Where to watch The Thin Red Line (1998)

Trivia & production notes

• Sean Penn told Terrence Malick during their first meeting to simply give him a dollar and tell him where to show up, expressing his willingness to work on the film with minimal compensation.
• Bruce Willis offered to pay for first-class airline tickets for the casting crew in exchange for getting a few lines in the movie.
• Leonardo DiCaprio flew up from the Mexico set of Romeo + Juliet to meet Malick at an American Airlines lounge in Austin airport during casting.
• Terrence Malick paid $250,000 to write the screenplay and began adapting James Jones' novel on January 1, 1989, delivering a 300-page first draft five months later.
• Sony Pictures withdrew financing for the film in April 1997, three months before filming was scheduled to begin, because new studio chairman John Calley doubted Malick could complete it within the proposed $52 million budget.
• Producer Bobby Geisler spent $2 million of his own money on other Malick projects before securing new financing for The Thin Red Line, including funding a stage production of Sansho the Bailiff.
• The editing process took 13 months with five Avid machines, and Malick edited footage one reel at a time while listening to a Green Day CD with the sound turned off.
• Adrien Brody attended a screening to discover his role had been reduced from one intended to carry the entire film to just two lines and approximately five minutes of screen time.
• Billy Bob Thornton recorded three hours of narration for the film that was eventually scrapped during post-production.
• After an unfinished version was screened for press, Sean Penn helped Malick shape the final cut, and the director subsequently trimmed an additional 45 minutes from the film.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article The Thin Red Line (1998 film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.