Behind the Scenes: The Thin Red Line (Malick, 1998) with Jim Caviezel and Sean Penn

He didn't want to work with stars. He wanted people that you would just believe were the characters. His way was just to make it as real as possible, and to make it as real as possible would be people that you didn't recognize. So one of the things we had to do, we had to figure out which ones are the ones that are going to be the, quote, stars of the movie without them being stars. Everybody wanted to be in this movie, and I was even looking back over these tapes remembering that there were times that I would stay in the office until 11 o'clock at night because, like Stephen Dorff was working, but he had to audition. He just had to, and he had worked on it, worked on it, and he'd, please, could I wait for him? So I'd wait and wait and wait, and he'd come in, and we'd work until 11 or whatever. I didn't count up, but I know there were probably somewhere along the lines of 126 speaking parts. We had all of this research from old Life magazine articles and all sorts of books on World War II and pictures. I mean, there's loads and loads and loads of pictures of people of that time, and it was, people looked older than they were. I mean, it's a very interesting thing when you look at these people, and you realize they're 18, 19 years old, but they look like men already. They're, so we used that as a sort of template of all of those to try to find people who didn't feel too contemporary. What we had to do was contact theaters in different places, like the Guthrie has always been a very good source of actors for me, the Seattle Theater Group. So I sent letters to people and said what we were looking for, and people put themselves on tape or an acting teacher would put some of her clients on tape. And so we did receive a lot of tapes, particularly from Minnesota, from Texas, from Seattle, Chicago, a lot of people from Chicago. But it just, I don't know what it is, but people in small towns, there's a very different look to people like that. And then there's a look of people who just have more character in their face. And a lot of those people are people from small towns somewhere. And Nick Stahl, he was just a little baby at the time. And then when he's killed, your heart breaks. Leave me alone, all right? Hey, B, come over here. Now, what happened to you? Me? Shit, I told Dawn I was up there. I was on the ridge. I slipped, I fell, I skinned my ---- off. Where'd you go a little while ago when you were gone for a while? Where were you? Well, I went up to take a crap. What do you say? When I see him, he's coming down from Second Platoon's line on the ridge. I was up there on that ridge. I was past the line. And a ******* Jap guy came at me and tried to ban that man. So I killed him. Damn it, I told you I wanted the goddamn truth. And I don't kid gangs. You go ******* look for yourself. Because he's up there now. You don't take my word for it. You go goddamn ******* look for yourself. The thing that is sort of interesting about a lot of these characters is that this is a war and they're scared. But they're scared in different ways. You know, Dahl puts on bravado. Fife doesn't understand why he's feeling so scared. And he tries, but he's probably, I suppose, if it comes down to it, even though he's trying to overcome it, he's more cowardly, whereas some of the others have put on the bravado. This was a time in the 40s when men were men. And it was very important for men to be strong and to be virile and to be, you know, go out there and fight and do all that kind of stuff. So that was one of the things you had to get to, that you had to get actors who really understood the mentality of that time. And then there were people like Adrian Brody who just, he just looked old-fashioned. He looked like a person of the period who belonged in this movie. And Jim Caviezel had that too. It was just something that, he just felt there was an old soul in his body. Jim Caviezel was a surprise. I just got his picture in the mail and I looked at his resume, which was very tiny, but he was represented. He had a manager who was a person I knew and I figured if she was his manager, he must be very special because she's very special. And so that's the reason I saw him, not because there was anything on his resume that indicated that he was right for this or not. You know, Dash was very young at that time and he has little chubby cheeks and he just didn't look like anybody else. And he's so inventive. I mean, Dash is just an incredible person. Oh, what do I do now? Maybe they didn't know about, maybe they was against it. Maybe they was against it. And I think one of the things that's always important for me, you want actors that you want to be around because you don't want egos. You don't want people who are gonna just be needy and wanting all your attention and wanting everybody else's attention. You want it to group, it's a team. I think that the main thing he wanted was he wanted a certain transparency that the actor was able to put their own ego aside and just inhabit the character. You about finished yet? Look here, Maisie, I gotta ask you something. Do you think there's any germs in this mud? Germs? Sure there's germs. You really think so? Hell yes. Don't you read the papers? This island is loaded with all kinds of germs. Now, where do you find germs? In dirt. Malaria germs. No, no, malaria is from mosquitoes. Well, sure. Where