Last June, I was told that, after five years in post production, Terrence Malick was finally done editing “The Way of the Wind.” In addition, Géza Röhrig, who plays Jesus in Malick’s biblical epic, hinted that the film would premiere at Cannes 2025.
If you believe one of its stars, Malick supposedly shot close to 3000 hours of footage for ‘Way of the Wind,’ which is also said to clock in at around 3 hours.
John Bleasedale, who just published The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick, spoke with longtime Malick production designer Jack Fisk on his podcast, Writers on Film. While Fisk didn’t work on ‘Way of the Wind,’ he knows all about the project which he says has been percolating in Malick’s head since the ‘70s.
“[For The Way of the Wind] over a 14-year period, we went and looked at locations around the world for that film. We were in Morocco and Israel, Italy,” said Fisk, then revealing how close the project is to Malick, adding, “It’s just the most important film to him […] Most of the scripts he has, it seems like he had them from the time of Badlands. It’s crazy, the ideas.”
“The Way of the Wind” conveys 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,” rumored to be one of the parables included in the film. The cast includes the likes of Matthias Schoenaerts (as Saint Peter), Röhrig (as Jesus), Ben Kingsley, Joseph Fiennes, and Mark Rylance (as Satan).
Malick first hoped to make the film in the ‘90s with Disney and a large budget, but quickly departed the project when the studio wouldn’t give him final cut; he then embarked on shooting “The Thin Red Line.”
Malick’s last film was 2018’s “A Hidden Life,” and only a few months after its Cannes premiere, he went on to shoot ‘Way of the Wind.’ Six years later and we might finally get to see his latest opus when it potentially premieres at the Cannes Film Festival in May.