My personal voyage to Terrence Malick’s Voyage of Time
One should always keep his mind and his eyes open, because life may come around with a surprise in any given or unexpected moment.
Those of you who are familiar with film markets happening either in conjunction with a film festival like Cannes, Berlin, Toronto or independently as a stand-alone market such as AFM, will most certainly also have experienced the fact that, the later in the market (usually after the first weekend or in the last two or three days of a market) the crazier and more bizarre the projects, which will be pitched to you. The power-players and good projects come early and leave early. This year in Cannes, most of the international and the important US buyers had left by the first Sunday.
Now a couple of years ago at the Marché du Film in Cannes, I was standing at the booth of Red Bull’s Media House, whose cinema department I was heading back then. After the usual barrage of “killer-zombies on snowboards, or aliens invading Earth to steal our energy drinks (!!), or a mixture of a western with the Comanches attacking on Snowboards (one of my favorites!), this quiet person approaches me and tells me, he knows who I am and what I have done in my past and he would like to talk to me.
The guy didn’t look like one of these crazy people with the crazy projects. There was something else about him.
Having been in the industry for more than two decades, with ever-changing legislation and tax laws, for a moment, I thought, the IRS started hunting down film producers in Cannes, and I must have done something wrong in my past.
I caught myself looking for the nearest exit to make a grand escape.
Do you know the feeling when you drive next to a police car, and you know that everything is fine, you have your license, your vehicle is in top shape, everything is paid for, you have not been drinking, you wear your seatbelt, etc… but you still feel uneasy! Well, that was the feeling I had.
After a minute or so, I relaxed since he was clearly not a tax office investigator.
He wanted to talk to me about a project that might interest me, but he wouldn’t disclose the project or the director attached to it. Just that it was something very big and would have an international impact, and I would be the right guy for it.
Well… I thought to myself, here we go again….it is the end of the market. I was bracing myself for another “surfing zombies meet stripper girls on snowboards” pitch. BTW, don’t even think about it, I have copyrighted this one! ;-)
So the guy went on and on, and he was telling me that if I google it, I would pretty fast discover what he was talking about, but he couldn’t tell me!
Keeping my countenance, I replied friendly that I can’t really consider a project that he would not talk about and that this is one of the most bizarre pitches (or rather non-pitches) I have ever seen!
We left it at that. I gave him my card, and he gave me his contact details.
Somehow I was intrigued. The guy did not give me the impression that he was one of those weirdos, he was intelligent, well-mannered and seemed like a good guy, who did bother to look into my previous work. The lesson here for aspiring filmmakers: Do take the time to study the past of the person you want to win over for your project. Don’t just say, I have the best project in the world and only talk about you and your project.
People feel flattered and honored when somebody took the time to check out what they have done. If you just know a little about the person you are approaching, you will get so much more out of a meeting. We work in an industry which is about people seeing your work, knowing your work. It may sound so simple, but you will not believe the number of meetings I have sat through, where the other side did not bother, even for a split of a second to do their homework!
Well, being a documentary producer, one of my main drivers is curiosity! With the little fragments of information I had been given, I started my Voyage.
“Documentary”, “lifetime”, “big-name director”, “nature”, “cosmos” ….it did not take long for the name “Terrence Malick” to pop up. Now I was really intrigued since I had long been admiring his older films, and of course, the name is legendary. I needed to know if this was for real since I was planning a career change anyway…. blame it on Snowboards or Zombies!
Having produced BBC’s “Earth” and “Deep Blue” to global success, made me part of this tiny group of specialized producers, who do these impossible projects that take forever and require big budgets and global audiences to be financed.
Filming animals and nature is one of the toughest things in our industry. The only real secret is, it takes forever! The more time you spend in the field, the better your results will be. I remember for Earth we had crews out there for months and months. The total number of days of cinematography was 4,500 (!). This is no typo. When you have about 30 to 50 crews out there somewhere on the planet at any given moment, you can get to this number in a matter of three to four years.
So to cut a long story short, after the meeting in Cannes, a couple of weeks later, I found myself boarding a flight to Austin, TX, to meet Terrence Malick.
We met and talked, we talked a lot about what he has been doing with Voyage in all these years and what he wanted to achieve. We spoke about my previous theatrical documentaries, how they were done, how they were released, and what the learnings from these films were. Terry knew a lot about the process of making these films, he had actually worked with some of the same cinematographers, we had employed for Earth and Deep Blue. I believe this is where my name was first somehow mentioned in the context of Voyage.
He then showed me a 60-minute assembly of the kind of materials he had filmed so far. Obviously, Voyage was never going to be a pure natural history project, and it was always dependent on images collected by the Hubble telescope, NASA, ESA, and other sources of space imagery and scientific simulations and depictions of events which occurred millions or billions of years ago.
