Trivia

Dissatisfied by the look of modern computer generated visual effects, director Terrence Malick approached veteran special effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull, who was responsible for the visual effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), to create the visual effects for the film using bygone optical and practical methods. This marks the first feature film Trumbull has provided the effects for in 29 years, his last being Blade Runner (1982).

The butterfly that landed on Mrs. O'Brien's (Jessica Chastain) hands was not CG but a real one. One morning while both Chastain and Brad Pitt were rehearsing, Terrence Malick spotted it flying around. He got the crew and Chastain following it three blocks of Smithville, then got her to step into the middle of a street and hold her hand up.

The critic Jim Emerson got word of what Terrence Malick intended the sequence of dinosaurs to mean, by way of the visual effects supervisor in charge of that very sequence who is Michael L. Fink. Emerson describes what he learned from Fink; "The premise of the four-shot scene was to depict the birth of consciousness (what some have called the "birth of compassion")-the first moment in which a living creature made a conscious decision to choose what Michael described as "right from wrong, good from evil." Or, perhaps, a form of altruism over predatory instinct".

According to Emmanuel Lubezki, a whole movie focusing on Sean Penn's character could be made from cut footage.

As with The New World (2005), Terrence Malick and Emmanuel Lubezki laid down a series of parameters (a dogma) to be used throughout the film:

• Shoot in available natural light.
• Do not underexpose the negative. Keep true blacks.
• Preserve the latitude of the image.
• Seek maximum resolution and fine grain.
• Seek depth with deep focus and stop: "Compose in depth."
• Shoot in backlight for continuity and depth.
• Use negative fill to avoid light sandwiches (even sources on both sides)
• Shoot in crosslight only after dawn or before dusk; never front light.
• Avoid lens flares.
• Avoid white and primary colors in frame.
• Shoot with short focal length, hard lenses.
• No filters, except Polarizer.
• In the eye of the hurricane, shoot with steady handheld or Steadicam.
• Z-axis moves instead of pans and tilts.
• No zooming.
• Do some static tripod shots "in midst of our haste"
• Accept the exception to the dogma (a.k.a Article E) - Article E however does not apply underexposure of the negative.