The Playlist is reporting about having spoken to a source in Austin during SXSW about Terrence Malick‘s Tree of Life undergoing additional shooting and that the film “is about a year away from completion and maybe a year and half away total.” Which means, if this turns out to be valid information, that we’re looking at a mid-2010 release.

Malick’s parallel IMAX project is said to be titled Voyage of Time. An anonymous Awards Daily commenter who claimed to be posting from Malick’s home town of Austin (but who could in fact be the great Ahmed Khan posting from Kabul) wrote earlier this month that Time will run in the vicinity of 45 minutes, that some Time footage may be used for Tree of Life, and that it’ll be released simultaneously with Tree of Life.

Clearly, Malick has an attachment to secrecy. He seems to live for it almost. To be able to work within such an utterly secret vacuum that no one is able to learn any substantive-sounding information is perhaps (who knows?) the bottom-line electric lightning-bolt element in Terrence Malick’s life and head. Secrecy! But with all the sniffing around no one, it seems, has stopped to consider the absolute lunacy of attempting to blend a story about an anxious 20th Century man (Sean Penn) and recollections of his distant father (Brad Pitt) with prehistoric pre-time elements, including a prehistoric creature sleeping in a sea of magma. Good God!

Until somebody closer to the action or someone with a professional rep with some kind of valid professional relationship with Malick spills I’m treating the whole thing as one big dinosaur wank.