Terrence Malick's upcoming film Tree of Life starring Brad Pitt and Sean Penn is somewhat of an engima at the moment. While the official blurb says little more than a normal story, a conversation with an effects artist suggests that there's something rather surprising set to be in the film. Dinosaurs.

The comments can't be sourced at the moment, and that's where you come in as you can help do just that, but if they are true then they're going to add so many questions to this film rather than answers.

So far for The Tree of Life we have a blurb that goes something like this:

“...a family with three boys in the 1950s. The eldest son witnesses the loss of innocence.”

That's it, not much more, but the expectation is high when you consider some of Terrence Malick's previous films like The Thin Red Line and Badlands. Then there's the fact that both Sean Penn and Brad Pitt are leading.

However the story from Hollywood Elsewhere is both cryptic and revealing. In it Jeffrey Wells has a comment from an unnamed story that claims to have found a comment in Empire magazine, but not one that is in its online archives.

“We're just starting work on a project for Terrence Malick, animating dinosaurs, the film is The Tree of Life...It'll be showing in IMAX -- so the dinosaurs will actually be life size -- and the shots of the creatures will be long and lingering.”

Now Wells can't find that anywhere searching over at Empire, so my thoughts are that it'll be in the magazine. So if you have a copy see if you can find it.

If it is true then this story is sounding even more bizarre. Wells complicates the issue even more by revealing that he wrote about Malick's intentions for a film way back in 1978 that would have spanned millennia and had a sequence with a dinosaur sleeping and dreaming in a sea of magma.

What?! Well that was a story way back, but could it have been the beginnings of The Tree of Life? If anyone has a subscription to Empire can you get digging and see if this is actually true?