Terrence Malick's Lost Decades: What Really Happened

EXCERPT: He burst on the scene with 'Badlands' and 'Days of Heaven' and then disappeared. A new biography solves the mystery

THE ENIGMA Terrence Malick all but disappeared from public view for nearly 20 years, but privately was enduring great creative and personal churn. (Photo illustration by The Ankler; Malick: 20th Century-Fox/Getty Images)

There always has been the air of mystery around director Terrence Malick. His first two films — 1973’s Badlands, which made stars of Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, and 1978’s Days of Heaven, which featured a young Richard Gere — established him as one of Hollywood’s most promising new auteurs. It was followed by a nearly two-decade fallow period in which he made no movies and disappeared from the public eye. Those years became the source of his legend as an enigmatic genius.

Malick made a splashy return with 1998’s The Thin Red Line, a WWII drama, followed by seven more movies over the next 20 years. The now 80-year-old filmmaker is still at work, with plans to debut his long-gestating film about Jesus with an all-star cast (Mark Rylance, Joseph Fiennes, Ben Kingsley) at Cannes in 2025.

Film critic and Writers on Film podcast host John Bleasdale pulls back the curtain on the never-before-told mystery of those lost decades in his exhaustively researched new Malick biography, The Magic Hours (University of Kentucky Press, Dec. 3). In this excerpt, Bleasdale charts the false starts, aborted productions and squandered opportunities that stalled the director’s career in the 1980s and 1990s. Although he was out of the spotlight, the Oklahoma-raised Malick, whose formative childhood experience was attending boarding school in Austin at St. Stephen’s Episcopal School, never stopped working. But those years are a case study in how a promising career can be derailed — by bad partners, and a filmmaker’s own excesses, including tumultuous romances and creative dead-ends.

This era, out of the public eye, was also punctuated by Malick’s work as a script doctor, his role as “spiritual director” to Martin Sheen and, eventually, the perseverance of his former agent Mike Medavoy in the making of The Thin Red Line with an all-star cast that included George Clooney, Sean Penn, John Cusack and Woody Harrelson. Mailck’s time in the wilderness even included his key role with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon in the making of Good Will Hunting.

KINDRED SPIRITS Martin Sheen and Malick on the set of Badlands in 1973. (Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images)

This excerpt begins with Malick searching for a follow-up to 1973’s Badlands (Warner Bros.) and 1978’s Days of Heaven (Paramount), and the agonizing beginning of trying to replicate that success: