As Terrence Malick and company now enter the sixth year of editing on his Biblical epic The Way of the Wind, 2025 may now finally be time it sees the light of day. After once again placing it highly among our most-anticipated films of the year, we have a few more details on the film, including a potential reason for it being Malick’s longest-ever post-production.
In celebration of his new book The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick, author John Bleasdale has published a fascinating new series on his podcast Writers on Film exploring Malick’s work, including a conversation with his long-time production designer Jack Fisk. While Fisk didn’t work on The Way of the Wind (Stefano Maria Ortolani, a Wes Anderson collaborator and, fittingly, The Nativity Story production designer, took on duties), he did heavy location-scouting for the film starring Géza Röhrig as Jesus, Matthias Schoenaerts as Peter, and Mark Rylance as Satan alongside Ben Kingsley, Joseph Fiennes, Tawfeek Barhom, Douglas Booth, and Aidan Turner.
“[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.” Fisk also noted the origins of the project had been brewing for decades, saying, “Most of the scripts he has, it seems like he had them from the time of Badlands. It’s crazy, the ideas.”
“When we worked on it was always called The Way of the Wind. I just saw today it’s called [The Last Planet]. I think it’s going to be great. I ended up not doing it. I just didn’t want to be out of the country that long. It was a time… we had been looking at stuff in the Middle East and it was uncertain times. The art department, you’re out there first person and I’ve got grandchildren and stuff. I hesitated. I just couldn’t do it,” Fisk added.
That didn’t stop Malick from reaching out to him during production, however. Fisk said, “I was on the roof of my daughter’s house in Austin, fixing the roof, and I get a call from Terry. He says, ‘Can you come to Italy?’ I go, ‘No, why?’ He said, ‘I’ve got this production designer here and he just sits in his office all the time.’ [Laughs] He’s so used to me because I’m a hands-on type thing. A lot of production designers do sit in their office, but I grew up with Terry and I work completely different. I sort of developed my style from Terry’s style. I’ve worked [so] well with him, it became the way I want to work.”
After speaking with many connected with Malick for his book, Bleasdale also got some interesting details on the editing process. When speaking to an editor, they noted, “[Malick] never watches them all the way through. He’ll be having different editors work on different pieces and he’ll look at sequences or reels and look at them, look at them, look at them until he gets it right. He’ll only watch it all the way through at the end or once or twice during the whole process because he doesn’t want to get bored of it. He doesn’t want get to the point where he’ll watch it all the way through for the 10th or 20th time and not be able to see the film.”
Bleasdale also asked Fisk if Malick, who turned 81 this past November, may have another film in the works after The Way of the Wind. “I’m sure he does,” said Fisk, adding, “I was just looking on IMDb and he’s involved in so many things where he’s helping young filmmakers. Executive producer on this and there. I know people come to him. He gets the best young filmmakers, want to have his input so he’s helping to spawn a whole new generation of artists and filmmakers.”
Malick is in the air elsewhere: Adrien Brody stopped by Marc Maron’s podcast to talk The Brutalist. They touched on his infamous experience shooting The Thin Red Line and finding out his role had been drastically reduced. However, if one listens to Bleasdale’s podcast, he calls Brody’s story “implausible” as the script (in which Brody didn’t have many lines) and finished film are not “that different.” He notes, “The novel is a choral work. It’s about lots of different stories in the middle of a campaign. It is about the mission, not the man. It’s about the men. I think that’s the publicist of Adrien Brody at an early point in his career beefing up his part.”
Listen to the conversations below, and we highly recommend picking up Bleasdale’s book and listening to his podcast.