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LEGEND COMES
TO LIFE
the new world
Colin Farrell sums up the reaction of most of the cast about how they felt when they were offered a chance to work for New Line Cinema with the director of The New World. “Malick does a gig and the actors come running,” jokes the Irish star who has risen to the top rank in Hollywood over the past couple of years. “It’s not like you even have to read his script, because the purity of every single movie he’s made is proof enough. Terry’s like a sage: he’s got the wisdom of years that he hasn’t lived on this planet, and he has a gentility which is astounding and a ferocity which is amazing. He’s a poet.”Born in Waco, Texas in 1943, Malick is indeed something of a legend in American cinema. A former Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and one-time teacher of philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he made what is probably the most astonishing debut feature of all time, Badlands, in 1973. Since then, he has directed only two films, both of which have been epic portraits of a key moment in American history: Days of Heaven (1978), which dealt with the plight of migrant workers in Texas during the Great Depression; and The Thin Red Line (1998), a gruelling adaptation of James Jones’ novel about American GIs in Guadalcanal during World War II. Malick’s latest film, The New World, which shot on location in Virginia and in the UK in 2004, details the first encounter between European and Native American cultures on American soil. “The New World is Terrence Malick’s artistic rendering of England’s colonisation of the Americas,” explain Farrell, who plays John Smith in the film. “You just trust in the mind, soul and spirit of Terry. His intelligence and gift lies in that he sees that which most of us miss every day: the beauty and tragedy of life all around us. You know that he will respect all sides of the story, including the Native Americans, who Terry pays homage to as a culture and a people whose beauty was not just misinterpreted but ignored by the early settlers in this great land.” |
