The Tree of Life

Started by modage, January 28, 2009, 06:54:07 PM

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OrHowILearnedTo

Quote from: Stefen on May 04, 2011, 02:27:41 PM
I was at Hooters this weekend watching UFC 129 and I was talking to someone about this movie and as soon as I mentioned the title, I swear this happened, some giant juicehead with a goatee smacked me upside the head and told me "Terrence Malick sucks, fag!" then smashed a beer can on his forehead and jumped out a window.

Quote from: john on November 10, 2008, 05:16:37 PM
"You didn't care for Days of Heaven? What are you, some sort of faggot?"

md

Quote from: Stefen on May 04, 2011, 02:27:41 PM
I was at Hooters this weekend watching UFC 129 and I was talking to someone about this movie and as soon as I mentioned the title, I swear this happened, some giant juicehead with a goatee smacked me upside the head and told me "Terrence Malick sucks, fag!" then smashed a beer can on his forehead and jumped out a window.

What the? :ponder: :ponder: :ponder:

Anyways, here's a clip...

http://insidemovies.ew.com/2011/05/04/tree-life-brad-pitt-clip/#more-36380

Sounds like a Norm Macdonald anecdote.  Especially the "What the?!"

I fucking love Norm.
"look hard at what pleases you and even harder at what doesn't" ~ carolyn forche

Ravi

This movie won't not cause everyone in the world to have multiple mindgasms. Even people who don't see it.

Ravi

http://motion.kodak.com/US/en/motion/Publications/In_Camera/Web_Exclusives/index.htm

InCamera Web Exclusives
Tree of Life Premieres at Cannes Film Festival
Film is an Important Aspect of Malick's Cinematic Vision

Tree of Life is described as the journey from the innocence of childhood to a disillusioned adulthood, and the quest to regain meaning in life. The film, which premieres at Cannes, stars Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and Jessica Chastain. It is the latest collaboration between Terrence Malick and Emmanuel Lubezki, AMC. Their previous film together, The New World, earned Lubezki an Academy Award® nomination for best cinematography, and was the first studio feature film in nine years to use the 65 mm film format for anything other than visual effects plates.

Malick is a master whose credits also include Badlands, Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line. Lubezki caught the cinema world's attention with Like Water for Chocolate, and his credits since then include Y Tu Mama Tambien, A Little Princess, Ali, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Burn After Reading, and Children of Men, which earned a fourth Oscar® nomination and an ASC Award for the cinematographer.

For Tree of Life, Lubezki once again used a mix of 35 mm film and regular 65 mm, as well as the huge IMAX™ format. He says the large formats deliver an enhanced "jolt" to viewers, and that Malick's emphasis on expressing himself through images makes for a unique and sometimes impressionistic cinematic experience.

In the following conversation, Lubezki explains his collaborative with Malick and the thought processes that led to their decisions.

How does working with Terrence Malick differ from other shoots?
Lubezki: It differs completely, and in every possible way. Terry does not impose himself on the situation the way a conventional Hollywood movie director might. With those films, the most important thing is to finish the day. You put up a big silk so you can control the situation and eliminate surprises. On Tree of Life, it was the opposite. We used real light, and the sun, wind and rain and other elements that came our way became part of the story. A very important theme in the movie is the constant passing of things, the changes and flow that are part of life. By not imposing yourself on nature, you are able to catch these very fleeting, ephemeral moments. That theme had a parallel in our approach to the filmmaking.

Does shooting film help you make that approach work?
Yes! Film has been an important aspect of our method, especially the new negative films that Kodak produces. As we prepped this film a few years ago, we saw nothing in the digital world that resembled or came close to the latitude of film. The cameras and lenses we have now are the best we've ever had. Also, there are some scenes in the film like an eclipse that Terry filmed 25 years ago, that show film's beauty and longevity. Terry has been thinking about this project for a long time.

Why did you choose 65 mm for some scenes?
We chose it because of the high resolution. One of the rules Terry and I follow is to achieve maximum resolution whenever possible. We would have preferred to shoot the entire movie on IMAX. When these scenes appear in the movie, they give you a jolt. It's a feeling of enhancement and majesty. It's almost as if someone cleaned off the window you were looking through.

