In 2010, the photojournalist Eugene Richards was hired to join the crew of Terrence Malick’s “To the Wonder,” shooting in the town of Bartlesville, in northeastern Oklahoma. In the movie, which was released in 2012, Javier Bardem plays a priest struggling with his faith. Richards—a former photographer for the storied Magnum and VII photo agencies, who has spent his career documenting subjects including poverty, mental illness, and crack-cocaine addiction—was tasked with venturing into the town and finding real residents to interact with Bardem. To locate most of his subjects, Richards got the help of a local Episcopal priest, Father Lee Stephens, who pointed him in the direction of Bartlesville residents who had sought his spiritual counsel. Bardem, dressed in his priest garb, sat with them as Richards filmed, and, as Richards puts it, “The basic question of ‘Tell me a little bit about yourself’ grew into something else.” In the end, Malick used only small slivers of the footage in his film. But Richards was so fascinated by the stories he recorded that he petitioned Malick to release the footage to him for his own use.