Badlands

“Badlands. Terry Malick made this movie. It’s one of his great films. Coupling sort of rebellion and youth and suburbia with this strange, kind of monstrous-feeling violence that seems inexplicable. And he really captured the sort of both the beauty and the pain of that place and time and that idea. And he’s just an incredible…”

“We were real into this movie. Remember you painted– you repainted… I repainted that cover. You painted the cover. I don’t even paint. That’s the weird thing. That’s how much we were inspired by Badlands. We liked Badlands so much. I took up painting just to paint the cover of Badlands. It inspired you to paint. It actually did. And it was a pretty good painting. It was a very good– You made the guy’s arm too big, if I remember, honestly. You didn’t have to say that on camera. But yeah.”

“Hello! Yes. Terrence Malick, Badlands. I love this movie so much. 1973. I think this may be my favorite Terrence Malick. Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. I mean, the beautiful performances in this... I had the absolute joy of working with Sissy Spacek some years ago on a film. And I just hounded her like crazy. She's one of my acting heroes, and this is such a beautiful film. I think it's one of the great road movies of all time. And one of the things that I most love about Badlands is I think it may be one of the best car chases in cinema ever. And the reason I say that is I'm a car guy. I've raced... I, like... Cars and bikes are my life. But what Terrence Malick does in this car chase is he doesn't overpower it with stunt driving and vehicles that are obviously built to do it. It looks like these cars are about to break every second and the cars are driven like there are normal people driving a car in a car chase. But, yeah, just a great, just a great film, some great action and just beautiful. Just beautiful Terrence Malick.”

“When I came in I saw Badlands and now I can't see it. Oh, you can't choose Badlands, and promise me you won't choose Badlands. My favorite film. Yeah, cannot choose that. Whoever finds it first gets it. Where's Badlands? Give us a clue. It's order of release, and since it's a great film, they would have released it way earlier than anything else, and be up there. It's my favorite film, by the way, so I showed it— No, I think I saw it first and recommended it to you. This is why Terrence Malick is a genius, like this is just like the most unique thing. Do you know the budget for this? It's like 300 grand or something, it's ridiculous. I can believe that. Yeah, I just find it really dreamy. Remember seeing it the first time and then forgetting what it was and what it was called, but remembering like a shot of a piano on fire, and then that xylophone tune that's all the way through it, and just individual images, like dreamlike. That's an absolutely beautiful film. I want American movies to get back to this moment, and I don't know if it would ever do that, but this is just like, I mean, I could watch this all day. Have you shown Ikhyd it yet? Yeah, I have. I put it on and I just force him to watch it, because every time he is watching like, watched Transformers, like just noise and CGI world, then I put this on to be like, this is real filmmaking. And he's always so like blown away by it, like when he watches a very like subtle kind of a beautiful film that's just got a perfect storyline, and it's a little bit intense for Ikhyd, but I sort of narrate through it for him so he understands it. Mm-hm, and yeah, it's just so beautiful. All right, cool, that was mine, that was my last two.”

“Oh boy, this is one of the all-timers: Badlands, Terry Malick's first movie. And this is one of the great examples of the unreliable narrator, which is hard to pull off in movies. Sissy Spacek is telling a story that is different than the one we're watching. She's telling us a romance in a way; we're watching a murder of a psychopath crossing the plains of America. A stunning movie, I think it's my favorite Terrence Malick movie still. Charles Starkweather, that was the actual killer. Horrible, horrible man. The disc is made in Mexico, it says, so supporting our Mexican economy there.”

“This is one of my favorite films of all time: Badlands. Young Martin Sheen, young Sissy Spacek, directed by Terrence Malick. The style of this movie was very influential to my friends and I when we were just getting into filmmaking. Loved the naturalistic performances, the simplicity of the script. It's just awesome. It's a killer film. Badlands.”