Which film stocks did you use?
We used KODAK VISION2 500T Color Negative Film 5218 and KODAK VISION2 200T Color Negative Film 5217. We used ARRI LT and 235 cameras for the 35 mm scenes. The 65 mm camera was a Panavision. We used mostly ARRI Master Prime lenses. I operated most of the handheld scenes. Handheld camera plays an important part in Terry's movies. The post was handled at LaserPacific and at EFilm in Los Angeles. We have a 2K version going to Cannes, but we are in the process of doing a 4K DI as well.

You mentioned that you used very little lighting on the film. Why?
It's interesting. Once you start shooting without film lights, and you go twenty days without using an HMI, if you then put up film lights, they look really bad. It just doesn't make sense. If you really look carefully at natural light, you realize how complex it is, and how it's constantly shifting. When you put up an HMI and diffusion or bounce, it's very monochromatic and has a different feeling. So we burned our bridges, and sent all the lights back to the rental house. You can do this with Terry because he really understands lighting and camera very well. If we are inside a house and it's not working, instead of bringing in lights, he would rewrite the scene and reassemble it outside. Or we'd shoot something else, and come back the next day when it was sunnier. The production was very agile in that sense. Also, the production designer, Jack Fisk, made the entire film possible. In the house that was one of our main locations, he added some windows in key places that became the main sources of light.

Terrence Malick is known as a very visual filmmaker. How does that affect your work?
Films have inherited a lot from other arts, like theater and literature. Since I first met him many years ago, I have felt that Terry is trying to make films, and to express himself, without using the part of film's DNA that comes from these other arts. The images in his films are very, very important to him. Sometimes he says to me, "Dialog is not what I'm trying to capture. I'm trying to capture an emotion, and I want to do that visually." I think he has succeeded, and that's why his films are so strong.

How does that translate into filmmaking techniques?
It's incredibly difficult. We joke that we are like fishermen. We are trying to get little bits from a river that is constantly flowing. Sometimes you catch one or two, and sometimes you don't. It's very nerve-wracking. Sometimes it seems like he is almost trying to create a mistake, to take the actors and the camera to a place where they are going to crash. And it's those little accidents and moments which are in the film and look naturalistic. Those are the truly visually expressive moments.

Stefen

Falling in love is the greatest joy in life. Followed closely by sneaking into a gated community late at night and firing a gun into the air.

MacGuffin

Cannes 2011: Finally, the end of secrets on Terrence Malick's 'The Tree of Life'
Source: Los Angeles Times

For years, Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life" has hovered over the film world like a ghost, staying just out of reach. An intriguing, mysterious project starring Brad Pitt and Sean Penn, there were hints over the years that the movie tackled themes of faith, family and the reason for existence. And oh yes, there seemed to be a dinosaur involved too.

Last year, the movie almost came to the Cannes Film Festival —plans were in motion with organizers —before the enigmatic Malick and the producers pulled back as the festival drew near.

Not long after, the question began to percolate: Perhaps "The Tree of Life" would never come out? After all, Malick had taken an unusually long time to get a movie out before, waiting 20 years after his sophomore effort, "Days of Heaven," to release his third film, the 1998 war drama "The Thin Red Line," which was nominated for the best picture Oscar. The new film's effects —including what looked like a computer-generated dinosaur, revealed in a leaked photo —were indeed taking years to assemble in postproduction. The process dragged out to such an extent that the film ended up with about a half-dozen editors; no one could afford to stay on long enough to complete the job.

All the whispers will finally come to an end Monday as "The Tree of Life" premieres in Cannes before arriving in U.S. theaters on May 27. In interviews, people who worked on "The Tree of Life" described a process filled with almost as much mystery as the themes the movie explores.

About five years ago, Malick had just finished the Colin Farrell colonial tale "The New World" and began talking with his team in earnest about making a film that dealt with his own childhood, the creation of the universe and the meaning of all things.