do they get them? From dirt. No, they get them from humans who have got malaria. Okay, sure, but where do they come from first? Everybody knows. Germs come from dirt and being dirty. You'll probably be sick as a dog tomorrow. Yeah, I tell you. You're a son of a bitch, Maisie. Yes, I am. I think the kind of actor who works best with Terry is probably somebody who's extremely flexible, that doesn't get hung up on lines and words and things and is able to change as things go on. Terry, as I understand it, will shoot the dialogue and then will do the same scene again without the dialogue and everybody will have to do what they just did but without any dialogue. And that's difficult for actors because a lot of them depend on the words in order to be able to communicate. And he wants you to depend on what you're able to give to the character without the words. Well, I think he was there for one or two minutes. So he decided on this project that maybe the best thing to do was that I would put the people, the actors on videotape, edit down the tapes and send him the best of what we had. And that's how that process worked. When you look at a tape, you see something that you may not have seen in the room. Or if somebody reads and they're very subtle, you may just go, oh, okay. Or, I mean, Ben Chaplin, for example, is a very, very, very subtle actor. And if he was reading in a room, you might not see the amazing thing that's going on in his eyes. And if it's near the end of the day or if it's lunchtime and you're hungry, you're not really giving the actors your full focus. And when you can tape them and go back three days later when all the fun that happened in the room is gone, and you look at it and you go, wow, I didn't remember how great this person was. That's the advantage of having those tapes as opposed to just doing it in the room. Take me back. But they never should have made me go. It's their fault. It ain't mine. I didn't need no discipline like I was a dog. I can't do that. I won't go and beg them. I appreciate you trying to help. No, I mean, it's just how bad you want to get back in. You know how bad. We thought we would be. What I said to Terry was, let's just get the actors that we like the most and then figure out where they belong rather than trying to fit them into parts in the beginning. And let's just see because maybe one will relate more to one part or maybe we feel after looking at them that someone would be better in another part. I don't think you understand what's going on down here, sir. We've been taking a lot of fire. We've had heavy casualties. I was planning on reinforcing them, but we had something bad happen. A man got shot, had his gut shot out on a slope, caused quite a bit of upset, and that's taken care of now and I'm planning on reinforcing now, over. And that's really what happened a lot. I would read people for one part and then Terry would look at these tapes that I had made and say, oh, bring them back and have them read this other part. And all of the actors, I mean, I think all of them came back several times to read different roles. I've got as much right to be here as you have. There's certain people that I just feel are just gonna become big, big stars and Tom was one of those people. He just had this wonderful, like, little Redford, a little Marlon Brando, a little bit James Dean. I don't know, he was just a complex person that I just really responded to. You see me walking down the street, you don't talk to me, you don't see me. You and me ain't friends no more, okay? We don't even joke around. Forget it now, go on. You try to talk to me again, I'll knock you down too. So we brought him in several times to try different characters and he didn't really embody any one particular person. I think I'm looking for people who make me feel something. It's interesting, very often I am the person who has to read with them. Sometimes, like in the case of Thin Red Line, I had a reader and he read with almost everybody and that's great, it's a wonderful tool to have a wonderful help. But sometimes I have to do it and I find with people who are really good, I get so engaged in watching them that sometimes I forget to do my lines or I find they pull me in to the point that if it's a nervous scene, I start to feel what the character I'm reading feels, which is bizarre because I'm not an actress. But the good people can involve you in that way and they can make it real. Colonel, I refuse to take my men on a frontal attack. It's suicide. I've lived with these men for two and a half years, Colonel. I am not going to send them to their deaths and that's fine. Working with Terry is very different from other directors because a lot of what Terry wants is in his head and so it's kind of hard to get a real fix on what it is and it's sort of like, well, let's experiment and maybe this will be it or maybe that will be it. Terry says that he has a problem, that he falls in love with everybody. He's so enamored of actors and looking back on these tapes, I realized we could have cast this movie like 15 times. There were so, so many really, really good actors and some of those auditions, you could have just printed and put them right in the movie. I mean, it was extraordinary and it's because it was so well-written, because he gave them material to work with. They were all good. You know, a lot of people have told me that Terrence Malick, they're not quite sure of what kind