Terrence Malick was born on November 30, 1943 in Waco, TX. He is the eldest of three boys, Chris and Larry. He spend much of his youth as a farmhand in Oklahoma and Texas. He graduated from Harvard with a degree in philosphy, he entered Magdalen College in Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, but exited prior to completing his final thesis after a disagreement with his advisor. When he returned to the U.S., he became a freelance journalist, with his work appearing in such publications as Life, Newsweek, and The New Yorker. He later became a philosophy professor at M.I.T., Malick enrolled in a colleague's film course. In 1969, he was accepted into the first graduating class at the American Film Institute's Center for Advanced Studies, paying for his studies by rewriting the screenplays for such films as Deadhead Miles , Dirty Harry, and Drive, He Said.
In 1972, he began production on Badlands. Rejecting all studio offers, Malick gathered financing through a partnership agreement with a group of several small investors, shooting with a non-union crew on a budget of less than 350,000 dollars. The movie was an iconic and loose retelling of the Starkweather/Fugate murder spree of the 1950s, and was considered a masterpiece upon its release. He would not make a movie umtil 5 years later.
When he finally resurfaced with 1978's Days of Heaven, the critical praise was even bigger. Praised for it's beautiful imagery, the tale of Texas harvesters made Malick more respected as a director. Malick won a Cannes Best Director award for the film. It also won an Academy Award for Cinematography by Nestor Almendros. Also in 1978, Malick planned to make a war film set in the Middle East, but after vacationing in Paris, he decided to stay there for the next twenty years. It has been said that Malick felt betrayed by Hollywood, which explains why he did not make a movie for twenty years.
In 1997, Malick announced his return to filmmaking with an adaptation of the James Jones novel The Thin Red Line. With The Thin Red Line, Malick created a anti-war movie that was intelligent and visually beautiful. Malick was nominated for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay Oscars. His next movie The New World, a drama about explorer John Smith and the clash between Native Americans and the British in the 17th century, is set to be released in 2005.