If Terrence Malick ever gets round to releasing a director's cut of The Thin Red Line, it's likely to be the longest film ever made. "We shot a million and a half feet," Jim Caviezel (who stars as Private Witt) recalls. That computes to around 100 hours of footage or - to put it put another way - enough for 50 full-length features. Inevitably, vast chunks of the film and even entire performances (including those of Bill Pullman and Mickey Rourke) were lost along the way.

The idea of a small army of Hollywood's biggest stars stuck together in the tropical rainforests for months on end might sound like a recipe for disaster, but Caviezel insists there was no friction on set. "The ego thing got set down real well straightaway… Terry Malick will treat an extra the same way as he will treat Sean Penn.