of a director he is, actor's director, cerebral director, whatever. All I can say is my experience and my experience was that he trusted me to bring what he hired me to bring and then he trusted me even more to bring things that I didn't even know I had in me. I had gotten the script about three months ago. Penny Allen had given me the script to read and she told me that they were looking, they couldn't find the part of the captain. So I read it, it was really about this thick. I was going, jeez, you know, how am I gonna get through this thing? And as soon as I read it, I thought, here's a good script. It's huge. A lot of logistics trying to do this right, you know. To me, what came across was how thankless the part of the captain felt, you know? I mean, his men weren't behind him. They didn't really believe in him until something in their process happens that turns these men around. So I felt it was a pretty thankless role. You're gonna get beat up, you're gonna get fired and then you're gonna get sent home. And so I thought, where's the joy in that, you know? So ultimately, there were enough heads who prevailed to convince me that this is an opportunity not to pass up, you know? I had put the word out to him, I think through Mike Medavoy, that I was an enormous fan and where was he? Let's make a movie. And then I was driving through Texas at one point and got a hold of him. And we went and had lunch and I told him that. I said, you know, if you're gonna do something, let me know, I'll show up. And then not that long after that, I guess he was starting to get interested in making a movie again. And then he had written a thin red line. So we got together and talked about it and I said, you know, I'm in. And then it went on for some time because it was gonna be difficult for everybody. For one thing, nobody was gonna get any money out of it and they were gonna be there for a long time. And it was a hard movie to get financed. So between Mike and Terry, they needed to get some names that would enhance the value of it to the financier. And so, you know, I suppose my coming on board initially set a tone for, you know, this sort of career suicide that it would be for everybody for a time because we'd all have to go commit an awful lot of time. And it wasn't just the time shooting. It was, we didn't know when we were gonna be able to start the movie. And so it was kind of a blind commitment for a time and one had to not do other things to keep open to do it. But, so I really don't know how effective I was. I think that, you know, the people that ended up there would have been there with or without me. There were people who liked me, appreciated Terry. I was doing a Sam Shepard play at the time and then Sam Shepard did Days of Heaven with Terry. And from what I gather from Terry, Sam showed him like a tape of the play and, but I needed to be in this film, even if I had a, if I was carrying ammunition to Nick Nolte, I had to be in the films. There were five pilots they wanted to sign me for and I was going to test five pilots and I kept coming back to the Thin Red Line. And they were saying, well, look, we'll talk to Diane Crittenden and the radio down in Australia because Terry's, you know, looking at locations. And so is he gonna get any part in the movie? That was it. It was a fair question. And then Terry's response or Diane was, Jim needs to take the work he can get at hand. And then it went on. I mean, this was like 12 weeks and then one day he calls me at home and he says, hey Jim, this is Terry. He says, I was wondering if you, I would never forget. He says, I'd like you to play wit. And I said, well, okay, Jim, we'll welcome aboard. And I feel like I'm getting on a train. I can't get off. And I said, don't worry, I'll be there. And I knew before my agents even knew. I had to call them and tell them. I think that he's one of those directors that if it's a, if you love his work like I do and did, then you kind of jump on board this train and you don't ask where it's going. If you do ask, he'll answer you, but it doesn't help. You know, it's not a destination you've been before. And I remember trying to, in the middle of the night, not knowing my head, my feet. And it was so cold that night. Here we are in the tropics, but it was so cold. And it was pouring down rain, like showers. We were in the rainforest and it just comes down in sheets. And I was holding Adrian Brody, and I thought it was my wife. You could hear this, Jim, Jim, I'm not your wife. And sorry, you know, I think I probably kissed his ear or something. Maybe I even bit it, I don't know. I had my kids down there and also I had, I think, a very different experience than the rest because there was a group of, I was the old man there. I mean, we had a couple of guys, but like Clooney came up for a day or Woody was around a little bit, but even those guys are younger than I am. So I felt like I was kind of the old man with my family. And then there were all these young guys having the experience that I had had 20 years ago of being on a, for many of them, a first film and all of that. And I can imagine that from their point of view, it was really a magical time. It was for mine also, but much more specific. There was working with Terry and there was being with my family in this beautiful place. And there was being in this place, but there was a kind of deeper camaraderie, I would say. Also, I think that it was, that there was