A Hidden Life

Terrence Malick spent nearly three years editing A Hidden Life.

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While filming in Radegund at the Jägerstätters' actual house, August Diehl and Valerie Pachner met Franz and Fani's daughters Maria, Rosalia and Aloisa, who still live in the village where their parents lived.

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Artificial lights were used only rarely during the shoot. On all other sets, including the prison cells, the crew used the right time of day to film until the light was gone.

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The film takes its title from the final sentence of George Eliot's Middlemarch: "… for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

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A few days before the film's world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, a private screening was held at the Jägerstätters' home for their daughters. According to Valerie Pachner, the three sisters liked the film and found it satisfying.

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The bedroom in the film belongs to the Jägerstätters and looks as it did at the time. Fani's embroideries still hang on the walls. Franz and Fani's three daughters — Maria, Rosalia and Aloisa — live in or near St. Radegund. Fani died in 2013 at the age of 100.

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When German troops moved into Austria in March 1938, Franz Jägerstätter refused the position offered to him as mayor of Radegund. He was the only person in the village to vote against the Anschluss in the plebiscite on 10 April.

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When the presiding judge at Franz's trial, Lueben (played by Bruno Ganz), was asked in 1944 to condemn three priests from Stettin as Franz had been, he chose to commit suicide instead.

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Although it is set during World War II, not a single gun is fired on camera.

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The cast consists solely of European actors, mostly from the German-speaking countries of Austria, Switzerland and Germany.

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Shot over eight weeks in July and August 2016, the production spent 24 days in South Tyrol, Italy's northernmost province, then moved to Austria and filmed for several days in St. Radegund. It spent the final 14 days on the prison scenes in Zittau (7) and Berlin (7), Germany. Supervising art director Steve Summersgill says the locations were carefully chosen for their textures, authenticity and visual scope. The film was shot in churches and cathedrals, on farms with real animals, in orchards, high in the mountains, in fields and on rural roads. Several scenes were shot at the St. Radegund locations where the depicted events actually took place, including certain interiors of the Jägerstätter house, which has become a pilgrimage site over the years, as well as the bank of the Salzach river near St. Radegund and the forest below the house.

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Valerie Pachner says that in all her years of acting she has never encountered a process like the one Terrence Malick uses to draw the performance out of his cast. She also describes Malick as "very respectful, very humble, kind and at the same time radical. Radical in the sense that he always follows his thoughts and his point of view on things."

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Valerie Pachner, who plays Fani, grew up in the same province, 65 km away.

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The film was inspired by Franz Jägerstätter's correspondence with his wife Franziska, or Fani; it was edited by Erna Putz and published in English by Orbis Books.

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Before his execution on 9 August 1943, Franz Jägerstätter wrote: "If I have to write with my hands in chains, I find that much better than if my will were in chains. Neither prison, nor chains, nor the death sentence can deprive a man of his Faith and free will. God gives so much strength that it is possible to bear every kind of suffering… People worry about conscientious obligations because it concerns my wife and children. But I cannot believe that, because if a man has a wife and children, he is free to anger God."

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Franz Jägerstätter was declared a martyr and beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in June 2007. His feast day is 21 May, the day he was baptized.

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According to August Diehl, Terrence Malick did not want to portray Franz Jägerstätter as a hero or a preacher.

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These were the last films of Michael Nyqvist and Bruno Ganz, who died in 2017 and 2019 respectively. Because the film's editing took three years, it was released posthumously for both actors.

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It is Terrence Malick's first film with a linear narrative since The New World (2005).

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Composer James Newton Howard has said that the film's music was a highly collaborative process. One of the first ideas Terrence Malick brought to Howard was to combine sounds captured during production, such as church bells from villages, cow and sheep bells, a sawmill, sounds from a prison and scythes in the fields. Howard ultimately took many of these sounds and turned them into musical elements woven throughout his score.

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The clock visible on the wall of the Jägerstätters' living room is the clock Fani listened to when she recalled sensing her husband's presence at 4 p.m. on the afternoon of 9 August 1943, the hour Franz was executed.

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Today the fields around St. Radegund are covered with corn, a crop that was not grown at the time, as well as power lines and modern houses, some of them right next to Jägerstätter's house. As a result, the production had to move to higher mountains than the village's location.

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Franz Jägerstätter's fate was little known until 1964, when the American sociologist Gordon Zahn published his biography In Solitary Witness.

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This is Terrence Malick's first feature film since The Thin Red Line (1998) without cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. He was replaced by German Steadicam operator Jörg Widmer, who had worked on feature films shot by Lubezki.

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At the 2007 beatification ceremony in his native Austria, Franz Jägerstätter was remembered as a normal, ordinary man with faults. He sometimes took his faith lightly. He chased after girls, rode a motorcycle and fathered a child out of wedlock.

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The production was shot digitally with the Red Epic Dragon camera system. The camera was chosen for its ability to handle sharp contrast within a scene, preserving detail in both the highlights and the shadows of the image while maintaining realistic colors.

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Franz Jägerstätter was beheaded along with 16 others at Brandenburg prison on 9 August 1943. After the war, a group of nuns brought his ashes to his home village of Sankt Radegund in Upper Austria.

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In addition to his work as a farmer, Franz Jägerstätter also served as sacristan at the local church. He cleaned, rang the bell and prepared weddings and funerals without receiving any compensation.

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At 2 hours and 53 minutes, this film is Terrence Malick's longest to date.

