It’s time for my mid-year update on Terrence Malick’s “The Way of the Wind.” I’ve been doing this for, I don’t know, at least two years now.
Long story short, two separate sources are telling me the movie won’t be ready for the fall festivals. You can scratch “The Way of the Wind” off your Venice and TIFF predictions. It’s not happening. On to next year.
Malick’s arduous post-production process is still ongoing. This aligns well with how Malick usually works, taking his time in the editing room, refining and molding whatever footage he has into a tone poem that satisfies the inner artist in him.
Malick’s salad-toss approach to editing is infuriating to some fans, but sometimes it’s definitely worth the wait (“The Tree of Life” “The Thin Red Line”). I truly hope he has something special here.
We’ve all read and heard eccentric Terry stories over the years. A few years ago, composer James Horner explained the fascinating post-production process on “The New World”.
Horner basically implied that Malick butchered his score in the editing room and that the theatrical cut was not what he signed up for. It seems as though Horner didn’t quite grasp who he was working with in this creative endeavour …
There are plenty of stories like these out there. Malick has even edited out numerous movie stars from his films. In “The Thin Red Line” he snipped off Billy Bob Thornton, Mickey Rourke, Viggo Mortensen and Bill Pullman. Same goes for “To The Wonder” which completely axed Jessica Chastain and Barry Pepper’s characters. Christian Bale got the boot in “Song to Song.”
“The Way of the Wind” started shooting in the summer of 2019. Four years later, the film is still not done, which only whets my appetite further. This can’t possibly be an “unfinished symphony,” right? The film will hopefully, eventually, get released …
“The Way of the Wind” is supposed to convey passages “in the life of Christ” through the representation of evangelical parables. Jesus Christ's descent into the world of the dead, also known as his “descent into hades,” is rumored to be one of the parables that will be included in the film.
The cast, for now, includes the likes of Matthias Schoenaerts (as Saint Peter), Géza Röhrig (as Jesus), Ben Kingsley, Joseph Fiennes, and Mark Rylance (as Satan).