![]() ![]() The production designer Jack Fisk, who was to work on all Malick's films, was later praised for his Edward Hopper-esque recreations of small-town America. ("I prefer working behind the camera," he admitted later.) And the photo-shy Malick took the small role of an impromptu caller when the actor he had cast failed to show. It was extremely American, it caught the spirit of the people, of the culture, in a way that was immediately identifiable." Malick, known for his opaque direction, reputedly told the actor on set: "Think of the gun in your hand as a magic wand." Sissy Spacek played Holly, the baton-twirling schoolgirl who elopes with Kit after he kills her father (Warren Oates). It was a period piece, and yet of all time. Martin Sheen, who was cast as Kit, the nonchalant psychopath based on Starkweather, thought Badlands was the best script he had ever read. To my surprise, they didn't pay too much attention to it they invested on faith." "I developed a kind of sales kit with slides and videotapes of actors, all with a view to presenting investors with something that would look ready to shoot. Executive producer Edward R Pressman raised half the budget, while Malick put in $25,000 of his own and harvested the rest from professionals outside the industry - lawyers, doctors, dentists. "They seemed no less improbable a career than anything else." Lanton Mills, the short film he made at the AFI, landed him some lucrative rewriting jobs: he worked on Jack Nicholson's Drive, He Said, and wrote an early draft of Dirty Harry when Marlon Brando was attached to star.īadlands was the first feature he wrote for himself to direct. "I'd always liked movies in a kind of naive way," he explained in 1975. He worked as a philosophy lecturer and journalist before arriving in Los Angeles in autumn 1969 to study at the American Film Institute. Malick, the son of an oil company executive, came relatively late to film-making. It's also a miracle that this mighty work could have emerged from such an apparently shambolic production. ![]() It is eloquent about the intersection of crime, romanticism and myth-making in America, and innovative in its use of colour, editing and voiceover. In fact, no film-maker apart from Jean Vigo has attracted such intense reverence with such a slim output. Malick's transformation from dazzling young director to enigmatic recluse was never going to harm the reputation of one of the few films he actually got around to finishing. Nor do the names Starkweather and Fugate ring too many bells. The story had already been loosely dramatised in the 1963 film The Sadist, though hardly anyone remembers that one now. Terrence Malick began writing his screenplay Badlands, based on the pair's bloodthirsty road trip, in 1970, when he was 27. The couple was apprehended in February 1958 Fugate sentenced to life, while Starkweather went to the electric chair the following year. The media christened him the Mad Dog Killer, and within two months, he had shot dead 10 more people, and fled across the midwest with his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate. In the early hours of December 1 1957, Starkweather murdered a gas-station attendant who refused to let him buy a toy puppy on credit. ![]() C harles Starkweather was a 19-year-old warehouse worker with a James Dean obsession and an unpredictable temper. ![]()
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