Artistic License in The New World

In 2005 Terrence Malick, the elusive American filmmaker, directed The New

World, his reimagination of the John Smith and Pocahontas love story.

It was filmed on location in Virginia almost 400 years after the English arrival and the

founding of Jamestown. An open field, covered with tall blades of grass reaching past shoulders

to the sky, and filled with an eerie silence, bears the history of the settlement.

The effects of the Englishmen, who felled trees and used them to build a giant fortress

for themselves, still remain in the form of flattened forest. The New World differentiates

itself from previous John Smith and Pocahontas love stories with one element – secrecy. In this version