Links • DVD at Amazon • IMDB: The New World • TheNewWorldMovie.com official site • The New World production notes • LATimes CalendarLive.com/thenewworld • Video page - Christopher-Plummer.com • MalickWatch: Terrence Malick's The New World • Rottentomatoes: The New World reviews • Metacritic: reviews • Boxofficemojo • Box Office Prophets • Jamestown1607.org • Colin Farrell Fansite - with forums • Epicfilmtalk.com TNW forum • ChristianBale.net • AwesomeBale.org • Wes Studi Message Board • ComingSoon.net • Movieweb more photos • Moviefone Behind the scenes clip • ifilm • Yahoo Movies More about Terrence Malick: • IMDB: Terrence Malick • IGN FilmForce: Featured Filmmaker: Terrence Malick • Senses of Cinema Great Directors Database: Terrence Malick • The Flicks of Terrence Malick • Trailer: The Thin Red Line (1998)   Official site at Fox | Quicktime at Fox | IMDB   Version#2 Videodetective Version#3 Moviefilmfest • Trailer: Days of Heaven (1978)   Moviefilmfest • Trailer: Badlands (1973)   IMDB | Videodetective

The New World Release dates: Dec. 25, 2005 LA, NYC / Wide USA the weekend of Jan. 20, 2006 DVD release May 9, 2006 These trailer screencaps are in Hi-res from the HD trailer.

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2 scans from New Line's 38 page press book (June 2005).

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From Virginian-Pilot Sept. 8, 2004

There's a comedic lilt in Christopher Plummer's voice as he teases the woman making up his hale countenance, here in the trompe l'oeil-foliage-adorned sunroom of his sprawling Connecticut home. But the pancake lady doesn't seem to get the joke. Looking thrown, she proffers a tiny compact. "Oh! That's not big enough," Plummer harrumphs. "I've got a bigger mirror, for God's sake." He takes leonine strides to an enormous gilt-edged hunk of glass, looking so much younger than his 75 years that you have to wonder if there's a Dorian Gray hidden somewhere on the other side of the reflection. He regards his face with eyelids narrowed. "Oh, yeah. That's all right."

Plummer has been primping for stage work, screen roles, and photo shoots for some 60 years now, and he shows no sign of slowing. Lots of casual entertainment grazers know him only as The Sound of Music's Captain von Trapp or as General Chang, the Klingon commander from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Bring up either of those roles with gushing enthusiasm and you're likely to see his thoroughly patrician demeanor--product of a privileged, only-child upbringing in Montreal, as well as culture-vulture stints living in New York City, London, and the French countryside--collapse like a punctured souffle. After all, this is a filet mignon kind of actor you're dealing with, not a Happy Meal. Plummer had mastered just about every major Shakespearean role, on stages in all three Stratfords (Connecticut, Canada, and England), by the time he was 35. The Sound of Music's freakish success sent him off sideways from that noble territory, and it took a lot to right himself. "On the screen," he says matter-of-factly, "I never had the luck I've had in the theater." (Check out a thumbnail accounting of that theatrical good fortune on page 57.)

Plummer soldiered on through a decent number of good roles and many more awful ones after von Trapp. (Exhibit A: He actually played a character named Shitty in a 1990 John Boorman misfire called Where the Heart Is.) Along the way, he found great happiness with his third wife, Elaine Regina Taylor, whom he married circa 1970. (Plummer and his first wife, Tammy Grimes, divorced in 1960 after a four-year marriage; they had one daughter, fellow thespian Amanda.) And ever since his Tony award-winning performance in 1997's Barrymore, Plummer has been on a character-man renaissance streak. Michael Mann tapped him to play Mike Wallace in The Insider. Ron Howard cast him as the psychiatrist in A Beautiful Mind, and Oliver Stone made him Aristotle in Alexander. We sat down with him at length on a recent October afternoon to discuss one of his latest, most promising acting adventures, Terrence Malick's The New World (a retelling of the Pocahontas tale due in December), as well as his stage roots. So let's start, in the words of the immortal musical that will hound him to his grave, at the very beginning.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY Like another famous Canadian-born actor, William Shatner, you're best known for playing a captain.

CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER I've known Bill forever. We don't always keep up our association--there are great gaps. But we pick up where we left off.

EW Didn't he act beside you in a Stratford Festival production of Henry V in '56?

CP Yes, but we knew each other long before that. We started out on radio together, in Quebec [in the mid-1940s]. We started at 16, 17, 18. Then we played Shakespeare in amateur productions in Montreal. And then Shatner did do Henry V with me. [He played the Duke of Gloucester.] And he also understudied [the Henry role].

EW You were the big breakout star--great notices, picture in The New York Times. Did Shatner ever go on in your place?

CP One night he did. I'd gone to bed with some girl. I didn't know the girl at all. And I woke up with this terrible, terrible pain. The first thing that came to my mind was "Christ, I've got syphilis!" I was 26 and terrified. I couldn't walk. I crawled to the telephone [and called] for a doctor to come. Some taxi brought me to the frigging hospital. They pushed morphine into me instantly. That felt good! I had a kidney stone, so the poor girl was exonerated. [But] I thought it was the end of my life. God, how dramatic we are when we're young. In the meantime, Bill had gone on and made a triumph in his performance. Which I could've killed him for, 'cause he was clever about it. Whatever I had done, he did the opposite. He'd studied it, obviously, very carefully. If I did the Crispin's Day speech standing up, he did it lying down. And of course we knew from that he was going to be a star, the son of a bitch.

EW You got to work with him again years later, in Star Trek VI, as a Shakespeare-loving, eye-patch-wearing Klingon. You were General Chang to Shatner's Captain Kirk.

CP He was so encumbered by Captain Kirk. If you go back and look at those very first episodes of Star Trek, he was giving very interesting performances. He was a different Kirk in every show! That talent was dying to get out and declare, "Please take me seriously as an actor. I'm really very, very good." And he is.

EW And what about your own captain cross to bear, Captain von Trapp? The Sound of Music came out in 1965 and immediately changed you from a classical stage actor into a movie star.

CP The only reason I agreed to do Sound of Music was because what I really wanted to do was a [stage] musical about Cyrano de Bergerac. So I wanted to use Sound of Music as a sort of audition. Can you imagine? I was very arrogant.

EW You wound up not singing for yourself in the final movie--you got dubbed over--even though at one point you insisted on recording your own songs. What happened?

CP They wanted me to record the songs right at the beginning of production. I said, "Guys! Come on, give me some time!" And that became a real issue. I said, "If you're not going to allow me to be heard singing these numbers, then I want to get the f--- off the movie."

EW But it was common at the time to use someone else's singing voice. It happened to Natalie Wood in West Side Story and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady. And how were you going to do your own singing next to Julie Andrews, anyway?

CP Our balance didn't work at all. Julie has that irritating sense of absolute perfect pitch. [Laughs] And her endurance on those long notes! I didn't have that technique, for Christ's sake. And [director] Bob Wise explained, "Look, you need a little help next to Julie." So, they got a guy in [to dub my singing voice] who was wonderful [Bill Lee]. But they did use some of my entrances into the songs. It was very cleverly done. And that was okay. At least I had a shot.

EW You weren't disappointed?

CP No, it was all right. Because by that time I was already on the way to doing Cyrano on the stage, with songs, which was the whole point. Strangely enough, I'd be able to sing [the von Trapp role] better now, because I know a little more. It's hard to sing very softly, into a microphone. All your frogs appear. It's easier to sing on the stage, because you sing above them. In front of a mike, I was just terrified. But I don't want to go into a long thing, and make this a long interview about the f---ing Sound of Music. [Groans]

EW What were the upsides and downsides about being in such a phenomenon--at that time, the highest-grossing movie in history?

