HELM & HAW: Natalie Portman on the shoot last year for the unnamed next film by notoriously slow director Terrence Malick (left). (FAMEFLYNET)
Famed director Terrence Malick said “Voyage of Time” would be his masterpiece. His investors say it was a $6 million cruise to nowhere.
One backer wants his money returned, charging in a federal lawsuit that Malick not only failed to make the promised documentary trilogy, but used investors’ cash on other projects, including the recent “To the Wonder,” which one critic called “two hours of ‘artistic’ torture.”
Malick, the reclusive auteur behind 2011’s “The Tree of Life,” sold potential investors on “Voyage of Time” as his crowning accomplishment — nothing less than the history of the universe in all its IMAX majesty — and a project he’d pursued his whole career.
But with nearly $6 million in financing in place, and years allegedly devoted to filming across the globe, nothing materialized, according to the lawsuit filed late last week by Seven Seas Partnership, a London-based company that kicked in $3.3 million. An unidentified nonprofit foundation, which is not suing, provided another $2.5 million.
Malick, through his Sycamore Pictures, was to make two 45-minute IMAX films and a feature-length movie. The films were to have been finished by May 2013.
“Sycamore consistently misrepresented that production of these films was moving forward for years, but now has missed production deadlines and blown through $6 million with little to show for it,” said Dan Webb, the lawyer for Seven Seas.
“Yet during the six years he was supposed to be filming ‘Voyage,’ Malick has finished four other films, and Sycamore is now stonewalling our right under the contract to full access to everything relating to the development or production of the ‘Voyage’ films.”
Among the projects distracting Malick was “The Tree of Life,” which he started filming in 2008. It won the Palme d’Or top award at the Cannes Film Festival, but the camera-shy Malick refused to go on stage to accept it.
Brad Pitt, who starred in “The Tree of Life,” was supposed to narrate the “Voyage” films along with Emma Thompson.
But the project was such a mess that its Oscar-winning special-effects artist walked off the job in November 2012.
Douglas Trumbull, who worked on the groundbreaking “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Blade Runner,” told Malick in a letter that “all the greatest special effects cannot save a film,” according to court papers.
Malick, 69, a Harvard-educated Rhodes scholar, has directed only five films since “Badlands” in 1973. He shuns Hollywood, is rarely photographed, and never gives interviews.
But he can be exacting in his direction. For the “Voyage” project, he insisted that the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific was the only place on earth to “appropriately capture the emergence of man from primates.”
Malick did not return calls for comment.