Toward the end of Terrence Malick's elegiac film, "The New World," the young Indian princess known as Pocahontas - the "delight and darling" of her father, the king of the Powhatans of coastal Virginia - pauses in front of a gilt cage containing a live skunk. Brought from the New World to the Old in 1616, this morose creature, curled as tight as a fist, is being presented to the English court alongside a bald eagle, an Indian priest and Pocahontas herself. The princess, dressed in Jacobean costume, a ruff collar fluting around her throat, and played by the sublimely lovely newcomer Q'orianka Kilcher, looks both at ease and entirely foreign. When she sees this pitiful captive, does she see any part of herself?

If that question is never answered in "The New World," it is because Mr. Malick, who wrote and directed the film, his fourth in three decades, never presumes to know the answer. For the filmmaker, who is more poet than historian, Pocahontas is clearly a metaphor (virgin land, as it were), but to see her as exclusively metaphor would only repeat history's error. What interests Mr. Malick is how and why enlightened free men, when presented with new realms of possibility, decided to remake this world in their own image: free men like Capt. John Smith (Colin Farrell), who marvels at the beauty of a place where "the blessings of the earth are bestowed on all" while Indians lie bound in his boat, and who claims to love, only to destroy.

Smith, whose histories provide much of what is known about Pocahontas, was part of a contingent of some 100 men charged with founding an American colony on behalf of the London-based Virginia Company. In April 1607, three of the company's ships dropped anchor off the Virginia coast and a group ventured ashore. What they found, one of the actual settlers wrote in a near-swoon, were "faire meddowes and goodly tall Trees, with such Fresh-waters running through the woods as I was almost ravished at the sight thereof." The colonists had entered a paradise, but they were looking for gold and a river route to the South Seas, not meadows and trees. They found Indians, too, though in Mr. Malick's description of this mutual encounter, it was not a happy discovery for either party.

The filmmaker opens "The New World" with images of rippling water, swimmers shot from beneath and the woman we will soon come to know as Pocahontas as she utters what sounds like a prayer ("sing the song of a land"). After a brief credit sequence, James Horner's score gives way to chirping birds, blowing wind and what might be the rumble of distant thunder or a cannon blast. This cacophony then melts into the opening notes of the prelude to Wagner's "Das Rheingold," the first opera in "Der Ring des Nibelungen." A haunting drone meant to suggest the rippling of the Rhine River, the prelude begins as a whisper that grows progressively louder until it reaches a crescendo, signaling the moment when the Rhinemaidens realize that the Nibelung dwarf Alberich has forsworn love for gold and power.

The musical chords ripple with escalating intensity as Indians run along the shore, excitedly pointing at the three ships. With a restless, searching camera that finds realms of beauty in a single leaf and the downy hair on a woman's forearm, Mr. Malick gives us a palpable sense of what this unspoiled place must have looked like to the English, what was found and soon would be lost. Like Smith, we come to this new world slowly, first in intoxicating glimpses, then in sweeping vistas. A soldier and an autodidact, Smith escaped captivity in Turkey and was said to have read Machiavelli; Mr. Farrell's captain doesn't look like much of a reader (or a greedy dwarf), but he does look like trouble.

Soon after they land, the colonists shut themselves in a fort and raise a towering cross. Smith, meanwhile, charged with finding fresh supplies, is imprisoned by Indians, brought before Pocahontas's father (called Powhatan and played by August Schellenberg) and either almost killed or just seriously frightened. The story of Smith's brush with death, which may have instead been an initiation ritual, remains under dispute. Mr. Malick stages the scene like a hallucination, a freak-out with shadows and smoke. Smith wrote that Pocahontas, then between 10 and 12 - though here she looks dangerously older - begged her father to spare the colonist's life. The purported rescue inspired myths about a romance, which in turn fed lurid fantasies about natives and the forces of civilization and helped fuel justifications for the domination of a land and its people.

