A new biography, “The Magic Hours,” takes on one of American film’s most deliberately obscure figures: Terrence Malick, the director of “Days of Heaven” and “The Tree of Life,” who has spent roughly fifty years declining nearly every interview request and letting the work stand without commentary.
That silence has always done double duty — protecting a genuinely private person, and building a mystique that makes the films themselves read as more oracular than a straightforward account of a working director’s choices might allow. A biography can’t fully undo that, and this one doesn’t try to. What it can do is describe the actual conditions the films were made under: the budgets, the collaborators, the years-long edits. That’s a duller story than the myth. It’s also the one that explains how the movies actually got made.