Badlands and Days Of Heaven Director Terrence Malick is set to produce his new film, Radegund, about a World War II soldier, as Film Stage and several German sites have confirmed. August Diehl of Inglourious Basterds (and Salt and a bunch of German films) will play the film’s protagonist, Franz Jägerstätter, a 36-year old Austrian soldier who became a conscientious objector during the Second World War. Malick and the crew will begin shooting at Studio Babelsburg in Potsdam, Germany, later this summer.
Malick’s last wartime drama was the critically acclaimed The Thin Red Line in 1998, which was also set during WWII and received seven academy award nominations. He is also reported to be working on an IMAX film, Voyage Of Time, about the birth and death of the universe, and has long been at work on Weightless, about intersecting love triangles in Austin’s music scene, starring an ensemble cast of Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale, Natalie Portman, Rooney Mara, Cate Blanchett, Val Kilmer, Cliff Collins Jr., Benicio del Toro, and Michael Fassbender.
It’s amazing how, with all of this new work in the pipeline, it’s easy to forget that for a time we had to wait six or seven years for a new Malick pic. (He was even sued for… procrastinating?) Now he just can’t seem to put the camera down.