this in the characters. There was a bit of, my character was a bit separate. And so it worked out that I was a bit. So I can't, I wasn't really as much a part of the mass experiences as some of them were. I knew Adrian from high school. I knew Dash from New York. Within, so we have camaraderie that way. Then they also put on, we play basketball at nighttime. So every night we'd play basketball for like two or three hours. So there was a camaraderie there and also from the bootcamp. And surprisingly, it was for 23, 24-year-old testosterone filled boys, we surprisingly got along. I think it was important to, to capture a certain mentality at the times. And I don't know if all of us went, and that's a lot to do with the writing and a lot to do with Terry's sensibility and how he set us up. But I knew that it was important that we were guys who were from the 40s. There was a kind of innocence of that time of that breed of soldier that he wanted to get on screen where, which was a very different time than when you came into the later stories of the Vietnam War and things like that. And there were a lot of questions about the government support and the righteousness of the mission and so on. There was a deep, clear patriotism that he was trying to put to balance with what became the surprise of fear and death and horror that war was going to be in any circumstance. And I think that if the characters had in their nature an anticipation of that, it was gonna violate Terry's vision. Literally a 45-second crane shot. And it was like over two days. And the most you can do was one setup per day because you had to, all the explosives had to be set up and it was like 500 guys. And the camera would swoop down, swoop down, swoop down, swoop down. And then zoom in on the character crying. So Terry goes, okay, Kirk, all right, that's gonna be you. Go ahead and start crying. I'm cracking jokes with playing chess with Woody Harrelson. And he's just like, all right, just start crying. Go ahead, go. You know, for some people, you know, it was difficult. You know, you have to sort of like, you know, focus right away because on any given day and any given hour, you didn't know what you were gonna shoot. I mean, it was very spontaneous, you know? So the lighting suited this moment, this scene. So that's what we were gonna shoot at this moment. So, you know, you had to be on your toes. One thing that he would tell me in the beginning when I couldn't really understand until, you know, much later was I would tell him we need rehearsal. We gotta rehearse. It's a bit of a running joke. And he said, Elias, your whole life has prepared you for this moment, my boy, all right? What does he mean by this? I soon found out that how much my own experience and life paralleled a similarity to, without the insanity of, obviously, the captain's responsibility. But there was a bit of a similarity in terms of coming out from nowhere, being a reservist, being almost on the fringes of, you know, so suddenly you're called upon to be a leader of men. Now, Kirk, you're on a ship and the beach is right there and you're calling out into the abyss and that's what your motivation is. So it was like, gotcha, I understand. But, you know, but the funny thing about that is that I did understand, you know what I mean? His directing's very poetic, you know, very just, you know, sort of like catching for, you know, like fairies and butterflies, so to speak. So you have this hands-on kind of direction, you get kind of, feels a little humbling, but ultimately you realize that you're part of a bigger vision, you know, and you just gotta surrender yourself to it, you know? It took me a little bit of time to adjust to this. I think it took me a couple of weeks and some heart-to-heart conversations with Terry about what contribution I could make because I had never been involved in something where there, you know, I don't know, I can't speak for what secrets Terry has in his head. He would often, you know, when he would share certain things with me, he would often end it with, you know, loose lips sink ships. So he'd, you know, it was always be, you know, he has, Terry's got a lot of secrets and I think that you have to, at some point, if you're supportive of a director, be willing to support those secrets. He's a very complicated guy. I mean, we used to laugh a lot because he's such a gentle person. We would laugh a lot wondering, you know, where's the guy that made Badlands? We're in his face and once in a while, you'd see a kind of flash of these, you know, Terry be talking, he be talking. And there'd just be these moments of these eyes go boom. You know, there it is. There's the guy, there's the guy that made Badlands. I was, you know, more of a spectator than anything, just watching, coming in and seeing this creation. The end of the film, you know, I could feel the miles and miles of footage that were behind this cast and crew. It was visceral. You're shooting magic hour, pure hard sunlight and clouds, overcast. What are you doing? And Terry said, well, you see, this way, I've got the film, I've got the scene three ways. I've got it at magic hour, full sun or overcast and I could cut the movie together and I could cut, it was all overcast, all sunny or all magic hour and that way, I could put your scene anywhere I want in the film. I was hired to shoot a war film. Now, I do not think it's a war film. I think it's an amazing poem about the