Terrence Malick’s Disciples: Why the auteur is the most influential director in Hollywood

In the winter of 2024, the photographer and filmmaker RaMell Ross released Nickel Boys, a masterful adaptation of a novel by Colson Whitehead. In a fragmentary, impressionistic style, the film portrays the friendship of two African American teens at a brutal Florida reform academy during the Jim Crow era. Acclaimed as a visionary movie, it ended up on many critics’ best-of-the-year lists and earned an Oscar nomination for Best Picture.

Ross is a fiercely independent artist. His first film, the lyrical 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, was also nominated for an Oscar. Afterward, he refused Hollywood’s overtures for years. So why did he take a meeting with the producers who reached out to him about making a studio-financed, big-budget adaptation of Nickel Boys? Ross’s explanation was simple: because one of them had produced Terrence Malick’s 2011 film, The Tree of Life. Ross’s reverence for Malick is plain in his films, which, like Malick’s, rely on extended montages of the everyday and do away with the conventional rules of cinematic storytelling, hovering instead between distant, melancholy reverie and hyperfocused, lived-in specificity. And he is not the only recent filmmaker who has fallen under Malick’s spell. Indeed, Malick’s sensibility, visual style, and working methods have had a profound influence on some of today’s best and most interesting directors.