We then sat down for dinner and talked again. After seeing the compilation, it was me who had many questions. Questions about the positioning of the movie, questions about the message of the film, and questions about how he planned to tell the story.
I write about this so extensively because this, for me, is the most crucial moment in the making of every film. To determine the motives and the “why” a project is done and what the motives of each of the key people in the project are?
There are projects, which are made for money, there are projects which are made because of an artistic, creative desire, there are projects which are important to make, because of the subject matter but often (should I say most of the times?) in the documentary world do not mean financial success.
You have to have a shared vision; otherwise, you are bound for disaster!
I then met the rest of the production team around Terry, first and foremost, his two producers Sarah Green and Nicolas Gonda, who had been accompanying Terry on Voyage for over 12 years as well as all his other projects.
We then spoke about financials and what was required to complete the project.
Terry had been working on Voyage on and off in various forms since the 70ies. Often filming would be triggered by natural phenomena such as volcanic eruptions and other events, which stubbornly refuse to be made part of a proper shooting schedule!
Money was needed, and not a little of it. Costs which had accumulated so far required to be covered and more shoots commissioned, but most importantly, massive post-production, involving tons of visual effects had to be undertaken.
The more I familiarized myself with the project, the more I wanted to be involved. All the work I had done over the past 20 years, trying to push the limits of what documentaries can be, making them appealing to broader audiences, pushing them out of the niche and giving them the platform they deserve as passionate works of visionary, creative filmmakers who spend their life working on them, I thought Voyage had all the pedigree for it.
With “Earth”, we had beaten “The Dark Knight” in Germany and Japan in the Box Office, now was the time to push the envelope even further, not only financially but also creatively.
I was all in!
The theatrical doc market is very particular. The world is used for the US to be the primary driver of film projects and provide the lion share of the financing and lead the releases.
When you look at docs (apart from the Michael Moore films), you will quickly discover that the overseas markets often are the bigger driver of revenues. Theatrical documentaries typically make 70% or more of their business outside of the US.
March of the Penguins, Earth, Winged Migration, Microcosmos, just to name a few, all became successes outside the US before they were released in the US.
There is another side to it, though: IMAX documentaries work precisely the other way round. They make the vast majority of their business domestically and only a small percentage overseas.
I enjoyed a strong relationship with IMAX because of my previous work. Voyage came at a time when we were looking for new projects to work on together.
Terry always wanted to have a version of Voyage, which would play at the biggest screens cinema has to offer: IMAX.
Considering all the above, I developed this diverse release strategy to have two versions of the film, being released in different release patterns.
The 90’ feature-length version of Voyage would always be a version that would have its strongest market potential outside the US, whereas the IMAX version would have its stronghold domestically.
With this in mind, we went out to seek financing, reflecting on exactly this situation. An overseas-based sales agent would handle the 90’ feature version, and IMAX (ideally) should be our partner in the Giant Screen world. I made sure to engineer such a structure where the success of the IMAX version would also benefit the investors of the 90’ feature version and vice versa. This ensured there would be no “competition” between the two versions, all of us would work for both versions.
I always considered documentaries in cinema challenging. We all go to cinema for the emotional journey and not because of our thirst for knowledge.
How do you do that in a theatrical documentary, especially one that deals with Science, Natural History, and all these topics, which carry the constant danger of “beaming” the audience into a science class and not into a movie experience in cinema.
Many of these documentaries (and I have been a culprit as well) are glorified discovery channel shows — just bigger and louder.
If we want to have an audience for docs in cinema, we need to do more, we need to become more engaging and more cinematic. The minute you feel, you could be watching this on a TV set at home, is the moment when we lose our audience. What is the reason to make it theatrical then?
Hence I have been pushing more and more for the docs I am involved in to become more cinematic and less explanatory. The 90’feature version of Voyage delivers precisely this. It is emotional, it is poetic, it is a cinematic piece of art, and it is very personal at the same time.
In my view, this is what we have to do in theatrical docs.
IMAX has historically been very educationally driven since a significant portion of its audience are school classes, field trips, and families with their young children. They want the facts and figures and all the factual background. Most of these films have been following a certain formula, cueing up the audience at the very beginning on what they are about to see, showing it to them with plenty of information, and at the end summarizing once again what they just saw. Your sort of condensed “all you need to know about turtles” in 45 minutes’ program.
With Terry’s 45’ IMAX version of Voyage, we saw a great potential to deliver this to the IMAX audience in an unprecedented way. Yes, the IMAX version is scientific, it also teaches you about the Universe, the making of the stars, the planets, life and everything else in it, but it delivers it on such an awe-inspiring visual canvas, that you will devour Voyage of Time — The IMAX Experience as much with your mind and intellect as you will do with your heart.
My recommendation would be to see both versions (obviously) and continue walking through life with your eyes open, embracing opportunities that may come along the way.
Thank you, Ryan, for being so mysterious!