In a gutsy move, the filmmaker represents this romance between Pocahontas and Smith as real, but only to flip it on its head. In quiet, drifting scenes set amid surreally beautiful wilds (the Virginia locations are paradisiacal) the two slowly circle each other like dancers, their respective interior monologues filling in the silence between them. In the past, Mr. Malick's fondness for voice-over has sometimes seemed like a crutch, symptomatic of a weak screenplay, as in his last film, "The Thin Red Line," or as a misplaced bid at naïve consciousness. Here, though, you feel as if you are eavesdropping inside the characters' heads. While Pocahontas's voice-overs are filled with schoolgirlish yearning, Smith sounds dangerously lofty, as if he is rehearsing the dissembling that will shape his later histories.

If the affair seems strangely ethereal, as if it were taking place in another dimension, in a lovelier, more enchanted realm, it is because Mr. Malick is fashioning a countermythology in "The New World," one to replace, or at least challenge, a mythology already in place. In Mr. Malick's interpretation, Pocahontas is no longer the simple girl of Smith's fanciful imaginings or the acquiescent native who bows to take the English yoke, thereby making way for all the colonies to come and all the catastrophes perpetuated against native peoples. Pocahontas is still irrefutably "other"; for a filmmaker living 400 years later in another world and different skin, there is no alternative. He is still putting words into her mouth, but with scrupulous tenderness.

The story of Pocahontas has inspired poems and portraits, histories and biographies and a 1995 Disney animated feature in which the cartoon princess wears what looks like a very full C-cup. "Captain Smith and Pocahontas," Peggy Lee sang, "had a very mad affair." Ripe for discovery and exploitation, she is uncharted territory and she has always sent temperatures rising. But Mr. Malick's Pocahontas, while impossibly young (the mature-looking Ms. Kilcher was 14 when the film was shot), is also the agent of her own destiny, never more so than after she and Smith are separated. The two are parted just as Mr. Farrell's moony reveries threaten to drown Pocahontas's voice. Once he is out of the picture, though, she secures her voice and then a husband (an excellent Christian Bale), and ushers the story toward its shattering close.

The real Pocahontas died in England in 1617, probably of tuberculosis or pneumonia, between the ages of 20 to 22, in the presence of her first or second husband. By then she was Lady Rebecca and had met Ben Jonson. At one time, her life may have been her own, but with her death that was no longer true. Like those Indian princesses who have long been a favorite of Hollywood, the pop Pocahontas who later emerged in song and cartoons is a comfortable fiction, at least for a country eager to tell its story in the best possible light. In that telling, Pocahontas is the noble savage exalted by an impulse to self-sacrifice for a white man. In Mr. Malick's telling, Pocahontas is a woman whose story has the reach of myth and the tragic dimension of life.

"The New World" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). There is some intense, bloodless violence and the beautiful underage lead actress may cause cardiac arrest among some viewers.

The New World

Opens Sunday in New York and Los Angeles.

Written and directed by Terrence Malick; director of photography, Emmanuel Lubezki; edited by Richard Chew, Hank Corwin, Saar Klein and Mark Yoshikawa; music by James Horner; production designer, Jack Fisk; produced by Sarah Green; released by New Line Cinema. Running time: 160 minutes.

WITH: Colin Farrell (John Smith), Christopher Plummer (Capt. Christopher Newport), August Schellenberg (Powhatan), Q'orianka Kilcher (Pocahontas) and Christian Bale (John Rolfe).

However, when Martin and Coldplay's guitarist Jon Buckland recently chatted with Yahoo! Music editor Lyndsey Parker, they showed that success hadn't gone to their heads like a proverbial rush of blood. Instead, they talked excitedly about playing in low-rent studios and intimate clubs; claimed they didn't consider themselves a "big band"; and questioned whether they deserved their fame and fortune at all. And world domination didn't even appear to be an explicit goal of theirs; instead, they seemed content to merely dominate a few Midwestern high school proms--which Coldplay ballads like "The Scientist" and recent single "Fix You" have surely already done.

Read on for the full interview, in which you can learn all about Coldplay's prom plans, Johnny Cash tribute, cocktail recipes, and more. To borrow a phrase from the band's new single, let's talk...