CP Well, there were a great number of downsides, which made me very angry for a long time. In pictures, I was being typed as a rather uptight romantic leading man, when I wanted to do so many more interesting things. And was capable of doing them. Instead I was getting these rather stiff-necked a--holes to play. But I was making money. And I was able to do theater. I'm luckier than Julie, in a way, because I had much more broad acting training, and I could go back to theater. Sound of Music certainly did help bring people into the seats. It gave me more power in the theater, more say in what I wanted to do. And I did more films, too.

EW You did a rapid-fire string of movie roles after Sound of Music, and they weren't terribly successful. Oedipus the King, with Orson Welles. A Tom Jones knockoff called Lock Up Your Daughters!--you were some ninny called Lord Foppington. And you also appeared in a disappointing World War II mystery, The Night of the Generals, with Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif--two other blockbuster refugees.

CP I didn't enjoy that time. I drank very heavily--as we all did, throughout the '50s and '60s. I drank myself through those bad parts, until I became a character actor. Thank God--at last! It gave me a much freer range, and I began to do versatile things on the screen. See, I always want to be different in everything I play. I don't want to bore the audience with the same performance twice. Or bore myself. Or the crew. That's what acting, to me, was all about. I got stuck because of Sound of Music for a while. I've also been very grateful to it. I have a good time sending it up, and I have some affection for it.

EW The whole idea of inebriation-as-pastime is passe now. There isn't a bar on every corner anymore--there's a Starbucks.

CP I know! Isn't it awful? We're back to puritanical times. So many people don't understand, we didn't necessarily drink because we had problems. We drank 'cause we adored it! We adored getting drunk, you a--holes! Don't tell me that it isn't fun! I can't bear that. "Oh, you must have had some awful childhood, that you drank like that." Nonsense! Actually, I was taught as a child to drink. I came from a family that loved wine. I was 12, I think, when I was drinking wine with dinner. I'm glad I had fun and lived in a fun time.

EW You've been exceptionally busy lately, and one of your bigger recent parts is Captain Newport--another captain!--in Terrence Malick's The New World. You're the British commander to John Smith, played by Colin Farrell, who of course gets mixed up with Pocahontas in the story.

CP I haven't seen it.

EW No, nor have any of the actors. Malick's not done editing yet.

CP I may be dead by the time Terry finishes. He takes an awfully long time...but I was fascinated to work with him, because I admired Badlands and The Thin Red Line very much. He has an eccentric, sort of academic mind, coupled with this wonderfully naive outlook on things. Very pure. Very religious. That all pours into the work. He seems to have a poetry about his camera. Some of his narration he does overwrite, that's the one bug I have with him. He writes so much, and then he has so much to take away again.

EW What's he like as a director?

CP Sometimes it's difficult to work for him, because he has no design. It's improvisation, carefully documented, and those two approaches work against each other. But I would do anything again for him. The atmosphere Terry creates is spectacular. The very quiet stillness of the ships, and the calm of the people standing knee-deep in that water. He's not capable of doing an ordinary shot. And he's never without his camera. I thought, My God, he's going to follow me into the bloody men's room. Can we sit down to dinner without this madman with his camera strapped to his shoulder?

EW Could you tell what material he might not use?

CP Colin and I joked about the story of the leading man in Thin Red Line [Adrien Brody] who was taken out of the picture [almost completely]. He turned out for a premiere and somebody had neglected to tell him he wasn't on screen. We [shot] endless reams of things for this picture. I'd say to Colin, "How much do you think we're going to be on the screen?" And he'd say, "He's gonna turn us intah fookin' ospreys, y'know? It's all gonna be on the fookin' ospreys." So yes, maybe we'll be ospreys. Perched ominously over the James River.

EW What sort of man is your character, Newport?

CP Very little is known about Newport. So some of it's made up, and well made up, I think. You can't help it. Actually, I must tell you, the bartender came in one day. Very nice guy at the Williamsburg Inn [where cast and crew stayed]. We were talking, and he said, "You're playing Newport? Are you playing him with one arm?" I said, "One arm? What do you mean?" He said, "Newport had only one arm. He lost it in some war." I said, "You mean after he discovered the James River." "No, no, no, before."

EW How did the bartender know?

CP Because they all know their history there! And he was absolutely right. That was a moment of absolute horror for me.

