Extended Cut of Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder Confirmed; Longer Song to Song Rumored

Terrence Malick’s status as a moving target––more accurately, a target who rushes towards us while seen through a wide-angled lens––makes it easy to lose track of odds and ends. Thus I sometimes forget our report from August 2023, based on a pair of rather reliable sources, about a longer cut of To the Wonder, à la The Tree of Life or The New World, which would possibly integrate footage from Eugene Edwards’ adjacent docufiction Thy Kingdom Come. (A great film in its own right and essential companion you can rent here.) When we’d first heard of this in 2019 it was deemed a major time-consumer, and with workflow later derailed by COVID it became uncertain when (or if) this project saw the light of day.

But now a major update comes courtesy Keith Fraase, one of that film’s five credited editors, who told podcast The Malick Hour, “I definitely know there’s a longer version of To the Wonder that they’ve been working on for awhile.” While admitting he doesn’t “particularly know what that would consist of,” he speculated on “abandoned storylines” such as “a lot more with Ben [Affleck’s] job.” Fraase also noted that, like many Malick productions, To the Wonder employed numerous actors who were left on the cutting-room floor––Jessica Chastain, Michael Sheen, Rachel Weisz, Barry Pepper, and Amanda Peet being the known names––by way of suggesting they could appear, this extended cut potentially rescuing “lots of random storylines that didn’t feel like they were applicable to the final tale.”

Just as intriguing is Fraase being “sure there’s something for Song to Song as well.” Less (which really means: nothing) is known about what that might entail, though its list of excised performers runs even deeper: Christian Bale, Benicio Del Toro, Haley Bennett, Trevante Rhodes, Boyd Holbrook, Angela Bettis, Fleet Foxes, Iron & Wine, and Arcade Fire. Noting “story elements” that once existed in both films he edited brings to mind Song to Song having a previous iteration, Weightless, that was more than an early title; I’d heard some years ago that Malick once fashioned a different-feeling, heavily reworked project. While I somewhat doubt they’d simply give that cut a new shine for release, it points towards comprehensive ideas already existing on a hard drive (perhaps in Texas). All this being said, don’t expect the same treatment for Knight of Cups: Fraase claims that film “sort of has everything in it.”

On the subject of Terrence Malick’s post-production practices, I’ll use this space to drop a crazy rumor about The Way of the Wind: a source with strong connections to the project told me Malick’s had actors from previous projects take a crash course in film-editing and try their hand at cutting together scenes. This, perhaps, being a nostalgic and retrospective experiment steeped in the director’s advanced age while working on what, per longtime collaborator Jack Fisk, is “just the most important film to him.” How those contributions bear fruit––or if these sequences even emerge in a final cut––remains to be seen.

Listen to Fraase’s appearance on The Malick Hour below: