In 2012, director Terrence Malick made a movie called To the Wonder, in which Javier Bardem plays a Spanish priest in Oklahoma struggling with his faith. Malick shoots a lot of extra stuff for his movies and is known to cut out a lot of footage, so now, Eugene Richards, who shot many of the scenes with Bardem, is taking all the extra footage and turning it into his own movie, Thy Kingdom Come.
The curveball in all this is that for To the Wonder, Malick had real people come forward to confess their sins to Bardem. They knew Bardem wasn’t a real priest, but that doesn’t stop them from opening up about deaths in their family, wishes they’ve never been able to realize and regrets they’ve had. One confession was with a former Ku Klux Klan leader.
“Most people knew him as the murderer in No Country for Old Men,” Richards told The New Yorker. “Some didn’t know who he was at all. And absolutely no one cared, in the end, who he was, except that he was there to listen.”
Thy Kingdom Come premieres at SXSW this year.