He had discussed it before —financier-producer Bill Pohlad recalls sitting down with Malick about a decade ago and hearing the pitch for a script well over 200 pages. "I told him good luck and moved on," said Pohlad, who couldn't imagine such an ambitious project ever getting made.

But Malick, who eschews photos and interviews, had been working on it much earlier. Jack Fisk, the director's longtime production designer and collaborator, says the ideas have been dancing in the back of the director's mind since he began making films.

"Terry had been collecting footage for decades, since 'Badlands,'" Fisk said, referring to the director's acclaimed 1973 debut starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. "Things like eclipses and other natural wonders, just for this film."

It would be more than 30 years before Malick was ready to make his spiritual opus, combining scenes from a midcentury Texas childhood, inspired by Malick's, with cosmic and astral images pertaining to the origins of the world. With a new script that interwove those two sections more tightly than before, Pohlad came on to finance and produce it.

Pitt, Penn and Jessica Chastain would star. Pitt, originally a producer on the film, decided to commit to the role of the midcentury father after several other actors fell out. Chastain was already cast as the wife, and Penn would play one of their sons as a grown-up.

The budget for the live-action portion was about $6 million, according to one person close to the production who asked not to be named because the person was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. It was shot about three years ago in Smithville, Texas, a town that Fisk describes as "more like 1950s America than any place in the country today."

The budget for the effects portion —which according to some who worked on the film is split into "realms" such as "the microbial" and "the natural" and includes simulations of the creation of the galaxy's first stars —is harder to gauge. Those scenes were put together with an unusual set of partners that included NASA experts.

"I've worked on a lot of movies where scientists were consultants," said visual effects coordinator Dan Glass, who described the use of Hubble Telescope imagery and the process of re-creating the stars, known as Population 3 stars. "But these were not advisors that contributed an image or two —they were a team of people meant to ensure this was scientifically accurate."

In Texas, the movie shot in three houses all made to look like the same one, so Malick could shift easily between them depending on the light at a given moment, with the production often packing up in one house and running to the next in the middle of the day. Malick used no artificial lighting and often pointed the camera away from the actors' performances, toward the wind and the sky. Cinematographer Emmanuel "Chivo" Lubezki said "Tree" was "like no set I've ever worked on."

Malick changed dialogue and action as he went. "'Oh Jessica, no one pays attention to the script,'" Chastain recalled Malick saying when she sought to recall her lines as written.

Because he didn't know what he wanted until he saw it, the director would often keep everyone else guessing too.

"It was about waking up early in the morning and wondering how your day would change based on what you thought Terry might feel," said Jacqueline West, a costume designer and another member of the Malick coterie. "A lot of working on this movie was about being clairvoyant."
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

Jeremy Blackman


Stefen

Falling in love is the greatest joy in life. Followed closely by sneaking into a gated community late at night and firing a gun into the air.

matt35mm

I'm glad that I wasn't the only one excited about that fact. I can't wait to skim those reviews tomorrow!

Reel

don't read the reviews you guys, it'll ruin it for ye

matt35mm

I won't be able to not look at them at all, so I'm going to try and skim and get a general sense of the reception without getting too much detail. We'll see though.

Fernando

like you I never read but always skim.

something that has worked for me is that I read the first and last paragraph of it, most of the times those doesn't have any spoilers and they show praise, deception or whatever the case might be.

Stefen

Quote from: Fernando on May 16, 2011, 12:26:46 AM
like you I never read but always skim.

something that has worked for me is that I read the first and last paragraph of it, most of the times those doesn't have any spoilers and they show praise, deception or whatever the case might be.

LOL. Same here. Only the first and last paragraphs.

Fuck. The secret is out. How long until some jerk journalist starts spoiling everything first and last? We're going to have to start only reading the middle!
Falling in love is the greatest joy in life. Followed closely by sneaking into a gated community late at night and firing a gun into the air.

matt35mm

Yeah, we're gonna have to stop reading any words and just look at the grade/stars/thumbs/rotten tomatoes rating.

polkablues

I'm only going to listen to the Lights, Camera, Jackson review.
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