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Days of Heaven is a 1978 film written and directed by Terrence Malick and starring Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard and Linda Manz. Set in the early twentieth century, it tells a story about transient laborers who travel to the Texas Panhandle

to harvest crops on a farm, and who become involved with a dying farmer.

Synopsis

According to the theatrical trailer, the story is set in 1916 (the film shows a 1916 newspaper, and a scene late in the film shows American soldiers headed off for World War I). Bill (Gere), a Chicago

manual laborer, knocks down a boss in the steel mill where he works, killing him, and then flees to the Texas Panhandle

with his girlfriend Abby (Adams) and younger sister Linda (Manz). Bill and Abby pretend to be siblings to prevent gossip.

The three hire on as seasonal workers with a rich, shy farmer (Shepard) who, although still young, Bill learns is dying of an unspecified disease. When the farmer falls in love with Abby, Bill encourages her to marry him so that they can inherit his money when he dies. The marriage takes place and Bill stays at the farm as Abby's "brother," though the farmer's foreman Robert Wilke suspects their scheme. The farmer's health unexpectedly remains stable, foiling Bill's plans.

Eventually, Bill's true relationship with Abby is discovered by the farmer, though she has begun to fall in love with her new husband. The farmer goes after Bill with a gun, but Bill kills him with a screwdriver. Although we see that the killing was in self defense, it's clear that (due to the class difference between them and the fact that Bill was perpetrating a scam on the farmer) Bill would be treated as a murderer if caught. Bill and the women escape, but the vengeful foreman puts the police on their trail, and the police ultimately kill Bill. Abby leaves Linda at a boarding school and goes off on her own.

Production

Producer Jacob Brackman introduced fellow producer Bert Schneider to filmmaker Terrence Malick in 1975. On a trip to Cuba

, Schneider and Malick began conversations that would lead to the origins of Days of Heaven. Malick had tried and failed to get Dustin Hoffman or Al Pacino to star in the film but was not successful. Schneider agreed to produce the film and he and Malick cast a young Richard Gere, playwright Sam Shepard and Brooke Adams. Paramount Pictures CEO Barry Diller wanted Schneider to produce films for him and agreed to finance Days of Heaven. At the time, the studio was headed in a new direction. They were hiring new production heads who had worked in network television, and, according to former production chief Richard Sylbert, "[manufacturing] product aimed at your knees". Despite the change in direction, Schneider was able to secure a deal with Paramount by guaranteeing the budget and taking personal responsibility for all overages. "Those were the kind of deals I liked to make", Schneider said, "because then I could have final cut and not talk to nobody about why we're gonna use this person instead of that person".

Malick admired cinematographer Nestor Almendros' work on The Wild Child and wanted to hire him to shoot Days of Heaven. He was impressed by Malick's knowledge of photography and willingness to use very little studio lighting. The two men modeled the film's cinematography after silent films which often used natural light. They also drew inspiration from painters like Johannes Vermeer, Andrew Wyeth, and Edward Hopper, as well as photo-reporters from the turn of the century.

Principal photography

Production began in the fall of 1976. Though the film was set in Texas, the exteriors were shot in Whiskey Gap

, Alberta

, Canada

. Jack Fisk designed and built the mansion from plywood in the wheat fields and the smaller houses where the workers lived. The mansion was not a facade, as was normally the custom, but authentically recreated inside and out with period colors: brown, mahogany and dark wood for the interiors. Patricia Norris designed and made the period costumes from used fabrics and old clothes in order to avoid the artificial look of studio-made costumes.

According to Almendros, the production was not "rigidly prepared", allowing for improvisation. Daily call sheets were not very detailed and the schedule changed to suit the weather. This upset some of the Hollywood crew members not used to working in such a spontaneous way. Most of the crew were used to a "glossy style of photography" and felt frustrated because Almendros did not give them much work. On a daily basis, he asked them to turn off the lights they had prepared for him. Some crew members said that Almendros and Malick did not know what they were doing. Some of the crew quit the production but Malick supported what Almendros was doing and pushed the look of the film even further, taking away more lighting aids, leaving the image bare. Due to union regulations in North America, Almendros was not allowed to operate the camera himself and with Malick, he would plan out and rehearse movements of the camera and the actors. Almendros would stand near the main camera and give instructions to the camera operators.

Almendros was actually losing his eyesight by the time shooting began, and to evaluate his setups, "he had one of his assistants take Polaroids of the scene, then examined them through very strong glasses". According to Almendros, Malick wanted "a very visual movie. The story would be told through visuals. Very few people really want to give that priority to image. Usually the director gives priority to the actors and the story, but here the story was told through images". Much of the film would be shot during "magic hour", which Almendros called "a euphemism, because it's not an hour but around 25 minutes at the most. It is the moment when the sun sets, and after the sun sets and before it is night. The sky has light, but there is no actual sun. The light is very soft, and there is something magic about it. It limited us to around twenty minutes a day, but it did pay on the screen. It gave some kind of magic look, a beauty and romanticism". This "magic look" would extend to interior scenes, which often utilized natural light. "In this period there was no electricity", said Almendros. "It was before electricity was invented and consequently there was less light. Period movies should have less light. In a period movie the light should come from the windows because that is how people lived". For the shot in the locusts sequence where the insects rise into the sky, the filmmakers dropped peanut shells from helicopters and had the actors walk backwards while running the film in reverse through the camera. When it was projected everything moved forward except the locusts. For the closeups and insert shots, thousands of live locusts, captured by the Canadian Department of Agriculture, were used.

