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the new world
“What a responsibility she took on!” adds Farrell. “She plays a character who you could say truly embodies the spirit of America. You’re asking someone of that age to understand these things, but Q’orianka is closer to the purity of what I think Pocahontas would have been. In a word, she’s amazing. I don’t know where it comes from, but she has a smile that could light up both hemispheres at the same time, and she has depths of light and darkness which could make the world stop moving.” Meanwhile, with a director as accuracy-obsessed as Malick, the process of recreating an almost unknown world proved exacting, with endless research and the hiring of an army of experts to ensure that every detail of costume, set construction and the characters’ appearance was as correct as possible. The James Fort was rebuilt, almost to scale. The three ships which are part of the Jamestown Settlement tourist attraction were borrowed, aged and put back to sea. And a platoon of craftsmen went to work. “Sometimes, we had up to 25 people working there weaving mats, making Native war clubs, leather bags and belts,” says props master Steve George. “And later on, during the battle scenes, we had to set up a triage factory in the prop truck trying to repair everything that was busted apart! But the biggest challenge on this movie is the fact that very few things exist from the time period depicted, so we pretty much had to manufacture all of the Native American and colonist props.” But, notes production designer Jack Fisk, who has worked on all of Malick’s films, the director just seems to take all of this for granted. “Terry is one of the few directors who doesn’t look at drawings,” he explains. “He just says, ‘Whatever you build, we’ll come in like a documentary crew and shoot it’. Terry likes to film almost on a found object so, the more complete it is, the more he can use it. He doesn’t really like the idea of just shooting a bit of a set or a wall in one direction. And, since Terry doesn’t like to light his scenes, he changes his direction according to the sun, so we needed to create an environment where he could move around accordingly. He likes things to be real, and it was fun to build the sets in as real a way as possible.” The resulting film - which premieres in North America on Christmas Day - promises to be both a painstaking recreation of the very first pages of American history; and an epic story of love, loss and discovery. And, like every Malick movie, it will be an event. “Terry is an extraordinary director,” says Green. “He’s all heart and instinct, and works in a way that is organic and beautiful. His work speaks to the heart of humanity; it gets under your skin. He’s a mystery, a magician and an alchemist. What we accomplished on this film shouldn’t have been possible. But we do it because we believe in him and in the spirit of the moment. I think he has a trust and a faith in people which comes through in the way he writes and the way he works with them. “There will be many ways of interpreting The New World,” she concludes. “I don’t think the title only refers to what the English colonists called America when they ‘discovered’ it. We were working with the idea that, however far America may have wandered from its true purpose and first promise, the true America still waits to be discovered – still awaits us.”
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