(5 of 5)
While filming a scene in which Nolte, who plays a hard-driving, glory-hunting lieutenant colonel, is chewed out by a superior over the phone (for Nolte's benefit, John Cusack improvises a verbal reaming from behind the camera), Malick's directions seem to consist solely of "Take a pause," "Look over at the river," and "Let's do another one." As the number of takes for this simple scene runs into the high teens, Nolte seems to get more and more flustered, losing concentration and blowing his lines (Cusack: "Are you incompetent, Colonel?" Nolte: "Yes I'm incompetent. What's my first f____ line?") until his growling frustration and the character's seem to merge, finally giving Malick what he wants. This is apparently his preferred way of working: letting actors go on and on until they exhaust themselves and stumble into some kind of spontaneous truth. "Terry loves scenes going wrong," says a cast member.
When Malick gives concrete notes, he tends to speak in metaphors as singular as the images in his films. He talks about the "green poison of war," and instructed one actor to play a scene like "a squid being thrown up on the beach from the abyss." On the other hand, the stage directions in his script could be dauntingly airy for an actor: "Fife's terror passes gradually over into a longing for life and peace." How do you play that?
From an audience's point of view, it will be interesting to see how Malick's meditative style meshes with the urgency of a combat tale. As it evolves on set, this is shaping up to be both the most ambitious war movie since Apocalypse Now and, potentially, the strangest. "It'll be Malick's Iliad," says Geisler with only slightly undue portentousness. A cast member says that the director, maybe sensing a roll, is already talking about an even more ambitious follow-up. Malick's Odyssey?