From Dennis Lim’s brief Q&A with Gus Van Sant at Cannes, where Restless is [finally?] debuting:
We did silent takes of almost every scene so we could maybe use them in the editing. Terry Malick apparently shoots silent takes so he can mold what he wants out of the scenes. But with our takes we actually created a silent version because we had enough material and we realized we could — maybe it’ll be on the DVD. Everything is there except the dialogue — all the sounds and music, and you hear all the footsteps, but there’s nobody talking and no lips moving. They’re the same scenes, but it has the distance of not being dialogue-driven. It’s the exact same love story but it plays like a different movie.
It’s funny, because Gerry and Elephant only have like 10 pages of dialogue between them anyway.
Previously: Gus Van Sant’s go-to guy, the greg.org 2003 interview with producer Dany Wolf