Terrence Malick Biography

Terrence Malick is the award-winning writer and director known for feature films that are as thoughtful and ethereal as they are rare. He was Oscar-nominated as best director for both The Thin Red Line (1998) and The Tree of Life (2011).

Terrence Malick was born in Illinois but grew up in Texas and Oklahoma; his father, Emil Malick, worked for Phillips Petroleum. Terrence Malick studied philosophy at Harvard and graduated in 1966, then went to Magdalen College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He worked briefly as a journalist and then returned to the U.S. to teach philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Eventually he attended the American Film Institute, and in 1971 he raised the money for his first feature: Badlands, a murder-spree drama starring Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen. After two years of filming and editing, Badlands was released to acclaim in 1973, establishing Malick’s reputation for unusual subjects and visual poetry. In 1978 he directed Days of Heaven, a handsome and slow-moving art-house hit. The film went over budget and schedule, due in large part to Malick’s detail-obsessed style of directing and editing. (These traits, plus his habit of avoiding reporters, earned Malick comparisons to Stanley Kubrick; the Daily Telegraph once called him “The J.D. Salinger of the movie business.”)

Seemingly soured by the experience, Malick spent nearly two decades living in France and traveling before directing his next feature, the World War II drama The Thin Red Line. His other major films include The New World (2005), starring Colin Farrell as Captain John Smith, Knight of Cups (2015, starring Natalie Portman and Christian Bale) and Tree of Life, a metaphysical family drama starring Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain. Tree of Life won the Palme de Or at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for a best picture Oscar as well as winning Malick the best director nomination.