Photo By Merie Wallace

Colin Farrell is Captain John Smith in Terrence Malick's The New World

BEVERLY HILLS -- Wes Studi, the actor who plays a 17th-century Algonquian Indian named Opechancanough in Terrence Malick's The New World, knows how he would change the film if he had control of the final edit. It is a speculative look at the cultural and personal ramifications of Pocahontas' love for Captain John Smith at Britain's Jamestown colony in 1607 Virginia.

"Less grass," he says, with a slow chuckle as he concludes a small-group interview at a hotel here.

Studi, an American Indian himself, is used to the pacing of movies like Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans, where the action and narrative exposition had a more straightforwardly urgent pacing. Malick, revered by cinephiles for his slow, almost mystical, environmentalist approach to filmmaking, is different.

For a start, he has made only three films since 1973's Badlands -- Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line are the other two. Second, he lets nature "talk" as much as his characters in The New World. Trees sway in the wind, water ripples, birds chirp and, yes, the tall grass bends and turns. These all are studied by the camera as if they and not Colin Farrell, Christian Bale, Q'Orianka Kilcher and Studi were the film's stars.

In fact, much of what Farrell's Smith and Kilcher's Pocahontas say to each other is done via voice-over narration rather than conventional dialogue. It's as if Malick was trying to stop conversations -- the actual hurtling of words from lips to air -- from polluting the environment.

"Yeah, he shoots some really great grass," Studi says. He looks around and, in jest, expresses worry that publicists from New Line Cinema will come into the room and cut him off. "Remember Days of Heaven and Richard Gere? They were in grass like that, too," he adds.

As reclusive as Howard Hughes in his final Las Vegas days, Malick wasn't available to speak to the press about his film. But he first wrote the screenplay 25 years ago, after having the idea in the mid-1970s. Without him present, it was left to the film's producer, Sarah Green, to explain his point of view to the press recently. She previously has produced films for David Mamet and John Sayles.

"I really love Terry's films for many reasons," Green says. "I love (that) they are dreamy and I can get lost in them, and they're so rich and layered. The Thin Red Line I watched over and over because it said so much about what is human nature and where does violence fit in, and all those complicated things for which there is no good answer.

"One of the things I liked very much about this movie is that while history can point you in any number of directions as to who these characters were and what were their motivations, you can still interpret quite a bit about it."

The New World was shot in Virginia along undeveloped stretches of the James and Chickahominy rivers. The production company bought a concrete fish house and then tore it town to build a fort. The crew also did intense research to achieve historical accuracy in costumes and language. A researcher was hired to virtually reinvent the Algonquian language for the actors portraying Indians -- it hadn't been used since 1780.

Malick also wanted to achieve historical accuracy by casting an indigenous-culture actress roughly the same age -- early teens or even younger -- as Pocahontas was believed to be at the time she met John Smith. But his casting directors had given up on finding someone that young until then-14-year-old Kilcher convinced them she could do it. Her father is a Peruvian Indian; her mother is from Europe and Alaska. She was raised in Hawaii and Los Angeles, where she studies music and performs at public gatherings. This is her first starring role in a film; she previously had a small part in How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

Speaking to a small group of journalists, the now-15-year-old Kilcher explains that she viewed the movie as a cathartic experience for her.

"It made me even prouder of who I am and of my roots," she says. "Now I just want to learn even more about my culture and about the Algonquian culture, because I fell in love with Pocahontas and the Algonquian tribe."

Overall, to enjoy a Malick movie one must be open to the unexpected. That goes for the cast as well as the audience, says Christian Bale, who plays John Rolfe, a colonist who marries Pocahontas after John Smith leaves her. He views himself as just lucky to still be in the film when it reaches the screen. In The Thin Red Line, Adrien Brody -- not yet an Oscar-winner -- originally was touted as one of the stars but was virtually edited out of the final version when Malick had to trim it to "just" 170 minutes. New World lost a good half hour from Malick's preferred version to come in at 150 minutes. And he cut another 15 to 20 minutes after these interviews were done, according to the trade press.

"He just likes to amass as much that's interesting as possible and then unfortunately has to condense it and lose a great deal," Bale says. "But I like very much the way that he worked, and I liked knowing that it was going to be somewhat of a surprise how much any of us would end up in the story.

"I was talking to (Grizzly Man director) Werner Herzog when Terry first asked me to do the movie -- they're good friends -- and he said to me, 'Oh, that's wonderful. He's a fantastic director, but just don't get upset if you're not in the movie.' " ©