Who would have thought that George Lucas, Stanley Kubrick and Terrence Malick, the three most notable AWOLS in American moviemaking, would all be directing films this year? It's like a harmonic convergence for cineastes and film geeks. Lucas, of course, hasn't been behind a camera since finishing 1977's Star Wars; he is currently in London shooting the first of the three long-awaited Star Wars prequels in which Ewan McGregor will star as the youthful Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Natalie Portman as Luke Skywalker's mom. Kubrick, who hasn't worked since 1987's Full Metal Jacket, is also in London, where he is filming Eyes Wide Shut, a psychosexual thriller with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman; Kubrick began shooting the picture almost a full year ago and, exceeding even his own reputation as a quasi-demented perfectionist, shows no signs of wrapping any time soon. "They're having a great time," says Cruise and Kidman's publicist. We bet.
And then there's Malick, a director whose entire resume lists only a pair of box-office duds. But what duds! The two films have survived in critical esteem to be numbered among the more significant films of the 1970s--itself one of the more cinematically significant decades. Malick, however, is probably even better known for not only exiling himself from Hollywood, like Lucas and Kubrick, but also for having willfully removed himself from the public eye altogether and becoming, as it is commonly said, the J.D. Salinger of movies. Out of the aforementioned trio, you certainly wouldn't have guessed that Malick would be the one directing seemingly every other male movie star in Hollywood in a big-scale World War II combat epic. The picture is The Thin Red Line, based on the James Jones novel about the battle of Guadalcanal. The cast includes George Clooney, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Nick Nolte, Gary Oldman, Sean Penn, Bill Pullman and John Travolta. And they are only, with the exception of Penn, members of the supporting cast.
The film's core players are a group of mostly unknowns who portray the grunts and noncoms of the novel's C for Charlie company. If the young actors and Malick do their jobs well, The Thin Red Line could do for this cast what The Godfather did once upon a time for the careers of Al Pacino, Robert Duvall and James Caan. Altogether the film has more than 60 speaking parts, hundreds of extras and a shooting script of 180-plus pages--which would indicate a running time of more than three hours. And that's not including the scenes Malick has been adding and improvising since the movie's scheduled five-month shoot got under way late last June in the Daintree rain forest near Port Douglas, Australia, which is doubling for Guadalcanal. Later, the crew will depart for the island itself to shoot scenes involving a sojourn among the native Melanesians. All in all, it's a daunting undertaking for any director, let alone one who hasn't voluntarily worked in two decades, or talked to the press for even longer.