This preposterously poised 15-year-old, who sits opposite me sipping water in a Beverly Hills hotel, is somebody, oddly, I have come across before. I remember her sashaying through a mean salsa routine at Third Street Promenade, an open-air shopping mall near her west LA home. Amid the usual karaoke jazzers and unfortunate strummers, Q’Orianka (pronounced kor-ee-ann-kah) was luminous; few would have guessed she was then about 12.
In those days, her main competition was Nostradamus, a fortune-telling cat. She giggles as we recall our fates as foreseen by Nostradamus, who would — with great gravity — select from a range of tiny paper scrolls and offer the chosen one to you between outstretched paws. “He has retired now, you know. He must have been getting quite old — maybe 16 or 17?” Ah, they burn out early in LA. But I bet even Nostradamus could not have predicted that, a couple of years later, the weight of promoting a $35m Hollywood movie would be resting on Kilcher’s slender shoulders, because its director refuses to lower himself to do the chat shows, and its star, Colin Farrell, has checked himself into rehab. A bit unfair, really.
This leaves her game for the only question everyone asks — what was it like to have your first-ever snog with roaring boy Farrell, with the world watching? We know, from Dame Eileen Atkins, that our Colin likes his women a little more mature, but then, at 28, he was twice your age. Wasn’t it, as your LA friends might say, like, gross? “No, he was a perfect gentleman. Lots of fun. I’m a perfectionist, but he showed me how to relax on set. And he was not twice my age, not quite. God, I wish I had never told anyone it was my first kiss,” she says, hands to face. “I just don’t know how to answer these questions.”
Don’t be fooled. She does. What makes so many baby stars twinkle, from Elizabeth Taylor to the awesomely screen-smart Dakota Fanning, is a sense of purpose. It may be an act, but they know where they are going. Like those terror tots, Q’Orianka started early. The daughter of a now misplaced Quecha Peruvian father and a German-Alaskan mother, Q’Orianka (it means “golden eagle” in Quecha) Waira Qoian Kilcher hung out around actors growing up in Hawaii. By seven, she was memorising entire scripts, starting with a saga about a polar bear that lived in her fridge. But she also had Judy Garland pipes, and was on her way to a recording session in Oklahoma, maybe to become a country singer like her cousin Jewel, when, as Nostradamus might say, fate intervened. Twice.
“My mom was driving a motorhome to Oklahoma when the steering shift fell through the floor and we came to a crashing halt near downtown LA. We could have been killed. So we decided to stay in LA,” she recalls. This bad luck was followed by the theft of her musical kit, which generated local-newspaper headlines and attracted the right kind of attention, and by a fleeting role in How the Grinch Stole Christmas. This was when she took up busking, auditioning and hoping — a classic LA lifestyle. A casting agent dismissed her as too young when she tried to get into Steven Spielberg’s TV serial Into the West, but remembered the “Indian Julia Roberts” when Malick was casting The New World, the painful story of the first English settlement in America.
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Malick is a tricky character to pin down, which is how he likes it. The 62-year-old Texan, a farm hand turned Rhodes scholar, has made just four films in 33 years, which is also how he likes it. After his 1973 debut, Badlands, with Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek as serial killers, he returned with Days of Heaven, which boosted Richard Gere’s youthful reputation. Then he took 20 years off before directing a rhapsodic martial hymn, The Thin Red Line, which had every Hollywood alpha male begging for a sweaty cameo.
Malick spends most of his time hiking in remote places, breaking off to teach philosophy at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In between, he attends the annual muster of the makers of nature documentaries, which alter- nates between Bristol and Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
According to those who have met him there, he asks lots of friendly questions, yet it surprises many that he works in such a co-operative medium as film. He has never granted a press interview and, in his contract for The Thin Red Line, he forbade the studio from issuing a picture of him. He’s the Thomas Pynchon of film — which, of course, spawns a cultish fascination with his oeuvre, slim as it is.
The New World has been in the works for a decade. Malick sets out to tell the story of Jamestown, the first English settlement in America, near present-day Washington, in 1607, and how the 102 Brits there poison paradise. And how, as we all know from the 1995 Disney movie, an Algonquian “princess” called Pocahontas saves Captain John Smith (Farrell) from her fellow Indians, falls in love, comes to Stuart England and, like the aliens in War of the Worlds, promptly dies from something very common. Probably much to her surprise, she also ends up buried in Gravesend.
In Malick’s eye, this story is secondary to the striking beauty of the unspoilt land. With Jack Fisk, his art director since Badlands, he spends more time lingering on places than explaining people. He even uses computer effects — but only to transform a contemporary bird into a Carolina parakeet, America’s only native parrot, which squawked its last nearly a century ago.
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So, Q’Orianka, you were selected from 3,000 hopefuls after negotiating a reality-show maze of tests and tasks, and now have your big break. Tell us: what is this mystery man, Malick, like? “Very patient. He wanted a lot of work in advance, reading about history and nature, but, when shooting, if something caught his eye, like the way grass moved in the wind, he would change the scene around it, and the cinematographer (Emmanuel Lubezki) would sweep around to catch the moment. I think Terry is a genius.”
Kilcher, who is on screen almost all the time, lived at the authentically basic “Fort Malick” for nearly the entire 18-week shoot in the Virginia wildlands. Wasn’t it tough? The 5ft 3in actress, who looks both taller and older on screen, in her doeskin dress, says she was kept going through some long days by Malick and her fellow actors. While Malick took her out bird-watching, Farrell amused her by running around yanking up the loincloths of the ersatz Algonquians, a prank funny the first half-dozen times.
Christian Bale (playing her character’s eventual husband, the tobacco farmer John Rolfe) was, in Q’Orianka’s careful words, “more mature, very stable”. And then there was her grandmother, sequestered among the squaws in the early scenes set in the tribal village.
The juvenile actress was on union minimum for the role. But there was payback, and not just in learning her craft. “There were moments, like dancing around a moonlit campfire, that still give me goosebumps thinking about them. That was when we really felt we were there, back in the 1600s, which is what Terry wanted — and that was just amazing.”
There was a price to pay for authenticity, however. “They wanted me to cut my hair, like the original Pocahontas, but I refused, and eventually Terry just did not mention it any more. Then there was the facepaint — ugh. And running barefoot through the grass. That ground was hard on my bare feet. But it was toughest in English period costume. Climbing a tree in tight little boots, going up much higher than it looks on screen, that was no fun, although the final shot was beautiful. Pity they cut it.”
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The first version of the film lasted three hours; the initial American release ran at 150 minutes, but lost loving scenes such as the princess playing with her tame fox. But wait, there’s less. Last month, Malick returned to the editing room, so the version we see is expected to be about 20 minutes shorter. It may still dawdle for those suckered in by the action-packed cowboys-and-Indians trailer, or be too jumpy for those seeking a Malickian meditation. But it’s a uniquely cinematic experience that demands that mindset of focus and openness available only to those willing to sit in the dark for two hours.
This is why, despite this being the age of home theatre, some people still go out to the cinema. Believe me, the director’s cut on DVD will be no substitute. So, for anyone with patience and trust in the values of cinema, let the young Q’Orianka guide you back into a very old world.
The New World opens on January 27