beauty of life. It relaxes me to know that it's not all dependent on who is in the movie. It's the story, the filmmaker is the thing for me and somebody with a big vision, it's obvious, you know, you want to, it'll challenge you, it'll elevate your game, it'll make you bust out from bad habits that you're used to, you know, life before Terry Malick and life after Terry Malick. When my father wrote The Thin Red Line, he felt, he'd written 150 pages of the book and my mother read it and didn't like it and she thought it was much too cold and removed and technical. So he just threw him in the fire and started all over. That's when he came up with the concept of C for Charlie as one dynamic, moving entity and that really gave him the solution that he was looking for and he was off. What he tried to do, I think, in the book is that he made C for Charlie Company an organism, one organism, like a very large worm who can lose pieces and still continue and that was the idea of the point of view of the voice in the book, it's a collective. I think that's what's amazing about The Thin Red Line, it doesn't try to be Tolstoy, it's just what it is, it's these guys, C for Charlie's not made up of college graduates, you know, and they don't sound like college graduates and I love that about it. I think maybe people rewrite their own histories too and there's that whole aspect of denial and what you slap on top of it in order to recover, in order to survive. So of course, they probably would not remember the details of the horror. I believe that there's a lot of retrospective, historical hindsight slapped onto that war, I really do and I think as soldiers, the ones who survived suffered a great deal when they came home. I don't think any of them really even understood what post-traumatic stress was or what was going on for them, what they were feeling, you know, pull yourself up, don't go to the psychiatrist, you know, you're not a man if you admit that this hurt but I think the ones who were sensitive and truly compassionate human beings suffered enormously. In fact, there's a line and it's a psychiatrist who said, they came back wounded and that we could fix but their souls were torn out of them and that we couldn't fix. My father really believed that war and the army destroys its best men, the truly great men, you know, had to be capable of great compassion and understanding for humanity, would not survive, could not survive this experience. There was a long tradition of soldiering in his family. His father was in World War I and he had two great-great-uncles buried in the same cemetery, Southern Illinois, who were on opposite sides in the Civil War. Many of the soldiers who went into the peacetime United States Army were from these very, very poor center of the United States, red state type of families where, you know, they'd lost everything in the depression, everything, they had no money at all. So we're not talking about a rah-rah group that felt that they were doing anything inspired or courageous to protect their country at all. So my father was a child of the depression. His family lost all their money. So he was from this sort of poverty-stricken, fancy family and at that point, his father said, look, your grades are terrible, you're always in trouble, you don't have a chance in hell of getting any kind of scholarship to college, join the Army, but go to Hawaii because nothing's gonna happen there, you'll be safe. So join and go to Hawaii. You know, the war is gonna be in Europe. So he was there about, at that point, a year, I think, when this happened on December 7th. Schofield Barracks is in sort of the middle of the island of Oahu. It's up and it's sort of in the valley between the mountains and so the Koli-Koli Pass, which climbs very high into the mountains, was where they flew through. That's where the airplanes came through, right over Schofield Barracks, on their way to Pearl Harbor. And they were just hanging out on a Sunday morning, all of them hung over in the morning, when they heard some bombs dropping and they thought it was dynamiting at Wheeler Field. Somebody said, oh, wow, you know, is that weird? It's Sunday. Next thing they knew, the Japanese planes were flying over the quadrangle and strafing. They had no idea what was going on and it was completely unexpected. Did anybody think at the time that war was the right thing? I think they did because they were attacked. They were young men. They were 18, 19, 20 years old and they were part of the regular peacetime army. They were not draftees at that point yet. And they were so absolutely shocked. They felt pretty much, I think, that we need to stand up and defend. They then prepared them for a Japanese invasion and then they were the forefront. They were the first to be sent out to the Pacific Theater. They became known as the Tropic Lightning Division. That was the nickname they were given, Tropic Lightning, because they made their way like lightning through the jungles of the islands in New Georgia, in the New Georgia campaign and Guadalcanal and so forth. And that was how they got that name. They were not expected to be as good as they were and they really swept through the Pacific and really fought bravely and did an amazing job in the face of huge Japanese opposition so he was very proud of that. He was very proud that he had been a member of the Tropic Lightning Division, even though really he was in combat only a couple