While the photography yielded exquisite results, the rest of the production was difficult from the start. The actors and crew reportedly viewed Malick as cold and distant. After two weeks of shooting, Malick was so disappointed with the dailies, he "decided to toss the script, go Leo Tolstoy instead of Fyodor Dostoevsky, wide instead of deep [and] shoot miles of film with the hope of solving the problems in the editing room". In addition, the harvesting machines constantly broke down, which resulted in shooting beginning late in the afternoon, allowing for only a few hours of daylight before it was too dark to go on. One day, two helicopters were scheduled to drop peanut shells that were to simulate locusts on film, however, Malick decided to shoot period cars instead. He kept the helicopters on hold at great cost. Production was lagging behind, with costs exceeding the budget by about $800,000, and Schneider had already mortgaged his home in order to cover the overages.

The production ran so late that both Almendros and camera operator John Bailey had to leave due to a prior commitment on Francois Truffaut's The Man Who Loved Women. Almendros approached his friend and renowned cinematographer Haskell Wexler to complete the film. They worked together for a week so that Wexler could familiarize himself with the film's visual style. Wexler was careful to match Almendros' work, but he did make some exceptions. "I did some hand held shots on a Panaflex", he said, "[for] the opening of the film in the steel mill. I used some diffusion. Nestor didn't use any diffusion. I felt very guilty using the diffusion and having (sic) the feeling of violating a fellow cameraman". Though half the finished picture would consist of footage shot by Wexler, he would only receive credit for "additional photography", much to his chagrin. The credit would deny him any chance of an Academy Award for his work on Days of Heaven, and he once sent critic Roger Ebert a letter "in which he described sitting in a theater with a stopwatch to prove that more than half of the footage" was his.

Post-production

After the production finished principal photography, the editing process took over two years to complete. Malick had a difficult time shaping the film and getting the pieces to go together. Schneider reportedly showed some footage to director Richard Brooks, who was considering Gere for a role in Looking for Mr. Goodbar. According to Schneider, the editing for Days of Heaven took so long that "Brooks cast Gere, shot, edited and released [Looking for Mr. Goodbar] while Malick was still editing". A breakthrough came when Malick experimented with voice-overs from Linda Manz's character, similar to what he had done with Sissy Spacek in Badlands. According to editor Billy Weber, Malick jettisoned much of the film's dialogue, replacing it with Manz's voice-over, which served as an oblique commentary on the story.

After a year, Malick had to call the actors to Los Angeles

to shoot inserts of shots that were necessary but had not been filmed in Alberta. The finished film thus includes close-ups of Shephard that were actually shot under a freeway overpass, while the underwater shot of Gere falling face down into the river was actually shot in a large aquarium in Sissy Spacek's living room. Meanwhile, Schneider was still upset with Malick. He had confronted Malick numerous times regarding missed deadlines and broken promises, and due to further cost overruns, he had to ask Paramount for more money, a request he was not comfortable making. However, when they screened a demo for Paramount and made their pitch, the studio was impressed and reportedly "gave Malick a very sweet deal at the studio, carte blanche, essentially". However, Malick would not be able to capitalize on the deal. He was so exhausted from working on the film that he subsequently moved to Paris

with his girlfriend. He tried developing another project for Paramount, but after a substantial amount of work, he abandoned it. He did not make another film for twenty years.

Reaction

In his review for the New York Times, Harold C. Schonberg wrote, "Days of Heaven never really makes up its mind what it wants to be. It ends up something between a Texas pastoral and Cavalleria Rusticana. Back of what basically is a conventional plot is all kinds of fancy, self-conscious cineaste techniques". Dave Kehr of The Chicago Reader wrote: "Terrence Malick's remarkably rich second feature is a story of human lives touched and passed over by the divine, told in a rush of stunning and precise imagery. Nestor Almendros's cinematography is as sharp and vivid as Malick's narration is elliptical and enigmatic. The result is a film that hovers just beyond our grasp--mysterious, beautiful, and, very possibly, a masterpiece". Gene Siskel of The Chicago Tribune also wrote that the film "truly tests a film critic's power of description ... Some critics have complained that the Days of Heaven story is too slight. I suppose it is, but, frankly, you don't think about it while the movie is playing". Time magazine's Frank Rich wrote, "Days of Heaven is lush with brilliant images". The periodical went on to name it one of the best films of 1978.

Awards

Malick won the Prix de la mise en scène (Best Director award) at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival. The film was also nominated for Academy Awards for Costume Design, Original Score, and Sound. It won an Academy Award for Best Cinematography. Per Academy custom the award was given in the name of principal photographer Nestor Almendros. This was somewhat controversial as renowned cinematographer Haskell Wexler also received credit on the film. Malick was also named the best director by the National Society of Film Critics.

In 2007, Days of Heaven was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress

as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Notes

Biskind 1998, p. 296.
Almendros 1986
Biskind 1998, p. 297.

References

Almendros, Nestor (1986) A Man with a Camera. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Biskind, Peter (1998) Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. New York: Simon & Schuster.

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