EW So did you want to change the character?

CP Terry [and the producers] didn't want to do that. I bought their argument, which was that people know who I am and they would wonder, What happened to Christopher Plummer's arm? So, they put me at rest. I don't think it matters, because Newport wasn't born with one arm. And I'm very glad, really, because it would've been a terrible bore to go around with one arm hanging every day. It teaches a very important lesson. The whole point of my story. Which is that when you're researching a character, you must go straight to the nearest bartender to find out what the hell your character is all about!

EW Was it fun shooting with a party boy as hardcore as Colin Farrell?

CP God bless him. He's a real guy, a real man. There are not an awful lot of real men on the screen today. In leading parts, they're boys, not men. But not Colin. He's one of the men. He's got that wonderful Irish free-spirit thing. He reminds me of me when I was young, because I was just as much of a rebel.

EW Will you ever retire from acting?

CP I think retirement is death. People who retire are checking out of life. Old Johnny Gielgud went on till he was 95 or 96, acting away. And Johnny Mills was 92, 93. So there's hope for us all.

EW What's left that you want to play?

CP I'd like to do Volpone on the stage. The great sort of comic roles, which I love to do. I've done King Lear, so it's time to do something funny. I guess one day, when you run out of parts, there's always Methuselah. And maybe God. And then that's about it.

SIDEBAR:

STAGE FLIGHT

SADLY, SOME OF PLUMMER'S GREATEST THEATRICAL PERFORMANCES CAN NEVER BE SEEN AGAIN

HAMLET Plummer played the great Dane in Ontario in 1957, then again for a BBC TV version in 1964, shot in a castle in Elsinore. You can see the latter at the Museum of Television & Radio in New York or L.A., but there's no video release. Says Plummer, "I had a terrible time getting a copy for myself. The BBC is very mean. They use it for lectures and so forth, but they don't show it again."

CYRANO DE BERGERAC Long before Steve Martin made Roxanne, Plummer embodied Edmond Rostand's big-nosed romantic (below), on stage and for TV in 1962, then in a 1973 Broadway musical. He learned a lot playing Christian to Jose Ferrer's Cyrano in a 1955 TV take: "Joe was wonderful, but he cried so goddamn much at his own death, there were no tears required from anybody else." So, Plummer's Cyrano died smiling.

KING HENRY II Plummer won a U.K. award for the 1961 London stage production of Becket--a role he landed, he says, only because Peter O'Toole, the leading candidate for the part, had to do Lawrence of Arabia. "But then Peter, with perfect poetic justice, got to play it in the movie."

IAGO James Earl Jones headlined as Othello on Broadway in 1982, but it was Plummer who got the loudest accolades. Does Plummer regret his triumph can't be seen on video or film? Nope: "That's the nature of the beast."

"We didn't necessarily drink because we had problems. We drank because we adored it! Don't say it isn't fun!"

"I was typed as a rather uptight romantic leading man," Plummer says of his early post-Music roles. "I wanted to do so many more interesting things."

GRAPHIC: PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPH BY ETHAN HILL, PHOTO: MERIE WALLACE, With Q'orianka Kilcher and Christian Bale in The New World; PHOTO: THE SOUND OF MUSIC: TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX FILM CORP., (Clockwise from above) Andrews, Plummer, and Eleanor Parker in The Sound of Music; The Insider; Star Trek VI; Alexander; PHOTO: THE INSIDER: FRANK CONNOR, [See caption above.]; PHOTO: STAR TREK VI: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY: PARAMOUNT, PICTURES/PHOTOFEST, [See caption above.]; PHOTO: ALEXANDER: JAAP BUITENDIJK, [See caption above.]; PHOTO: PHOTOFEST

November 6, 2005 New York Times By Caryn James
The Terrence Malick Enigma

TERRENCE MALICK'S films - all three of them over 32 years - are known for their exquisite, tantalizing images: a killer in a black Cadillac racing along a dusty road framed by endless plains in "Badlands"; an isolated farmhouse, lights glowing against a midnight blue sky in "Days of Heaven." But the most mysterious image of all is that of a man in a suit and fedora, who appears briefly in "Badlands" at a house where the killer is hiding. That's Terrence Malick himself, and behind the ordinary, slightly pudgy face is a director with one of the most brilliant and strangest careers in film.