YAHOO! MUSIC: I've heard that making X&Y was a struggle--is this true? And if so, how and why?

CHRIS: Well, I think any time you commit to making something as good as you possibly can, it automatically comes with struggling and tension, because nothing great comes easily. And I'm not saying that we necessarily think that our work is great. But we do think that we try as hard as possible. And with that comes moments of despair. But it comes with great highs as well. So it's worth it to be a struggle, basically.

YAHOO! MUSIC: Why did it take so long to record?

JON: We'd always planned to take a long time recording the album. We thought we'd release it this year, but it sort of took a bit longer than we thought, because we gave ourselves a deadline and then realized that what we'd done hadn't been good enough. We hadn't performed it well enough. And so we had to go back, record some more, re-record some stuff, write some more songs. So it was kind of a slow process, really.

YAHOO! MUSIC: But then it all sort of came together at the last minute, right?

CHRIS: Well, a lot of stuff did come together at the last minute, but probably because it was the last minute, you know? We seem to respond well to deadlines. And although we broke about four of them, each one we responded well to--except for the fact that we didn't actually meet it! [laughs] And like Jonny said, we knew we didn't want to release anything until this year, because we wanted to just be out of people's faces for a while. We also wanted to wait until we had totally natural songs. And by that I mean songs that just seemed to arrive without too much coaxing. And we were still missing about one and a half songs, in January [2005], but we knew we wanted to get the record out by June [2005]. So the last few weeks was very panicked and fraught, but within that time a couple of songs came out and we did a lot of work that we were really happy with.

YAHOO! MUSIC: With your previous success in the States, did you feel a lot of pressure to make this another huge album?

JON: Really all the pressure, the outside pressure, had not really that much effect on us. 'Cause we were locked away in a studio, and we just wanted to make the best thing we possibly could--which is enough pressure! You can't really think about everybody else, you know. It has to come down to what makes us excited and what we like to do. And then we hope that we're not that different from everybody else, so that makes other people excited, too.

CHRIS: We don't really see ourselves as a big band, you know. We don't meet the however many million who got the last album; we don't see those people very much. So I mean, to us, when we're releasing a new record, it feels like we're starting from scratch. Obviously, we're not starting quite from scratch. But that's how we behave, anyway.

YAHOO! MUSIC: Didn't you go back to the some dumpy studio or something like that?

CHRIS: Yeah, we really went back to basics. I think some of the stuff that comes along with being a big band isn't necessarily that healthy for creativity--or for your relationship, when you start traveling separately and you start being sort of naturally divided. So it took us a while to think, "Well, really we kind of miss each other, and we don't really need all this paraphernalia." So we did book out a tiny studio in North London and just went back in there with the most bare of instruments, and rocked. [laughs] Well, not rocked---soft rock. We soft-rocked.

YAHOO! MUSIC: So, do you think this album rocks harder than the last two?

CHRIS: Um, well, I think we made a conscious decision on this album, or I certainly did, to turn Jonny up. Just because we felt it was time that the world heard him. [laughs] And although he didn't agree, he was outvoted.

JON: We also we listened to a lot of electronic records while we were making it, and before making the album. We got heavily into Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode...

CHRIS: ... Brian Eno...

JON: Yeah. Bring in lots of good keyboard sounds. [Coldplay bassist] Guy [Berryman] had collected about a billion different keyboards and all these different keyboard sounds. And so we just went through them with him, finding nice sounds.

CHRIS: One of the benefits of having a shopaholic bass player is that you have every keyboard ever invented somewhere in the vicinity. And we made full use of it.

YAHOO! MUSIC: How do you know when to stop, though, and not just throw on effects or weird contraptions for the sake of it, until there's too much going on?

CHRIS: Well, we kind of know when to stop adding things to a song when it starts to sound bad, you know? It's a bit like making a cocktail, I suppose. Certainly when I used to experiment with making drinks when I was younger, there'd be one ingredient that you just knew had just pushed it too far. [laughs] And it sort of looks a bit gray, you know.

YAHOO! MUSIC: What was this famous comment that you made to the press about "reinventing the wheel" with this album?

CHRIS: Um, well, I often say things that I struggle to explain. [laughs] What I meant by that was we want to challenge ourselves--we want to reinvent our wheel. And, in trying to reinvent our wheel, we realized we actually quite liked our old wheel. So what we did really was just kind of put new 22-inch rims on our wheel. So our wheel looks a lot better. It's still our wheel, but it looks a lot better.

YAHOO! MUSIC: So you pimped your ride, so to speak.

CHRIS: We pimped our ride, exactly. [laughs]

YAHOO! MUSIC: You mentioned earlier about trying to concentrate on your friendships within the band--were those relationships at all strained because you had difficulty recording this album?

JON: I think the fact that we're friends means that we can deal with pressure and stress a lot easier than if we weren't. I think it's always in the back of your mind that you really care about the person who you're telling that you don't like what they're doing. I mean, you get angry with each other, but never for more than a few minutes.

CHRIS: I think we're at a level of familiarity now where any argument is just like an argument with your dad or something. You know that there's a deep love underneath it.

YAHOO! MUSIC: You've been quoted as saying if you can't top your last record, you're going to...

CHRIS: Quit?

YAHOO! MUSIC: Right, quit. Is that true?

CHRIS: Well, you know, rumors are very healthy things. [laughs] We have plenty of them around us. I just think that if we can't produce anything that's better than what we've produced before, then we'll just, you know, open up a museum or something. Otherwise, the only reason we'd continue, honestly, would be to keep talking about fair trade after that. You know, the whole fair trade thing is very important to us. So that would be the only thing that would stop us from stopping if we weren't very good anymore. But you see, other people might say that we should have stopped after the last album, after they hear this one! You know, it's hard to gauge. [laughs]

YAHOO! MUSIC: So, do you think X&Y is your best work yet?

CHRIS: I think we're far too close to it to know if it's our best work yet. Every parent, when they take their kid to school, secretly thinks that their kid is the best. But then ours might be the one that actually is the troublemaker and not very good at all. [laughs]

YAHOO! MUSIC: How do you think your fans will react to your new album?

JON: We hope that they'll take something positive from this record. You know, they'll put it on and feel like it was worth spending $12.

CHRIS: Yeah. I mean, an album--when you're a kid or when you've got a job that isn't being in a band--is quite expensive, you know. On a very simple level, it's very important to us that the people that bought our last record feel validated when they buy this one--or download it, whatever they do. Partly on a financial level, that they haven't wasted their money, and partly because, you know, I always have this image in my head of like a 15-year-old kid in Nebraska who buys our last album and then takes a whole load of flak for it from people around him, but then he gets this album and everyone realizes that they were all wrong, and they celebrate him and he becomes prom king. [laughs] That's really what we're going for.

YAHOO! MUSIC: OK. Do you think you need to take a step back, for a bit, because your whirlwind of success has done a number on your head?

CHRIS: I mean, I think it's important to leave the promotional trail after every album. Because otherwise you start singing about it. No one wants to hear songs about hotels--well, some Eagles fans do. [laughs] But most people don't wanna hear songs about the problems of touring and all. You know, the poor quality of room service in Boise. Who wants to hear songs about that? And in order to write songs that aren't about touring and promotion and everything, you have to not be on tour and not be promoting.

JON: Yeah, and besides, we'd lose all our family and friends. [laughs] We'd never see them.

YAHOO! MUSIC: So what do you guys do on your down time?

JON: Well, during our down time, we write. It's not really "down time" to us--it's "up time." [laughs] It's the time where we try and create something that we'll then be able to travel around with.

YAHOO! MUSIC: Are you guys ready to get back on the promotional treadmill?

JON: We're already on it. [laughs]

YAHOO! MUSIC: I guess you're right--you're doing this interview, after all. So, since you're not singing about hotel rooms, are there any overall lyrical themes on this record?

