If you've never watched it, The Tree of Life is, to me, an existential movie that juxtaposes the insignificance (yet importance) of human life with the vastness of existence as a whole (as well as whole other themes from the duality of nature to familial relations, etc). It does so by focusing most of the film on the lives of a small family in Texas while also showing scenes like this one, which features the creation of the universe, the creation of Earth, and the evolution of life. Malick is a religious man, and the film opens with a quote from Job:
This scene is pretty much Malick's visual depiction of that argument. If you want to know more about how they did it, you can read so here P.S. don't worry about Malick's religiosity if you're curious about his films but are afraid of being preached to. I'm an atheist and still love them. It's more a love of nature and humanity than dogma.Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?...when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of god shouted for joy? Job 38:4,7
The Tree of Life is AMAZING. I worked on it in the really early stages of the edit. It was one of those films where we were all so excited to have new rushes come in - all the raw material was amazing: beautiful, powerful, believable. What was difficult was to edit it. We found that the material would suddenly become unconvincing every time we cut into it.
Malick ended up going through a lot of editors to find what he needed! But he did find it, IMO, the finished film is wonderful!
I don't know what I find more exciting: That you got to work on a Malick production - albeit briefly - or that you got to play around with raw footage shot by Chivo. Tree of Life is a film I keep going back to, in particular for the editing. It appears to me that the film structures the scenes and images in a kind of vague jumble much like our memory tends to do. That's what fascinates me the most. What the protagonist remembers about his childhood and his family is not so much the particular events and happenings but rather, things like postures, tones, where he was... everything else being lost to the fuzzy side of the brain. I also think that Lubezki's capacity for capturing that feeling is unparalleled. It's no wonder that Malick went through so many edits, but hearing that you got to be a part of it is rad! Any more stories you could share about working on that production?