Director Watch Podcast Ep. 61: ‘The Thin Red Line’ (Terrence Malick, 1998) with special guest Jake Tropila

Welcome to Director Watch! On this AwardsWatch podcast, co-hosts Ryan McQuade and Jay Ledbetter attempt to breakdown, analyze, and ultimately, get inside the mind of some of cinema’s greatest auteurs. In doing so, they will look at their filmographies, explore what drives them artistically and what makes their decision-making process so fascinating. Add in a few silly tangents and a fun game at the end of the episode and you’ve got yourself a podcast we truly hope you love. On episode 61 of the Director Watch Podcast, the boys are joined by film critic Jake Tropila to discuss the next film in their Terrence Malick series, The Thin Red Line (1998).

After making two of the most celebrated, respected films of the 1970s, Terrence Malick spent the next twenty plus years crafting multiple projects, with nothing to show for it. Towards the beginning of the 1990s, the director was approached with the idea of crafting an adaptation of the World War II novel The Thin Red Line, which intrigued Malick enough to start working on this film, which seemed to spark every male actor in Hollywood to audition for him so they could be a part of this epic. The results of being gone from cinema for two plus decades gave us not only one of Malick’s most signature films, but what some consider to be the greatest war film of all time. Ryan, Jay, and Jake discuss their thoughts on the film, the insane roster of actors in this film, how Malick cut Adrian Brody mostly out of the film to create a new vision from the original source material, the brutality of war and what it does to a soldier’s morality, how it compares from Saving Private Ryan which came out from the same year, how something as so necessary as water becomes vital for the everyone involved, and the continued look into the career of Jim Caviezel.

You can listen to the Director Watch Podcast wherever you stream podcasts, from iTunes, iHeartRadio, Soundcloud, Stitcher, Spotify, Audible, Amazon Music and more.

This podcast runs 1h58m. The guys will be back next week to continue their series on the films of Terrence Malick with a review of his next film, The New World. You can rent it via iTunes and Amazon Prime rental in preparation for the next episode of Director Watch. Till then, let’s get into it.

Music: MUSICALIFE, from Pond5 (intro) and “B-3” from BoxCat Games Nameless: The Hackers RPG Soundtrack (outro).