Look at the movie and the first thing you notice is that, from the very beginning, speech is diminished, de-emphasized - drowned out in the opening scene by the roaring and pounding of the hellish factory.
Some complained about that at the time - that the film was gorgeous but insufficiently developed as human drama, that characters were cyphers, that the technique was "intolerably artsy" and "artificial."² The close-ups of animals or plants, or the pastoral images of trees or streams are "very, very inserty-type shots, and yet they have the same kind of dramatic impact" as the spectacular wide shots - or, for that matter, the scenes involving the lead actors. Terrence Malick's vision is reflected in his process, whereby an enormous amount of material - scripted and unscripted, A-roll and B-roll - is pared down, peeled back, opened up.¹ Camera operator John Bailey, in an interview on the Criterion Blu-Ray edition of "Days of Heaven," describes how the so-called "second unit" work. What the movie became - as everyone couldn't help but notice at the time of its original release - is a film in which the "background" (nature, the landscape) moves into the foreground and the human characters recede into macrocosmic expanses of earth and sky, and microcosmic observations of flora and fauna.
Principal photography took place that year in the plains of Alberta, Canada (standing in for the Texas panhandle shortly before World War I), and the movie that emerged in 1978, after two years of editing, did away almost all of it. At some point in 1976, "Days of Heaven" was a screenplay that contained conventionally discrete scenes, developed exchanges of dialog and a fairly straightforward (melo-)dramatic narrative structure.
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