Bill Pullman And Mickey Rourke Were Cut From This Classic War Movie

James Jones' novel "The Thin Red Line" is a dense but not daunting book. At 510 pages, it is an alternately fluid and ferocious account of the U.S. Army's brutal campaign in Guadalcanal during World War II. Joyce, a veteran of Guadalcanal (and a survivor of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which occurs at the end of his classic novel "From Here to Eternity"), paints a mural of massacre in an edenic environment populated by magnificent animals and awesome flora. He shifts perspective throughout yet aligns most often on the experiences of four characters: Witt, Welsh, Storm, and Fife. He also writes so vividly about the horrors of combat that I can't imagine anyone finishing the book and wanting to enlist in the armed services. War is truly hell, and no soldier who survives the ordeal comes out whole on the other end.

Unlike "From Here to Eternity," Jones' "The Thin Red Line" does not naturally lend itself to adaptation. The inner lives of its characters — who give voice to yearning, fury, frustration, sadness and so much more — are uniquely rich. It would seem to be nearly impossible to capture the philosophical breadth of the novel, so the obvious approach most screenwriters would take with the material would be to focus on fewer characters.

Terrence Malick did not want to pare down "The Thin Red Line" in the slightest. He wrote a 300-page screenplay that retained most of the characters of the book, all the while promising a kind of visual poetry that would explore the strangeness of wanton bloodshed in a lush, beautiful jungle environment.

And every actor in Hollywood wanted to be a part of it.

When Terrence Malick set out to adapt "The Thin Red Line" in the 1990s, he was a legendary figure in cinema on account of having made only two films, "Badlands" and "Days of Heaven," both of which were considered masterpieces. As soon as word got out that he was tackling an epic World War II movie based on the follow-up novel to the celebrated "From Here to Eternity" (which, as a film, won eight Academy Awards), actors made it known that they were very available.

Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Al Pacino, Johnny Depp, and Bruce Willis were all in the running at one point or another, and many of them were willing to take pay cuts just to play minor roles. After all, if Malick could go two decades in between movies, this might be their only shot at being in one of the maestro's films.

Malick finally rounded up a knockout cast of big-ticket movie stars (in order to appease 20th Century Fox, which was nervous about the then hefty $52 million budget) and promising young actors. John Travolta, George Clooney, Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Adrien Brody and Jim Caviezel were among the winners in the Malick sweepstakes. But while they were guaranteed to fly to Queensland, Australia and shoot their scenes, they couldn't be sure how much of their work would wind up in the final cut of the movie (due to Malick's penchant for finding his films in the edit). So when, for instance, Adrien Brody showed up at the film's press junket, he learned he had gone from being one of the film's leads (as Fife) to barely existing in the movie at all.

At least some of his performance made it out of the cutting room, though. Mickey Rourke and Bill Pullman, on the other hand, were excised from the film completely.

Pullman was just two years removed from playing the alien-conquering President of the United States in "Independence Day" when he was cast as Sgt. MacTae in Malick's WWII epic. Considering that the character doesn't play a significant role in the book, Pullman should've been prepared for disappointment. Was he peeved when he discovered that his portrayal of MacTae was entirely jettisoned from Malick's film? He's never spoken about it publicly, so who's to say?

Rourke, however, had some thoughts about his performance as a scout sniper getting dropped from "The Thin Red Line." In 2005, the actor commented, "There were political reasons why I was out of the movie. That really upset me ... just because of the temperature of me and the industry, my scenes were cut." While Rourke has certainly had his ups and downs in Hollywood as well as his personal life, it doesn't quite track that 20th Century Fox would lean on Malick to cut him out of the film. Judging from the deleted scene of Rourke's that's included on the Criterion Collection's release of the movie, it feels like his disappearance from film was entirely a rhythm thing. It's a shame, though, because he seems to be giving a deeply committed performance .

In any event, the actors who eagerly lobbied to be a part of Malick's first movie in 20 years must've felt a little silly when the filmmaker up and rattled off five new dramas during the 2010s. Suddenly, the deliberate auteur was downright prolific. If only Malick's post-"The Tree of Life" output was more inspired.