Days of Heaven
All actors and roles (10)
Short description
Terrence Malick wrote and directed this 1978 period drama, set in 1916. A steelworker in Chicago kills his supervisor in an accident and takes flight, bringing along his girlfriend and his younger sister. The three of them travel to the Texas panhandle and hire on as harvest labor for a wealthy, reserved wheat farmer. To avoid questions about their past, the man and woman present themselves as brother and sister. The farmer comes to love the woman and asks her to stay on, and the couple's circumstances push them toward accepting his offer, though the arrangement rests on motives none of them can keep hidden for long.
Richard Gere plays Bill, Brooke Adams is Abby, Sam Shepard is the farmer, and Linda Manz plays Bill's sister Linda. Malick's second feature followed his debut Badlands by five years, and Bert and Harold Schneider produced it.
Made for about three million dollars, the film took in roughly the same amount worldwide. Audiences rate it highly, at 7.7 on IMDb from around 68,000 votes and 7.5 on TMDB from just over 1,200. Critics are more enthusiastic still: a rating of 8.8 from 125 reviews places it well above the audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- John Travolta, Al Pacino, and Dustin Hoffman all turned down the role of Bill.
- A solitary rural house on the horizon, surrounded by wheat fields (this visual image runs throughout the film) is reminiscent of the painting "Christina's World" by the great American artist Andrew Wyeth.
- Terrence Malick spent two years editing this film.
- The film was shot on location in Alberta, Canada. All the buildings, including the farmhouse, were constructed from plywood by set decorator Jack Fisk.
- Striving for maximum realism, costume designer Patricia Norris sewed the costumes from worn clothing and old fabrics.
- Filming proceeded very slowly, mainly during the short 20-minute period of "golden light" immediately preceding sunset.
- The shots of the locust swarm taking flight were filmed as follows: a helicopter circled over the fields, scattering ordinary peanuts in large quantities, while the actors simultaneously backed away. In the finished film, this footage was simply reversed.
- When Bill picks up a rifle at the 84th minute of the film, it is a standard double-barreled shotgun. When he shoots at the police at the 86th minute, he fires three times in a row without reloading.
- Almost immediately after filming began, Terrence Malick abandoned his own script and filmed the movie for about a year almost entirely based on actors' improvisation. He wanted the actors to "find this story" themselves.
- Cinematographer Néstor Almendros, due to vision problems, filmed the movie practically blind. Before each take, his assistant would take a Polaroid photo, which the cinematographer would examine under a powerful magnifying glass.
- The scene in which Bill falls face-first into the water was filmed in a large aquarium in Sissy Spacek's living room (Terrence Malick had worked with Sissy Spacek on his previous film, "Badlands" from 1973).
- The book that Linda flips through at the farmer's house is an illustrated edition of Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book".
- Haskell Wexler, credited as an additional cinematographer, told film critic Roger Ebert in a private conversation that he had actually shot most of the film.
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