If I were putting together a ‘most anticipated films of 2010′ list one of the highest-ranked entries would be The Tree of Life, the new Terrence Malick generational family drama that has been simmering in an edit bay for months. Once positioned as a possible release late last year, the film wasn’t finished in time, and has been penned in for the best possible release date: when it’s done.
But a few buried nuggets of info in recently published articles suggest that we’ll definitely see the film this year (not a given, with Malick) and that it will have a world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. There’s also a new synopsis, which should be considered spoilerish; it’s at the bottom of the post. Read More »
The Playlist has been great about uncovering info about the two upcoming Terrence Malick films, The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time. The Tree of Life is the feature starring Sean Penn and Brad Pitt in a father/son tale about the loss of innocence. Voyage of Time is an IMAX documentary about, essentially, the birth and death of the universe. Both films feature work by Peter Parks, the macro photography guru who created amazingly beautiful (and affordable) effects images for Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain. Last night, via a PDF that has since been pulled down (more on that in a second), the site found that Brad Pitt is evidently narrating Voyage of Time, which only strengthens impressions we’ve had that the two films are closely related. Read More »
Did the notion of Sean Penn playing Larry in a new Three Stooges movie directed by the Farrelly Brothers seem too crazy/good/ridiculous/awful to be true? Now it is, as THR reports Penn has pulled out of both that movie and Cartel, the film in which he would have played a man out to protect his son after Mexican drug cartels kill his wife. Read More »
Earlier this month, it surfaced that dinosaurs were being rendered for a new epic presented in IMAX from director Terrence Malick (Badlands, Days of Heaven). The visual effects artist directly attributed the dinos to The Tree of Life, a meditative, time-spanning drama starring Sean Penn and Brad Pitt, and that remains the case. However, it emerged in the proceeding weeks that Malick was also at work in Austin, Texas on an entirely seperate film, yet another IMAX effort, that seemed to share only a thematic link and scope.
The Playlist reports today that this second film was, at one point, entitled The Voyage of Time, and was also originally set for release in the last quarter of ‘09. It’s now believed that both will see screens in 2010. Other sites have pegged the second film, which seems to fall under “highly ambitious documentary,” as considerably shorter in run-time. There’s no listing for Voyage by this title et al. on IMDB. Due to a lot of understandable overlap and confusion online regarding these two projects, it seemed as good a time as any to clarify, and more reason for cineastes to perk up. For more info on The Tree of Life, including a pretty wild plot synopsis, see our original post.
UPDATE: On The Tree of Life and another, separate Malick project here.
Today brings a rare update on legendary director Terrence Malick’s forthcoming epic, The Tree of Life, that is quite the internet-tickler. Tacked for release sometime this year, the film stars Sean Penn, with Brad Pitt in a flashback role originally intended for Heath Ledger, and now apparently features meditative scenes with dinosaurs. The news arrives via a print-only excerpt in the latest issue of Empire…
“We’re just starting work on a project for Terrence Malick, animating dinosaurs, the film is The Tree of Life. It’ll be shooting in IMAX—so the dinosaurs will actually be life size — and the shots of the creatures will be long and lingering.” - Visual Effects artist Mike Fink (X2, Mars Attacks, Project X)
The above quote first surfaced at HE, where Jeff Wells explains that Malick, who also wrote the script, is incorporating prehistoric themes from a decades-defunct passion project called Q. The film is listed in post-production, and it remains unclear if the dino-scenes (and possibly others) were shot in the newly-embraced IMAX format a la The Dark Knight. Back in 2007, when Pitt’s casting was first announced, we described the project as…
In one version of the screenplay, the story opened with “a sleeping god, underwater, dreaming of the origins of the universe, starting with the big bang and moving forward, as fluorescent fish swam into the deity’s nostrils and out again.” Malick supposedly wanted to create something that has never been seen before, and dispatched cameramen all over the world. They shot micro jellyfish on the Great Barrier Reef volcanic explosions on Mount Edna, and ice shelves breaking off in Antarctica. special effects consultant Richard Taylor describes sections of the script as “pages of poetry, with no dialogue, glorious visual descriptions.”
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