TSPDT

Key Production Country: USA
Key Genres: Drama, Romantic Drama, Period Film, War Drama, War, Romance
Key Collaborators: Jack Fisk (Production Designer), Sarah Green (Producer), Emmanuel Lubezki (Cinematographer), Nicolas Gonda (Producer), Grant Hill (Producer), Mark Yoshikawa (Editor), Keith Fraase (Editor), Rehman Nizar Ali (Editor), Hank Corwin (Editor), Billy Weber (Editor), Sean Penn (Leading Actor), Christian Bale (Leading Actor)

"Since he made only four movies in 30 years, Terrence Malick's filmography is one of the slimmest in cinema history - yet each film is considered among the finest of its genre. All four films directed by the enigmatic Malick are concerned with the corruption of innocence, the mythic expulsion from Eden, and the American propensity to violence... Each of these ravishing, meticulously crafted films is ironic, fatalistic, and allusive, with a variety of narrative strands, all dealing with the same situations from different viewpoints." - Ronald Bergan (Film - Eyewitness Companions, 2006)

"An enigmatic and assiduously reclusive figure, Malick has been referred to as the J.D. Salinger of the movies. Only recently did he choose to return to directing after a twenty-year self-imposed exile from the film world. To date Malick's directing career encompasses a mere 3 films in 27 years. While in no way prolific, Malick exemplifies how narrative cinema has the potential to mesmerise and challenge an audience's perception of reality." - Peter Homden (Contemporary North American Film Directors, 2002)

"Though he has directed only two feature films, Terrence Malick has received the kind of critical attention normally reserved for more experienced and prolific filmmakers. His career reflects a commitment to quality instead of quantity - an unusual and not always profitable gamble in the film industry." - Alexa Foreman & Barton Palmer (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)

"Terrence Malick is an American director whose films can be characterized as radical reevaluations of the current understandings of cinematic concepts such as image (and sound), character, and narrative. His films are intensely visual, abound in beautiful nature imagery and they elude explanation, in the sense of the reduction of a given phenomenon (say, a character’s behaviors) to various (psychological, sociological) causes, usually favoring expression of moods instead." - Hwanhee Lee (Senses of Cinema, 2002)

"Almost as legendary for his silence as for his films, Terrence Malick has created a myth around himself worthy of Stanley Kubrick. He began his career as a philosophy teacher, studying the subject at harvard and Oxford before going on to teach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At the same time - the late 1960s - he worked as a journalist and was one of the first graduates of the recently founded American Film Institute." - Lloyd Hughes (The Rough Guide to Film, 2007)

"Malick represents the obverse of the usual Hollywood coin - an erudite, literate man who chose not to make movies for twenty years because he wasn't prepared to settle for second best." - Mario Reading (The Movie Companion, 2006)

"A 20-year break between his second and third features made him a notoriously reclusive figure; his few films have been lyrical, visually painstaking creations." - Chambers Film Factfinder, 2006

"As Greta Garbo learned, elusiveness and inactivity can feed a legend; so it is that Terrence Malick has become one of the most intriguing figures in recent film history, as much for his long sabbatical as for his striking movie work." - Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia, 1995

"On the basis of Badlands (73), a brilliantly subtle yet raw study of psychosis and power, Malick is a promising filmmaker." - William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978)