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The film's origins go back to producer Grant Hill's meeting Terrence Malick twenty years earlier on The Thin Red Line (1998). Before Malick began shooting in 2016, the most important thing was meeting Jägerstätter's surviving daughters, who as of 2019 are in their 80s.

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The bishop's sermon about the hammer and anvil is quoted from one of the banned sermons of the anti-regime cardinal Clemens August Graf von Galen, a German count and Bishop of Münster. Von Galen condemned the neo-paganism of Nazi ideology and criticized euthanasia and the persecution of the Church. The von Galen case was a complete nuisance for Hitler's inner circle. Some, such as Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, wanted to get rid of him; however, doing so would create a martyr from an old German family line and affect the morale of German soldiers. They decided to wait until "final victory" and then settle accounts with him. Von Galen, nicknamed "Münster's Lion," even knew Eugenio Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII), who appointed him cardinal in 1946. In 2005 he was beatified like Franz Jägerstätter.

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Jörg Widmer said of the last day of shooting: "There was a 15-minute ovation from the actors and technicians to show how much they had enjoyed being part of the team."

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Franz Jägerstätter's death sentence was overturned by the Berlin regional court, Landgericht Berlin, on 7 May 1997.

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Pre-production lasted 10 weeks, followed by an eight-week shoot, and the remaining period of about three years took place at Terrence Malick's post-production facility in Austin.

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According to James Newton Howard, he felt his composition would best reflect the landscapes of St. Radegund. Accordingly, Howard says, the solo violin used throughout the film represents the connection between the film's two main characters.

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The Jägerstätters lived in St. Radegund, a small village of 500 people in Upper Austria near the Salzburg and German border — in the same province where Hitler was born and spent his early youth — not far from Berchtesgaden, his mountain retreat during the years he led the German state.

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A Stolperstein for Franz Jägerstätter — a concrete cube bearing a brass plate inscribed with the names and life dates of victims of Nazi slaughter or persecution — was laid in Sankt Radegund, Upper Austria, in 2006. Sankt Radegund is his birthplace.

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The shooting crew numbered around 30 people.

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August Diehl described Terrence Malick's process as "search mode." According to Diehl, Malick invites his actors not toward an answer but toward a question, a search.

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According to August Diehl, who played Franz Jägerstätter, he treated the letters between husband and wife — a kind of source material for the script — almost like another screenplay alongside Terrence Malick's own.

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Franz Jägerstätter was a conscientious objector of World War II who was executed by guillotine by the Third Reich in 1943. He was 36 years old at the time.

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The film was previously titled "Radegund."

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The screenplay includes a pre-credits sequence depicting the famous Tiananmen Square incident, in which a man in a white shirt, carrying a grocery bag, stands in front of a line of tanks and blocks their advance toward the square.

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Speaking at the Washington D.C. Air and Space Museum in April 2017, Terrence Malick said that after the looseness of Song to Song (2017) and Knight of Cups (2015), this film would mark a return to a more narrative-driven storytelling structure.

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According to lead actor August Diehl, the film was shot chronologically.

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The film, which held its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, brings Terrence Malick back to the event for the first time since he won the Palme d'Or there in 2011 with The Tree of Life (2011).

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According to producer Grant Hill, editing is a great puzzle for Terrence Malick, since he continually shoots and changes different scenes.

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This film not only deals with World War II and the Nazi regime, it also features two famous actors who portrayed Adolf Hitler: Bruno Ganz in Downfall (2004) and Martin Wuttke in Inglourious Basterds (2009).

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The famous Trappist monk and peace activist Thomas Merton devoted a chapter to Franz Jägerstätter in his book Faith and Violence (1968).

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The title card at the end of the film is taken from the final sentence of George Eliot's "Middlemarch."

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The production also filmed the Third Reich Berlin court hearing scene in the famous Kammergericht building in Berlin-Schöneberg.

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When the film was screened at the Vatican Film Library on December 4, 2019, Terrence Malick made a rare public appearance to present it.

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It is Terrence Malick's second World War II-era film after The Thin Red Line (1998).

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During pre-production, Terrence Malick sent Valerie Pachner, who plays Fani, a book about women who worked on farms during World War I while the men fought far away.

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Several scenes were shot at the farmhouse of Eckinger, a friend and neighbor of the Jägerstätters.

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A Hidden Life was the last film distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures with the 1994 original name and the 1967 MPAA logo.

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Martin Sheen, who played the lead in Terrence Malick's first film Badlands (1973), voices Franz Jägerstätter in Jason A. Schmidt and Ron Schmidt's short documentary Franz Jaegerstaetter: A Man of Conscience (2009).

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As he had done secretly in 2011 for the world premiere of The Tree of Life (2011) at the Cannes Film Festival, the famously reclusive Terrence Malick appeared once again at Cannes, a very rare occurrence, to present this film. He naturally avoided press coverage. However, in the festival's traditional RANG I video, which shows the moments right after the screening, sometimes a short speech by the directors and mostly the audience's reaction, Malick can be seen in a wide shot.

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Jörg Widmer had previously worked with Terrence Malick as Steadicam operator on his five previous films, and on this film he replaced the producer's longtime collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki.

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Franz Jägerstätter's case was the subject of the annual Braunauer Zeitgeschichte-Tage (Braunau Contemporary History Days) conference in 1995.

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August Diehl (Franz Jägerstätter), Alexander Fehling (lawyer Feldman) and Martin Wuttke (Major Kiel) appeared together in Inglourious Basterds (2009), another film set during the Second World War. Waldemar Kobus (Warder Stein) also shared the lead in another film set during the Second World War, The Captain (2017).

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