Writing

'Tree of Life' is like an existential novel but unbounded from the prison of specific words. He has left space for the viewer to make meaning out of the film, some say he left too much.

The original "screenplay" for this film was hardly a screenplay at all. Actress Jessica Chastain describes what she was given:

It was one of the best screenplays I had ever read. It’s not written like a screenplay. There are sometimes 25-pages of all prose, no dialog, but just subtext. The dialog is written as the character’s thoughts. A lot of the time Terry would say to me after a take, “That’s great, Jessica. Now, can you do this speech without any of the words?” It is a huge leap of faith an actor takes with a director.
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The way the script is written is that it was more about ideas than just “this has to happen.” I talk about this a lot, but the scene where I am dancing in the air was an accident, and that wasn’t written in the script. There are moments in the script that talk about the lightness and grace the mother has… I’m sure in the editing room, when going through the script and trying to find different examples of what he’s written, he’s able to place that as an example of her.

Famously Malick, the writer director of "Days of Heaven" and "Badlands", begins the initial draft for 'Tree of Life' by saying “The ‘I’ who speaks in this story is not the author, rather he hopes that you might see yourself in this ‘I’ and understand this story as your own.”

It is a stunning achievement and a clear example of how writing and filmmaking are two different disciplines. Those of us who want to write a great film can learn a lot from the extremes of this film even if what we want to create is not existential. A great movie is often like a shared dream -- we sit still in the dark and share 2 hours of image and sound and then we can debate what it means and whether it was satisfying.