The Thin Red Line

Terrence Malick’s first assembly ran five hours. Leslie Jones spent seven months cutting it down with him, Billy Weber joined later, the edit running thirteen months. The cast paid: Adrien Brody, whose Corporal Fife had been pitched as the part carrying the picture, was cut to almost nothing and found out at the premiere, having already begun publicity for a film he was not in. Bill Pullman, Mickey Rourke and Lukas Haas do not appear. The music came in an unusual order: most of Hans Zimmer’s score was written before shooting, and Malick played it on set to put the crew in the right frame. Only about twenty four days were shot on Guadalcanal; the hundred day main shoot ran in Queensland’s Daintree rainforest, which matched the terrain and had the infrastructure the Solomon Islands lacked. The film won the Golden Bear at the 49th Berlin Film Festival. At the Oscars it took seven nominations and no award: Best Picture, Directing, Cinematography, Film Editing, Original Dramatic Score, Sound, and Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published. A good fit if you take the men of the company heard one at a time, none made the lead, as method not loss. Not for anyone wanting the military logic of taking the hill; voiceover and landscape keep breaking the fighting.