New film makes star of 15-year-old ‘Pocahontas’
From Arthur Spiegelman

LOS ANGELES—The new film’s reclusive director is happy to let his movie speak for itself, since he doesn’t give interviews. The male star would be happy to promote the film, but he’s in rehab. So this leaves a 15-year-old former street singer, who worries whether she will be working at age 16, to bear the burden of promoting “The New World,” a $30 million tale of the founding of Britain’s colony in early 17th century Virginia.
The movie opens on Christmas Day in New York and Los Angeles, and elsewhere in the United States in January. If anyone can lift director Terrence Malick’s new movie out of art-house obscurity, it is fresh young actress Q’Orianka Kilcher. She is the real star of “The New World” and to hear the producer tell it, deserving of an Academy Award nomination.
Kilcher appears in almost every scene as Indian princess Pocahontas, who saves the British colonists from starvation and destruction after they cross the Atlantic to settle on land ruled by her father. She has a starry-eyed romance with explorer Capt. John Smith, played by Irish actor Colin Farrell, and later marries a stolid English planter, John Rolfe, played by cinema’s new Batman, Christian Bale. She gets banned by her own people for helping the English survive and travels to England to meet the king as a reward for her services to the crown.
Producer Sarah Green says there is no reason why Kilcher, whose father is a Peruvian Quechua Indian and whose mother is Swiss, should not be the spokeswoman for Malick’s latest film. “This is really Pocahontas’s story,” Green said.
MALICK MOVIE MAGIC
But it is also a Terrence Malick film — meaning it is long and lyrical, heavy on lush or menacing scenes of nature and bound to split the critics into two camps, one that calls him a filmmaking genius and the other that thinks that he it is so over the top that he gives pretension a bad name. Cast members declare themselves impressed with his ability to improvise a scene.