It’s not often we get a Terrence Malick film, and even less often that we get updates on a Terrence Malick film, but it looks like we may get both this year. With The Tree of Life, Malick’s forthcoming epic, tentatively slated to come out later this year, we now have an update for the film: Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells reports that an apparently print-only excerpt from Empire Magazine had some info via an interview with Mike Fink, a visual effects artist (and accomplished visual effects supervisor) working on the film. Fink had this to say:

We’re just starting work on a project for Terrence Malick, animating dinosaurs, the film is The Tree of Life. It’ll be shooting in IMAX—so the dinosaurs will actually be life size — and the shots of the creatures will be long and lingering.

Plot details have been unsurprisingly sparse for this film, but we do know that it takes some temporal liberties with flashbacks and the such, and may in fact start with the very creation of time. /film reported back in 2007 that in “one version of the screenplay, the story opened with ‘a sleeping god, underwater, dreaming of the origins of the universe, starting with the big bang and moving forward, as fluorescent fish swam into the deity’s nostrils and out again.’” Could this be the sequence where we see the dinosaurs, or are there time-traveling plotlines that no one previously knew about?

To give you a somewhat less hazy idea of what the film’s about, here’s what we know: Sean Penn will play the main character of the film, a bit of a troubled tabula rasa hero named Jack, and Brad Pitt will play his father in flashbacks. The movie will follow Jack’s evolution, starting from when he is a boy. The official production description tells us:

At first all seems marvelous to the child. He sees as his mother does, with the eyes of his soul. She represents the way of love and mercy, where the father tries to teach his son the world’s way, of putting oneself first. Each parent contends for his allegiance, and Jack must reconcile their claims.

Jack must then cope with these ideas as he grows up and experiences sickness, suffering, and death. Malick seems to be trying to make a grand opus celebrating the aching complexities of life, and in typical Malick fashion, sections of the screenplay have been described as “pages of poetry, with no dialogue, glorious visual descriptions.” If the film was indeed shot in IMAX, I would absolutely love to see these sections on a giant 90-foot screen. I guess if anyone is going to pull something this ambitious and this artsy off, it would be Terrence Malick. You can check out Summit Entertainment’s official site for more info on the film.

In the meantime, what say you on Dinosaurs x IMAX x Malick?

Tags: Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Terrence Malick, The Tree Of Life