His legendary status as some bizarro genius (and it's hard to argue with that) accounts for the great curiosity about his fourth film, "The New World," a version of the Pocahontas story with Colin Farrell as the least anonymous of John Smiths. New Line Cinema hopes to release the film on Dec. 25, and hope is the operative word; the original November release was postponed so that Mr. Malick could go on editing. That can't be reassuring coming from a man who spent nearly a year editing "Badlands" (1973) and two whole years editing "Days of Heaven" (1978). Yet even now those works seem as nearly perfect as films can be.

After making them, though, Mr. Malick, only in his mid-30's, vanished from filmmaking for 20 years. He returned with "The Thin Red Line," a big, ambitious World War II movie that has extraordinary scenes but nothing like the perfectly realized art of his earlier, polished gems. And while "The Thin Red Line" may have brought expectations for any Malick work back to earth, the guessing game continues. Why the vanishing act and why the return?

Mr. Malick doesn't give interviews, but this much is evident: It's odd that he's a filmmaker at all. He has the singular vision of a poet yet works in a form that relies on collaboration and other people's money. What's a perfectionist to do?

His unique style in those early films is unmistakable. Both "Badlands," loosely based on a 1950's case of a serial killer and his teenage girlfriend, and "Days of Heaven," about a lethal love triangle in Texas in 1916, share a powerful feel for the natural landscape and the way place shapes character. Both rely on striking voice-overs and deal with the same essential paradoxes: the cold calculations behind romance and the visual poetry of violence.

The young Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek did some of their best work in "Badlands." He is the coolest of killers (as in James Dean cool), blasé as he shoots people who get in his way. She is a hopeless romantic, whose naïve voice-over is Mr. Malick's most distinctive touch; a voice-over shaping the film has since become his trademark. And all that editing time was worth it: there is not a false move in this spare, 95-minute film.

Mr. Malick brought some kind of alchemy into the editing room for "Days of Heaven," too. It may be one of the most beautiful films ever made and took form largely after the fact. There is a simple eloquence to its story of a man (Richard Gere), his lover (Brooke Adams) and his young sister (Linda Manz), who leave Chicago to work in the wheat fields owned by a rich and dying farmer (Sam Shepard, whose movie-star sideline to his playwriting took off after this). The setting is as gorgeous as the romance is cynical, with Mr. Gere's character suggesting that his girlfriend marry the farmer for his money; their triangle ends in two violent deaths. But it is the young sister's narration - her accent tough, her words often poetic - that gives the film its elegiac tone, and that voice-over wasn't even planned until after the film was shot.

Most people who spend two years in an editing room and drastically revamp a movie wouldn't be able to see it after a while, would start making it worse. It says something about Mr. Malick's rare, obsessive clarity of vision that not a frame in "Days of Heaven" seems arbitrary. The voice-over even supports his friends' claims that personally he has a sense of humor. "He was headin' for the boneyard any minute," the girl says of the farmer, but he wasn't "goin' around squawkin' about it."

Mr. Malick's friends and colleagues insist that he doesn't cultivate his own myth, that he is truly (they don't say neurotically) private. And he is surrounded by people who protect him. Jack Fisk, who has been the production designer on all four films, spoke about Mr. Malick's work in a recent telephone interview and said, "All of us that love Terry would never do anything to invade his privacy."

In fact, those who spoke on the record for this article never went off the record; and those who spoke off the record never went on, for fear of unsettling their personal or professional relationships with Mr. Malick. His friends' assurances that he was working during his 20 years away (living mostly in Paris then, and mostly in Texas now) is technically true: he wrote an early, unused version of "Great Balls of Fire!," the 1989 Jerry Lee Lewis biopic, and worked on projects that never got far. Both Mr. Fisk and Sarah Green, who produced "The New World," said Mr. Malick wrote a version of the script more than 20 years ago; he apparently has a stockpile of others. But that doesn't explain why someone would turn his back on a career that offered boundless possibilities.

Speculation about his long absence is no more than that, though. Logic and cheap psychology suggest that fear of success or fear of failure might be involved. He may never duplicate the artistry and acclaim of his early films, and it wouldn't be surprising if the prospect of competing with himself caused creative paralysis in a filmmaker who likes every blade of grass to be shot perfectly.

If we don't know why he left, we certainly don't know why he came back, but he seems to have returned with the desire to apply his distinctive style to films with a broader scope. "The Thin Red Line" runs 2 hours and 50 minutes, and juggles a half-dozen main characters in telling the story (based on James Jones's novel) of soldiers in the battle of Guadalcanal. Instead of a single narrative looking back and commenting on the story as in the earlier films, here the voice-overs come from many soldiers, who meditate on life, death and war. The film's feel for nature is as strong as you'd expect, and there is a new attention to action; it is, after all, a movie about a battle. Unlike most war films, though, you can see the fear in these soldiers' eyes.

But all that jumping from character to character undercuts the film's emotion. And it's a good guess that Mr. Malick, who dutifully finished the movie so it could make the Oscar-qualifying deadline in 1998, could have used more editing time. Typically, there were drastic late changes. Adrien Brody, little known before "The Pianist," was meant to play a central character, but his role was cut to nearly nothing. Billy Bob Thornton, who was not in the film, reportedly recorded an entire narration that was never used.

"The Thin Red Line" didn't win a single Oscar and didn't make money, but the experience seems to have unblocked Mr. Malick. He appears to have a renewed energy for filmmaking, as long as he can work the way he likes: changing the script as he goes along, shooting in natural light, taking his time to edit. Mr. Fisk said: "I was looking at locations for him for four years before 'The New World,' for different films. Some of those things he couldn't get set up because he wouldn't have had the freedom he wanted." He came very close to making a film about Che Guevara, but "Che" and the other projects "weren't as bankable as the John Smith story," Mr. Fisk added.

Set in the Jamestown settlement in 1607, "The New World" is being sold as a love story, with Pocahontas caught between Smith, the dashing renegade whose life she famously saved as her father was about to kill him, and John Rolfe (Christian Bale), the more cautious settler she later married. (Most historians doubt that there was a romance between the very young Pocahontas and Smith, and some even question whether she saved his life, but the filmmakers are comfortable with their fiction.)

Although Mr. Farrell and Mr. Bale are the big-name stars, the story belongs to Pocahontas (Q'orianka Kilcher). Russell Schwartz, president for marketing at New Line, said, "Terrence said to me very early on, 'This is our original mother,' " meaning that her journey is that of America itself, as she goes from her role as native American to a woman who embraces European civilization when she is baptized and moves to London.

For a movie opening soon, though, there is still a ridiculous amount of secrecy surrounding "The New World." Mr. Fisk guessed that Pocahontas would do the narration and Ms. Green, the producer, would say only that there'd be one. Mr. Schwartz described the voice-overs as internal monologues and said that in the early version shown to New Line, "we start with Colin's voice-over because we enter the world from John Smith's point of view, then it's picked up by Pocahontas." That brings "The New World" closer to the meditative narratives of "The Thin Red Line" than the commentaries of the first Malick films. So does the length, an expected 2 hours and 15 minutes. The film's trailer suggests two unsurprising elements: it is a work of visual beauty and, following "Alexander" and "A Home at the End of the World," Colin Farrell is having yet another bad-hair movie.

The film's budget of around $30 million isn't much by Hollywood standards ("The Thin Red Line" cost $50 million) and New Line expects the film to do well internationally. Whatever "The New World" turns out to be, it isn't likely that Mr. Malick will be considered a big risk for his next film. Maybe he's getting more practical.

Or not. Mr. Fisk said: "There are a couple of other projects he's been working on since the 70's. He hasn't yet made the projects most important to him." What are they? "I can't tell you," he laughed.