I’ve been thinking about yesterday’s big news that Natalie will shoot two Terrence Malick films back to back, and I thought I’d share some of the more pertinent points.

– There is no script yet. Natalie, like all the actors, are signing on for one reason only – the chance to work with Terrence Malick.

– Natalie is known to prepare very hard for her roles and is very disciplined and organized. So it’s going to be interesting to see how she deals with Malick, who is anything but structured or conventional in his filming style. There will eventually be a script but he won’t stick to it. He will rewrite and change anything and everything as the mood takes him.

– On that note, here’s Pitt commenting on Malick’s process.

“Someone called Terry a perfectionist, and I said no, he’s an imperfectionist; he’s trying to mess it up. He sets up a scene and then “torpedoes” it — that’s his word,” Pitt said. “Say, if the parents are arguing inside the house, he’ll send one of the kids in and see how we handle it. Instead of doing little rewrites of scenes to be shot on a certain day, Terry would get up in the morning, and meditate, and write his thoughts about the day’s work. And we got handed these four pages, single-spaced, and they’d be these stream-of-consciousness ideas that we would incorporate into the day’s work.”

– The editing room is where the film really takes shape. Malick will shoot a TON and then spend, if his last films are any indication, a huge amount of time in the editing room, shaping and re-shaping till he’s happy. While the whole process can seem utterly haphazard to anyone not called Terrence, in his mind he knows exactly what he wants and has a real perfectionists eye when finally putting it together. I love this little story from shooting The Thin Red Line.

“There was a sequence that Terry had not been able to crack, he had been working on it for six or eight weeks, different editors, and one day he walks into the lead editor Billy Weber and said, ‘Billy, I know that somewhere after cut had been called — so it must have been early in the film – there are about 10 or 12 frames’ and he described what they were,” Hill said. “And of course Billy – who had 1.2 million of feet in front of him – said, ‘You’re crazy.’ But it took 10 days or so, he found the frames, put them in the sequence and I was in the room, and the sequence did just come alive. It was some weird sense of what it took to complete it.”

– Natalie enjoys input into her roles and films. Malick is very big on being a co-author with his actors, where they are encouraged to bring their own thoughts, ideas and even dialogue to the part. On the flip side, he can also be a very difficult and obtuse communicator, which has rubbed many actors the wrong way.

– One thing we have to at least have in the back of our minds is the fact that Malick has been known to write and shoot a big part for an actor, only for that part to be reduced massively or even cut altogether in the final film. The Thin Red Line was supposed to be Adrien Brody’s big break, the plum role was eventually trimmed down to 5 minutes of screen time and two lines of dialogue. Ouch. John C Reilly had a similar fate. Sean Penn in the Tree of Life. Etc etc.

– There will be shots of nature. Lots of shots of nature.

– It will look amazing. If you haven’t seen the Tree Of Life, check out the trailer at least. It’s on a whole other level.

– There will be voice over. Lots of voice over.

– In September of last year I did a post mentioning that in 2010 Natalie was linked to another Malick project about Jerry Lee Lewis. I mentioned that Malick had a new project with Christian Bale and if that had been the project that spurred the first Natalie link, that it probably meant that Natalie was no longer in the running. Glad to be wrong on that one.

– Ryan Gosling will co-star in Lawless, which is handy for us fans since he came in first when we did the fantasy male love interest poll a few months back. In more fantasyland musings, Blue Valentine, starring Gosling, was the number 1 film that I wished Natalie had been in.

– Every Malick film, excluding his first, has received multiple Oscar nominations. Way too early to think about that, but his films will always be in the awards conversation. Maybe Natalie will be back.

– Even if Malick’s films aren’t your cup of art, these films could at least showcase Natalie at her most beautiful.

– I predict Thor 2 will come out before the Malick films. That editing room, man…

– The films will be long, frustrating, beautiful and brilliant.