CHRIS: Well, the album title is X&Y, and that's really supposed to reflect the tension of opposites and answers for things that don't really have answers. You know, the yin and yang of everything. Those are the themes that keep popping up: the happiness of relationships and friendships and everything combined with the stress of them. The happiness of existence combined with the confusion as to what it's all about. They're very simple themes. [laughs] But hey, you can sure write a lot of songs about them.

YAHOO! MUSIC: Chris, did getting married and becoming a dad affect any of your lyrics?

CHRIS: I think being a dad, definitely--anything that affects your life affects your lyrics. And being a dad definitely affects your life and makes you see everything, I think, in more extreme color. I mean, I worship my daughter. So that's a great source of happiness. But also, you have all this fear about it and all that stuff. But yeah, everything that happens to us influences our lyrics.

YAHOO! MUSIC: Tell me about "'Til Kingdom Come," the secret track on the CD. I understand it was supposed to be a Johnny Cash song at one time?

JON: Yeah, it was written for Johnny Cash, for him to play. Chris actually recorded it with Rick Rubin, ready for Johnny to sing over. But unfortunately, he never had a chance, because he died. And so we recorded it, 'cause we really liked it. We recorded it and put it on the album as a secret track. That was basically it, our tribute to Johnny Cash.

YAHOO! MUSIC: Why did you make it a secret track?

CHRIS: We have no idea why. See it's not really that "secret" anymore. It's the least secret track I've ever heard of, 'cause we talk about it in every interview, and we play it at every concert! [laughs] So it's sort of like people who are in the closet when really, everyone already knows. It's like that.

YAHOO! MUSIC: Tell me about these club shows you did getting ready to tour. That's sort of the back-to-basics thing again...

JON: Well, we did a tour of club shows to basically get us back into touring again, get us good live again. Because we felt like it would be a terrible thing to jump straight back into doing massive venues. First of all, because we hadn't played any gigs for a year and a half. But also, because it's an exciting way to start.

CHRIS: Yeah. It makes you feel like you're a new band. You feel like a new band with everything to prove--which is what we are. We've got everything to prove. And playing in a sweaty club in Chicago is the way to do it.

JON: You can't hide behind anything in small clubs. You can't hide behind big production or anything. It's just you and the crowd.

YAHOO! MUSIC: When you did those club shows after being offstage for so long, did you feel rusty?

CHRIS: I mean, we're always a bit rusty on some things. But, um, what was the first one? The Troubadour, in Los Angeles...yeah, at the Troubadour we were basically sh-t. [laughs] But what can you do? You've gotta start somewhere.

YAHOO! MUSIC: When a lot of U.K. bands tour the U.S., they tend to do the major cities and that's it. But you guys seem to really do a lot of touring.

CHRIS: Well, if you want to do it properly in America, you've gotta come and spend time here. We've spent months and months; I mean, we spent basically half our time here. But a lot of our friends, like our friend Tim who's in a band called Ash, they tour here a lot too. The one thing that we had that some British bands don't have, was [L.A. radio station] KROQ was so nice to us. And WBCN in Boston, and people like that. And without that, we would really be nowhere still.

JON: We were fortunate enough that our first tour in America was pretty much sold-out. I mean, not many bands start in that position. So we've just felt incredibly lucky, and we used our opportunity as much as we could.

YAHOO! MUSIC: Does it boggle your mind at all that you're reached such a huge level of success?

CHRIS: Well, the success we've had, particularly things like Grammys and stuff, it's just incredible, you know. The feeling of getting a Grammy is a great, great, great feeling. But there's a thing behind it, where you feel like going, "We're really not worthy of this." Which makes you just work harder and harder. And so, we don't really think we deserve our success, but we do work as hard as possible to try and validate it.

YAHOO! MUSIC: Why don't you think you deserve it?

CHRIS: Well, we feel like we live in a world of 6 or 7 billion people, so it's lucky enough to be born in an affluent country. It's then lucky enough to be able to be educated and then, you know, to get into a band and be signed is pretty ridiculous. To get into a band, be signed and then, you know, start winning Grammys and everything--it's just beyond anyone's wildest dream. So I don't think anybody would feel that they "deserved" it. But we do feel like we'll try and prove ourselves.