in ways that leave us transformed. Malick works in movements, in scenes, and he deliberately scores his films so that the music casts a different mood from the imagery — thus layering and complicating our responses — even as the voice-over adds still another element. Yet he’s so unable to explain the delicate and subtle effects he’s after that, while working with the composer Hans Zimmer on The Thin Red Line, he simply talked about Renaissance paintings (before using all of Zimmer’s pieces in just the scenes for which they weren’t intended).

Sometimes as I read, I thought of Annie Dillard, another wild American explorer who, precisely by following her own course, produces effects that nobody else could plan or even dream of. I was tickled to find that Malick once shot an eclipse of the sun (one of Dillard’s most famous essays is on a total eclipse) and I thought of how Dillard is so dedicated to God that she never stops railing against his brutality and injustice.

Malick likes to pick up Wordsworthian spots of time, found pieces at the edge of things just as Dillard once made up a whole book of poems, Mornings Like This, out of lines she’d come upon here and there. Most of all, he gives us scenes and stories right out of the Old Testament but translated into a distinctively American vernacular. “There is nothing more American than a Texan,” Sean Penn says of Malick, and also that Malick “knows [America] like an Indian knows America”.

Actors are so used to being interviewed that theirs are often the most eloquent voices here. And sometimes it’s the most unlikely among them who have the most to offer. Ben Chaplin rightly sees that Malick’s films are all but parables on original sin, our “loss of innocence”; there’s always a tangible presence of heaven in the work that makes us wonder why we’re all stuck in hell. He notes that Malick writes “very dense, very structured screenplays” and then leaves most of the words out, so “the silence is given a lot more depth”. Jessica Chastain, in between talking about the meditation practice she observed to play the mother in The Tree of Life, refers again and again to the copy of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica Malick gave her as a way into his “visual poem”.

At times, though, I longed for the voice of someone who didn’t have a radiant experience on a Malick film. Nick Nolte, never quoted here, told Charlie Rose, in a classic interview, that he was given lines of Homer, some in Greek, on The Thin Red Line, and told to let them seep into his subconscious. Ben Affleck, making To the Wonder, gamely read Heidegger to try to gain insight into Malick, and he confessed, “It gave me no insight.” Even Penn once spoke out about how “the most magnificent” script he’d ever seen, for The Tree of Life, somehow was drained of most of its emotion in the editing room and turned into a film in which he barely featured. Decades ago, one of Malick’s earliest mentors, Arthur Penn, shrewdly noted that Days of Heaven might be “a little bit too sophisticated; I thought Terry became maybe too concerned with the camera”.

And even his closest associates can’t get to the heart of all the riddles Malick, 72, bodies forth. He is famously self-effacing and open to suggestions from everyone, and yet his films all bear the stamp of only one man, Terrence Malick, and can be taken only on Malickian terms (judge them in the context of continuity, story or character, and you’re likely to emerge from the credits outraged, if you even manage to stay the course). Tyrannising in his indecisiveness, the man is so shy, more than one colleague says, that he can’t bring himself to tell an actor that they have got the part — and yet his ambitions are as far from shy as can be imagined. Everyone who knows him echoes Brad Pitt’s description of “a very humble, sweet man”, but it’s only Penn here who asks how such a gentle soul can make such violent films.

In a curious way, this book, designed to be a testament to a brave and original visionary, ends up giving us exactly the least interesting and important part of its remarkable subject. The greater the artist, the more he transcends the circumstances of his life and the more he speaks for and from something invisible that even his closest intimates can’t see or guess at.

It’s exactly what his friends cannot say about Malick — cannot even explain to themselves, perhaps — that produces the effects that sometimes change our lives. One of the deepest memories of my almost 60 years was watching Days of Heaven in a Boston theatre at the age of 22, and being so affected by everything I couldn’t explain that I decided to consecrate my life to something akin to what Malick was attempting.

Of course it’s hard to try to catch the mystery of any artist, but it’s not impossible, and it’s the least that any admirer can do. Todd Haynes tried this by casting Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere and an 11-year-old black boy in his gnomic and scrupulously indirect portrait of Bob Dylan, I’m Not Here; Don Cheadle, in his current film about Miles Davis, chooses to concentrate on the musician in his hidden, “lost” years, away from the glare of the world, knowing that it’s his private time that is the source of his genius, much more than anything he did in front of crowds. Someone true to the spirit of Malick might evoke him in a silent film that, as one person says here about The Tree of Life, is “about light and about wind, and about curtains in the wind”.

Though in truth Malick seems to be doing that more and more himself, in works that feel increasingly like pages from a private album, ­silently presented to us out of sequence, and often reminiscent of a parody of his unforgettable early work (in his youngest pictures, teenage girls offered gritty, droll and prophetic voice-overs where now we get more generic ruminations, muttering “Where is God?” and “Why is there evil in the world?”).

Ultimately, Malick sounds a bit like his own version of God, allowing actors the illusion of free will and the chance to do things their own way, but coming down in the end with capricious acts of assertion and violence to remind them all, as Chaplin says, that “you are just a piece of paint” in a Malick film, “and you can’t see the canvas”.

It’s moving to hear so many speak of how joining Malick in his dream is akin to embarking on a spiritual journey; one thinks of Peter Brook leading his small company in similar explorations across the globe. And it’s immeasurably heartening to think that anyone can make such searching and anti-commercial films and still retain the financial and technical support of Hollywood for more than 40 years.

“The truly great thing about Terry,” says Zimmer, “is that he searches in a very pure and a very collegial and democratic way for something. He can’t even pose the question, but we know there is a search on and we’re going to find something that we didn’t even know that we were looking for.”

You’ll find 17 pages in this book on CGI effects in The Tree of Life, and technicians talking about “4k resolution” and the “Pop III star epoch”. You’ll also find many lines already well-known from the editors’ 2002 documentary on the same topic, Rosy-Fingered Dawn (an allusion to some of the Homeric words that left Nolte in a daze). Yet the beauty of Terrence Malick, the special grace of his art, is that the more you hear and read about them, often, the less you can claim to understand.

Pico Iyer’s most recent books are The Art of Stillness and The Man Within My Head, two titles that could belong to Malick films.

Terrence Malick: Rehearsing the Unexpected

Edited by Daniele Villa and Carlo Hintermann

Faber & Faber, 432pp, $59.99 (HB)