Terrence Malick Movies and Career Information

Terrence Malick (born November 30, 1943) is an American filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer. In a career spanning decades, Malick has directed four feature films. Numerous critics consider Malick's films to be masterpieces. Malick was nominated for an Academy Award for both Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Director for The Thin Red Line. Sources state Malick's place of birth as Ottawa, Illinois or Waco, Texas. His father was an oil company executive of Assyrian descent. Malick grew up in Bartlesville, Oklahoma and Texas, working on oil fields as a young man. He moved to Austin, Texas and graduated from St. Stephen's Episcopal School. Malick studied philosophy under Stanley Cavell at Harvard University, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1965. He went on to Magdalen College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. After a disagreement with his adviser, Gilbert Ryle, over his thesis on the concept of the world in Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, Malick left Oxford without a doctorate degree. In 1969, Northwestern University Press published Malick's translation of Heidegger's Vom Wesen des Grundes as The Essence of Reasons. Moving back to the United States, Malick taught