(3 of 5)
A quarter of a century ago, his first film, 1973's Badlands, earned the then 29-year-old a prominent spot in the generation of young film-schooled directors that included Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Brian DePalma, who together created a new, nervy kind of movie-literate cinema but who then, as the 1970s wore on into the '80s and '90s, made some really rotten movies along with the good. Malick's reputation, meanwhile, remains crystalline, pure with the promise and power of his youthful work. Badlands, which was shot for somewhere between $250,000 and $350,000--no money even in those days--starred Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek as on-the-lam lovers, a story seemingly inspired by the case of Charles Starkweather, the 1950s spree killer. Unlike, say, Natural Born Killers, the film is less interested in violence than in the ways in which its two self-absorbed romantics fail to communicate with each other and yet somehow bond; to wit, the dialogue includes some of the drollest non sequiturs in movie history.
Five years later, Malick followed his lavishly praised debut with the studio-financed Days of Heaven, an opaque allegory about migrant farm workers in Texas on the eve of World War I. It is so lyrically beautiful and narratively elliptical that its cast, which included Richard Gere and Sam Shepard, was upstaged by a field of wheat--which might sound like a knock on the film but is really a tribute to the quiet, meditative power of its best moments, of its preoccupation with the verities of the natural world. As one might assume from that description, Days of Heaven, like Badlands, fared poorly at the box office. Unlike Badlands, it also received mixed reviews, but those who did like it were rhapsodic, and the film cemented Malick's reputation as one of the industry's most esteemed young talents.
Unfortunately for the sake of dramatic newsmagazine articles, Malick doesn't appear to have had a particularly sensational reason for turning his back on moviemaking. The shoots for both his films had been draining and difficult, and the director was said to have been disillusioned as well by the normal run of Hollywood hustling. According to an associate, Malick found the whole ancillary process of marketing a movie "sickening"--and who wouldn't? "He said he always planned to take a break," recounts Mike Medavoy, Malick's agent at the time of Badlands and currently the head of Phoenix Pictures, which is producing The Thin Red Line for Fox. "He just didn't plan to take such a long break."