Trivia

In an interview, Christian Bale spoke of the eccentric directing styles of Terrence Malick. He said that he wanted to see what Malick would do if he just walked out of a shot and towards the crew. Malick followed Christian with the camera and, as Christian put it, "[the crew] were running, and they were diving behind bushes to get away from the camera."

Before the start of the shoot, director Terrence Malick and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki devised a series of photography rules that were to be used during filming. They were: 1. No artificial lights. Everything is shot in natural light. 2. No crane or dolly shots, just handheld or Steadicam shots. 3. Everything is shot in the subjective view. 4. All shots must be deep-focus, that is, everything (foreground and background) is visible and focused. 5. You (the camera crew) are encouraged to go and shoot unexpected things that might happen in accident or if your instinct tells you so. 6) Selective shots: any shot that does not have visual strength is not used.According to Lubezki, many of these rules ended up being broken. Artificial light was used, as were shallow-focus shots.

Terrence Malick was so intent on this movie being authentic that he told the actors to do as the characters would. On his breaks, Christian Bale would even sit in John Rolfe's chair and smoke a pipe, and Q'orianka Kilcher did Algonquian dances.

Because of Terrence Malick's habit of cutting and editing his films repeatedly, much of the music that James Horner wrote for the film never made it to the final cut, except for a few fragments. In an interview, Horner said that Malick loved his score, but had no clue about what to do with it. He concluded that working with Malick was "the most disappointing experience I've ever had with a man" and that "I never felt so letdown by a filmmaker in my life".

Algonquin is a language spoken by natives in Canada that does indeed only have about 3000 speakers left today. The Algonquian language spoken in the movie, however, was a reconstruction of the East Algonquian language called Powhatan or Virginia Algonquian. There are no native speakers of this language alive today. The language went extinct at the end of the 18th century. Linguist and Professor for English at UNC Charlotte Blair A. Rudes reconstructed Virginia Algonquian based on other East Algonquian languages and John Smith's records (among others).