Learning on the Job

Malick — who later said that he decided to go to film school because it didn’t seem worse than any other option — was a member of the first class of students at the American Film Institute Conservatory. One of his classmates, David Lynch, said that his time there was “completely chaotic and disorganized, which was great … you quickly learned that if you were going to get something done, you would have to do it yourself. They wanted to let people do their thing.” Another member of that first class, Paul Schrader, reported that

It was quite a moment that first year: no tuition, daily screenings, receptions four or five times a week with famous filmmakers. There were no structured classes, and I was the only critical studies Fellow…. I didn’t think it would last. It felt like a house of cards, and to a degree it was. Yet it survived.

Malick himself has commented that while it was awe-inspiring to have a constant stream of titans visiting — Renoir, Fellini, Elia Kazan, Bergman — he didn’t actually remember, later on, what any of them said, with one exception: Kazan told the students that when you’re hiring extras you should always try to hire cops, because they’re used to being looked at and tend to have a personal presence. That was it; that was Malick’s one lesson from the Great Masters.

In the end he made a 15-minute short to satisfy graduation requirements and went straight from that to writing his own feature, Badlands (1973). Looking back on that experience just three years later, he said,

I felt woefully ignorant. For instance, one example of this is that I didn’t understand the importance of over-the-shoulder shots. You know, they’re corny, they’re television and everything, but I always thought, ‘Why have half the frame occupied with the back of somebody’s head?’ It’s just not interesting. You know, why do people shoot that way? It’s just like television, they do it by taste or something. They think that that’s interesting. Well, I don’t think so — only to find out in the editing room that those shots really situate you, and it’s important to be situated. If I’d done more than this one short I would have known that. I would have found that out very quickly in the editing room, but I didn’t until it was too late, until the picture was all over.

Malick learned filmmaking by trial-and-error, one mistake at a time. He wrote and rewrote. Often after a day of shooting on The Thin Red Line (1998) he would return to his cabin or trailer to write new dialogue that he would give to the actors the next morning. He learned fast; he iterated, again and again. He still does.

He experiments constantly with narrative strategies, with lighting, with composition, with the rhythms of editing. His style of filmmaking has become increasingly sophisticated, but it is, fundamentally, handmade: he became a tactical bricoleur. He improvises, he tries the untried. He always surprises us, and probably surprises himself.

It’s difficult for someone who graduated from Harvard to be an outsider artist, but in many ways Malick is. His connections to the big Hollywood studios have always been tentative and distant; he approaches them when necessary but whenever possible goes his own way. He is one of the great American originals.