From The Tree of Life to Black Flies, a look back at Tye Sheridan's ideal journey

Revealed as a child in Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, Tye Sheridan has since grown up in front of the cameras of Jeff Nichols, Steven Spielberg, Paul Schrader… For Black Flies, he also became a producer, to better affirm his faith in cinema. 'author.

Terrence Malick, Jeff Nichols… The filmmakers he worked with Tye Sheridan are listed on its Wikipedia entry. But some of them are also in the end credits of Black Flies, the hallucinatory New York ambulance film directed by Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire, in the “thanks” section. A way for the French filmmaker to salute his colleagues who paved the way for the young Texan actor? Not quite, he explained to us at the Cannes Film Festival last May, where Black Flies was shown in competition:

“Editing was a fairly complicated process, Jean-Stéphane had difficulty finding the final form of the film. A consequence of his very particular filmic process: immersive, with this camera always moving… After a while, by seeing him bang his head against the walls, I allowed myself, as a producer, to let him offer to show the film to a few filmmaker friends, who could give him feedback. So I called Terry (Malick), Jeff (Nichols), and then Darren Aronofsky, who had the rights to the book for a long time Black Flies and with whom I made friends recently… They were all very responsive, and helped Jean-Stéphane to refine the film.“

Black Flies: sensory and hypnotic (review)

Tye Sheridan doesn't show off because he has a big address book: it's simply that, since his beginnings in cinema, direct conversation with the great authors of American cinema has been a natural process for him. A consequence of having, at the age of 11, been chosen by the brilliant Terrence Malick, among a crowd of 10,000 other children, to play the offspring of Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain in the landmark film The Tree of LifePalme d'or 2011. It was not, however, the beginning of a vocation but “an adventure in an unknown and exciting world, like a stay in a special summer camp“.

Sheridan will be hired immediately by two disciples of Malick, Jeff Nichols and David Gordon Green, to play in Mud then Joe. It was then that the young actor's desire for cinema crystallized for good: “Very precisely the evening of the screening of Mud at the Cannes Film Festival. An electrifying moment, one of the strongest of my life. The huge screen, the breath-holding room, the standing ovation… It was the first time that I truly became aware of the immense emotion that cinema can arouse in people.“

Last traces of childhood

The distinctive feature of Tye Sheridan's career will therefore be an obsession with “filmmaker-driven” cinema, primarily in the service of directors. What doesn't necessarily go without saying in Hollywood:

“Many of my fellow actors swear by the script, or their character. For them, the director comes second.”

Its spectrum ranges from the old masters (The Card Counter by Paul Schrader) to marginal eccentrics (The Mountain: An American Odyssey by Rick Alverson, also thanked in the credits of Black Flies). Even when he starred in the inevitable superhero film, it was with Bryan Singer (X-Men: Apocalypse). And the only real blockbuster he has so far carried on his shoulders was from Steven Spielberg, who filmed him in Ready Player One like a sort of alter-teen, a reflection of his own youth.

From film to film, the directors capture the transformation of Tye Sheridan, the gradual disappearance of the last traces of childhood. A form of hardening, too, the actor often playing taciturn types, immersed in themselves, taken under their wing by older, virile archetypes: Matthew McConaughey in MudNicolas Cage in JoeOscar Isaac in The Card CounterBen Affleck in The Tender Barnow Sean Penn in Black Flies.

This last film, the actor also wanted to produce it, as “a way to help create the best artistic environment possible, to show that I give my all to the film“. And then? He recently toured in The Order by Justin Kurzel, about a group of white supremacists. The film must be being edited. Terrence Malick has probably seen it before.