Guy Lochhead, 01/09/10
Reclusive filmmaker, journalist and philosophy professor. His films are characterised by their emphasis on natural beauty. He is best known for ‘Badlands’ and ‘Days of Heaven’. Malick’s background and unusually late entrance into big-budget filmmaking separate from many of his contemporaries, and this comes across in his films. Those these are largely romanticised and America-centric, they are also capable of offering a fresh approach to a subject or storyline that may be a Hollywood staple – I particularly like his way of macro-contextualising a personal story within a far wider universe and timeline. It’s a shame that his ‘transcendent’ style of filmmaking can also sometimes go too far in that direction and sort of, in my opinion, parody itself (perhaps most notably in ‘Tree Of Life’). I will watch a few more of his films and then decide what to include and write about them separately.