Visually, this has to be one of the most beautiful movies ever filmed.

It's also one of the most spare as far as dialog is concerned. All of the dialog in this very long film could probably fit on one page, and I've always wondered what the script looked like. It's a fascinating take on a less is more style of writing.

The assistant director, Skip Cosper, spoke at a college screening I attended in the 1980s. He said the film's visual grandeur was partly because of Malick's decision to shoot most exterior scenes during "magic hour," the period of muted natural light immediately before sundown.

Andrew,

I saw this last week, and it occured to me that perhaps a lot of the dialogue was improvised; it's so spare and spontaneous that it felt like it wasn't really "scripted" in that sense at all (the voice overs of course are another matter entirely).

Simply a gorgeous film, and the new 35 mm print is nearly flawless.

Good point and that makes sense; maybe much of it was ad-libbed. I guess I hadn't thought of that because the visuals are so hypnotic.

There's an urban legend about the 70mm prints of this film. (You think it looks good in 35mm? 70mm was a visual orgasm). Anyway, the story goes that the 70mm prints are all gone because someone high up in Paramount hated Tom Cruise, and ordered all the prints of Days of Thunder destroyed. And someone got it almost right. Oops.