of days before he was wounded and sent back for a superficial head wound. And it was not the superficial head wound that sent him home. It was a tear of a muscle in his ankle which was an old wound that had been re-damaged in this fight and he needed to go back and have it put back together. So he ended up in the hospital in San Francisco and then he was sent to Memphis, Tennessee. This was 1943 by now and he got his papers and he had to report back to duty. He was gonna be part of the invading army which landed in France on D-Day. And he felt, and he told me this himself and I'll never forget it because he took me to the, I get choked up even thinking about this. He took me to the beach. He took me back to the cemetery in Colville-sur-Mer above Omaha Beach and we walked that whole cemetery. The thing that killed him was the unknown soldier crosses. But he walked through that whole cemetery with me and he said, I would be here. I would be dead, I would be one of these graves. And I knew that. My luck had run out. That's what he said. My luck had run out. He got his papers to go back and he decided to act crazy. So he went AWOL, they brought him back. He went AWOL, he told them he had killed a man, this is true, in hand-to-hand combat in Guadalcanal. He'd gone to the bathroom. He'd gone off into the jungle to go to the bathroom. He was very private that way. He went off to go to the bathroom, number two. And out of the jungle came a Japanese soldier starving to death, truly half-starved soldier. And they got into a, they fought but neither one of them wanted to fire a weapon. My father didn't have a weapon anyway. He didn't have his gun. The guy came at him with his bayonet and my father went to the side in a football move. They struggled, they fought, and he killed him by bashing his head in with the butt of the rifle. And he wrote about this in many places but he never told the story to anybody as his own experience. He fictionalized it. But he had the Japanese soldier's wallet. He kept this wallet all his life. So he was a very odd combination of pro, not pro-army but of loving the army that gave him a home and took him in and of being against warfare. When my father first saw the film, From Here to Eternity, he didn't like it at all. He felt betrayed in a sense. He felt that they'd cleaned it up way too much. He really was upset that so much had got cut out. He felt confined and constrained, especially by the sexual hypocrisy that was sort of prevalent. He was not in any way even a socialist or a communist at all but he was really angry by what happened with the McCarthy era. One of the reasons that my father decided to go to Europe was really, I wouldn't say so much political as an issue of freedom of speech and freedom of behavior. I think in France they were freer to be free. Plus he was interested because of all the books he'd read by Hemingway and Fitzgerald and everybody who'd gone before him to Europe. And he really wanted to be a part of that at the same time and experience that. But I think it was more that he just felt, was angry and felt constrained by society's mores, I think more or less. My father was an extremely disciplined writer, methodical, precise. He was a slow writer. My father was somebody who had an incredible memory and imagination and he would work it all out in his head. My father felt even at the time that there was a great propaganda machine attached to war and warfare, no matter what generation you were talking about, that it was really cleaned up when it was presented to the country. There are a few things on this. The first thing is that the generals were very clean. They were back behind the hills. They were safe. And they wanted the spoils. I'm gonna give you the Congressional Medal of Honor, but then you have to come represent your country and you have to help us. It was really a propaganda machine even then, stars and stripes. They laughed at that stuff. Even then, the soldiers laughed at that stuff. There's a line in the Thin Red Line that Welch says at the end. He says, property, property, all for property. And he's the great cynic in the book. He's the one who really sees it as it is with no colored glasses and no heroic glory slapped on top. And I think my father really believed that it's a great, large bureaucracy. And any snafu on the part of bureaucrats costs thousands and thousands of lives, but an individual life's not important. It's the life of the company that's important. Can we take that hill? And what's a good number of casualties? What's an acceptable loss in a case like that? And if you're one of them, well, too bad. Too bad for you if you're one of those. My father only, I think, once that I remember, but it was so momentous. He took out the Japanese soldier's wallet in Paris. And I don't know how it happened and I don't remember what reason was behind it, maybe he came upon it up in his office, but he brought it downstairs and he was sitting at the long dining room table and he opened this little Japanese wallet and he took all the pictures out and was going through them and crying over this soldier he killed. And he didn't have to say very much. That was an amazing experience. And I remember my brother saying something about, yeah, war, watching the John Wayne movies. And my father saying, oh no, it's not like that at all. I think that's what he felt, that the war got the best of him and took the best of his whole generation.