6. Unfortunately, Malick’s Less Than Traditional Editing Approach Made Him An Enemy Of Composer James Horner
Terrence Malick’s intuitive, freewheeling approach to shooting and his disregard for sticking with the script made scoring the film a nightmare for James Horner. Writing and then rewriting pieces for scenes that changed from page to camera, were cut, re-ordered or abandoned, most of Horner’s music was eventually axed and the experience severely embittered the composer. In a radio interview with “On The Score” conducted by Daniel Schweiger for Film Music Radio, Horner laid into Malick hard. It was a lengthy diatribe — which you can read in full here — but we’ve condensed it a bit to give an overall impression of Horner’s experience working with Malick:
So he went out shooting the movie, went over time, and got beautiful images and everybody [said] “Oh god, this is so beautiful.” There were a couple of things that were pasted together by a couple of the experienced editors of the love scenes: “Oh, this gonna be great, absolutely great”. OK.
He had eight editors working for him — two prestigious, the rest out of the woodwork, and some assistants. There was so much film he was working on night on night, [that] there was a crew… When I first saw it, it was a mishmash of unrelated scenes, complete mishmash. I said, “Well Terry, you need to…” He asked me what I thought. “You need to cohere this. I mean this scene should be there” … all kinds of editing things were wrong. It was the first assembly.
It was April and he was supposed to have a cut ready by May to look at, and that we missed. He missed his deadline and it was in the middle of June when we saw it. The studio saw it, and it was the same thing I saw two days after he finished shooting. It has gone through two and a half month’s work and it was in just the same state. This was when I first saw it and red lights started to go up everywhere because I’m getting close to my recording dates and this is unscoreable like this.
I played him scenes, I played him everything on the piano and I had the feeling he did not really know what movie music was. He didn’t have any experience with real film music being presented to him. Even in ‘Thin Red Line’ it was all cut up. Here I was writing music for him, which he would say was “beautiful and great” and sounded “great” on the piano. Whatever. But I knew – and I warned everybody – this man does not have a clue what to do with movie music or how it works, not a clue. He is gonna to hear his first cue and not know what to do with it and I warned everybody.
I begged him to watch several movies that have music in them [used] very effectively. Be it ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,’ I mean I showed him all kinds of films or asked him to see all kinds of films that had scores in them. He said he would, but he never did.
“Slowly the editorial team started to disintegrate. The good editors left and they brought in more assistants and it was cut by a bunch of incompetents. There was no real editor. He continued on in that way asking for opinions and we were approaching recording and there were no scenes to record, there were no scenes to time. I had my music editors assemble sequences as I thought they should be or as they normally [would] be, and we scored some of that and it was lovely, just what everybody had hoped would be intended by the film.
Terry saw it and immediately took it back to his editing room and cut it apart and we were still recording and I realized that it was just a waste of everybody’s money to keep recording, though we were commited because we had hired the orchestra. So Terry was making this movie that was incomprehensible.
Everybody told him it was unwatchable. Everybody! Everybody! And he had Final Cut, and when a director has final cut, everybody can scream and shout, but unless you’re willing to really go head-to-head in combat, you basically have to throw up your hands and say, “I have no control over this man.” The editor who had worked on “The Thin Red Line” begged Terry to fix the fim. It was a love story, and Terry doesn’t feel those feelings. All I can say is that Terry is on the surface a stone and he does not know how to tell love stories to save his life. When we scored the movie he completely disassembled everything. The score made no sense anymore and he started to stick in Wagner over scenes, and a Mozart piano concerto over an Indian attack. Everybody thought he was insane. By this time I was no longer on, I basically said, ‘futz you. So I just did say a four letter word. I’m out of here. I’ve done my score.’
I never felt so letdown by a filmmaker in my life….It was the most disappointing experience I’ve ever had with a man because not only did he throw out my score, he loved my score, he didn’t have a clue what to do with it. He didn’t have a clue how to use music. So what he started to do was, as I said, to take classical pieces, but not even pieces that would be transparent and lovely, he was taking Wagner like a thick blanket and putting it in his movie. I swear to god, on the dubbing stage everybody thought he was joking and he would bring up these musical solutions and take out the score and put in Wagner, or take out the score and put in Mozart.
It’s not like he fired me and I’m bitter. What happened was I’m bitter because he did not make the movie he promised everybody he would make. Everybody felt betrayed, from the film company down to the editors. Everybody felt betrayed, and this was the man who took the story that could have been one of the great love stories and was one of the great love stories in history, and turned it into crap, and it’s because he doesn’t believe in those things. He doesn’t understand them. And most importantly, he has not an emotion in his body. He’s emotionless.”
James Horner’s complete score for the film was released on CD.
7. Christopher Plummer Didn’t Care For Malick’s Methods Either
While if you compare the drama on “The Thin Red Line” to “The New World,” and read both these features, the latter film seems tame by comparison, but actually like Horner, others had their issues as well. One was Christopher Plummer who was extremely candid about his disappointment in Malick’s notorious methods, even comparing his excised role to Adrien Brody‘s infamously chopped role in his WWII film.
“He’s fascinated by nature, and just cuts to birds,” he told New York Magazine earlier this year. “Colin Farrell kept saying, ‘My character, he’s a fuckin’ osprey. That’s how he sees me.’ You’d be playing a passionate scene, and he’d say in that strange southern voice of his, mixed with Harvard and Oxford, ‘Ah, jes’ stop a minute, Chris. I think there’s an osprey flying over there. Do you mind if I just take a few shots?’ I wrote him an infuriated letter because I saw the film and I was hardly in it—he cut my part to shit. And it recalled the story of Adrien Brody, the lead in The Thin Red Line. He went to the premiere, and he wasn’t in it! I wrote to Terry and said, ‘You need a writer, baby, you need somebody to follow the story.’ I was awful to him, but I did say I admired him. He’s an individual—also mad as a hatter.”