Days of Heaven, Terry Malick, an Airplane... and an Optimistic Yellow Pickup Truck.

I was the second unit cinematographer on Terry’s Days of Heaven. Among my tasks were to film scenes in vast wheatfields that could pass for 1915.

Terry and I had a 30 minute lunch – at an outdoor pizza place on Santa Monica Boulevard a couple of blocks from the BBS Building in Hollywood. He didn’t ask me much about myself or what I had done. He talked about the land, about the wheat fields he had worked in his youth. About the changing light at the end of day. He had ideas about filming that I’d never heard before – to overexpose film when the light was low that would create a magical feeling, how he wanted to avoid any saturated blue skies, how we were to find strange creatures and landscapes.

I don’t know why he had faith in me. Faith to send me off to Montana a month before first unit began filming Days of Heaven, to shoot scenes that would be integral to the look of the film. Second unit is usually not that, but Terry spoke to me in a convincing way that what I would be shooting would be essential. They wouldn’t be getting those shots in Alberta where first unit would be. He spoke in a way that I believed him.

I gathered a small incongruous crew including Coulter Adams and his new pickup truck painted “Optimistic Yellow”. That would be important for rural exploration.

I had my Cessna 180 in LA, and thought, as we would be wanting to explore a lot of territory in the flatlands of Montana, the airplane would be an advantage.

That was about all the production planning we had – Terrys script, an aeronautical chart of Montana, cameras and lenses, a small crew and Coulter’s truck. We headed off, Bob Eber and I in the Cessna, Coulter in his yellow pickup.

In my airplane, we followed roads in the rain.

Like Linda Manz says in the film, “We didn’t know where we were going or what we were going to do”.

Terry’s vision of the film, set around 1906, was of vast wheat fields, expansive  to reflect the expanding nation. We had to find these with no indicators of contemporary development. Even in the distance. No paved roads, no power lines, no subdivisions, no structures.

We crossed into Montana and landed near Hardin.

I flew over the eastern Montana landscapes, when I found a likely field, I just landed and looked for the farmer. I maintained radio contact with Coulter who followed in his Yellow Truck. I could guide him to a location. The winds in Montana were such that, facing upwind, I could often hover motionless relative to the ground.

From the ground it was often hard to orient. What seemed a good location, a drive of a few hundred yards revealed a water tower or grain elevator. But from the air, I had the spacious overview past the rolling hills.

Once there was a huge thunderstorm building on the horizon, I just landed in the middle of a field and got a striking shot, just before the rain hit.

The frame from Days of Heaven

Once I landed beside a field that looked promising. A farmer landed beside us in his Piper Cub – I was concerned for a moment, but there was an instant camaraderie. He was proud of his wheat field.

Frame from Days oh Heaven - Grasshopper stand in for Locust

One of our needed shots was of Locusts devouring the wheat. There were none, of course, but there were grasshoppers. Which, given the filmic distortion of scale, worked as doubles. We built a “Hopperdozer” on the front of Coulter’s truck, a six foot open-fronted cage that we drove though the wheat field. After a few hundred yards, we had captured about 300 grasshoppers. We put a bunch of them in plastic bags, blew in CO2 which put the hoppers into a groggy state. We put them on the wheat stalks, setup the close shot and as they slowly woke up and began to eat, we filmed. We didn’t have ASPCA people on the set. I wondered what they would have said.

We flew low along the Bighorn River and found places where we could float and film the POV shots for Brooke and Richard’s escape. One night we camped out on a sandbar to get early morning images.

All throughout the shoot, our communication with Terry and the first unit, shooting across the border in Alberta, was minimal. We were an off the grid operation circumventing official union regulations. We occasionally sent film up to them, but there were only a few phone calls with Billy Weber, the editor. It was way before internet. It’s a tribute to Terry’s descriptive writing and his words at our first meeting long ago in LA that what we shot fit seamlessly with the rest of the film. He didn’t describe scenes technically, but the emotional resonance to be found in silent nature elements.

At the end of our filming, I managed to pack all our equipment into the Cessna and headed south.

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Not long after Days of Heaven opened I was working with Terry on research for his next film project, “Qasida” or “Q”, to be centered on the creation of the earth (it later evolved into The Tree of Life). He wanted to scout the ancient volcanic craters and prehistoric landscapes around Death Valley.

I said we could fly there in my Cessna. That was a bit outside Terry’s comfort envelope, but Michie Gleason, his girlfriend at the time, really wanted to. So Terry drove his Volvo, Michie and I flew in my plane, we met him there.

We all spent time exploring the craters and sere land formations that, with a little imagination could pass for primeval times, inhabited by primal creatures.

Days with Terry Malick were always challenging and adventurous.

Paul G. Ryan