04. Martin Sheen was initially considered to be too old for the role of Charlie Starkweather.
Casting director Diane Crittenden recalls to GQ, “We were looking for a James Dean character, basically. Somebody confident and a bit narcissistic, and Marty Sheen came to mind, but Terry didn’t think that would fly. He thought he was too old.” But not only that, he nearly didn’t even bother reading for the part.
“I went to this hotel on Sunset Boulevard one day to read for a commercial for a haberdashery. Afterwards, as I headed toward my car, this woman is pounding on the window of the first floor of the hotel, trying to get my attention,” Sheen said to GQ. Crittenden adds, “I ran up to him and said, ‘I’m doing this great script. You should come in and read for it.’ He said, ‘Look, if it’s an independent film with no money, I’m not interested.’ And I said, ‘But it’s so good!'”
At a recent screening of “Badlands” at the LACMA, Sissy Spacek confirmed that Sheen was not the first choice. “I was cast first, and I got to do scenes with every good looking actor in Hollywood, and Terry said, ‘we have to meet with this guy as a favor, but he’s too old.’ That was Martin Sheen, and it was obvious immediately. From the moment we met him he was Kit, he had the boots and everything,” reports ScreenCrave.
But Sheen loved the material and nailed the audition with Spacek telling GQ, “Here I was ready to be nice, and Martin came in, and he just blew us away. I’d been doing the scene over and over with different actors, and it just changed everything. I felt like a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl twirling a baton in my front yard. We were giddy.”
05. Malick’s style was not everyone’s cup of tea and the lengthy and difficult shoot saw three cinematographers, numerous editors and sound men come and go on “Badlands.”
Terrence Malick’s unorthodox, intuitive and open-ended shooting schedule and production style is now the stuff of legend and it was evident from his very first film. “The shoot went on forever because the crew kept quitting,” Spacek told The Guardian. “They were completely brutalized. They’d be setting up one shot over here, then Terry would look over in the other direction where the moon was rising up and he’d go, ‘Let’s shoot over there!’ I have these memories of everyone tearing off across the desert in pursuit of one sunset or another.”
The Best Boy on the film Doug Knapp recalls to GQ, “The first unit must have run three and a half months, and then they did another month to two months of second-unit work with a completely different crew. For a small film, that’s a long time. And the amount of film that was shot—I heard over a million feet on the first unit. More typical for a smaller film would be 250,000 to maybe 500,000 feet. I know they shot a lot on the second unit as well. Terry didn’t seem to know very much about running the camera other than ‘It’s time to reload again, isn’t it?’ He would reload a lot.”
“It just went on and on. Terry just kept shooting. He was about ready to lose his whole shooting crew. It was almost like Mutiny on the Bounty,” actress Janit Baldwin recalls to GQ (her scenes were cut from the final film much to her shock). “He probably shot enough film to make five pictures,” said actor Gary Littlejohn with Assistant Director Bill Scott noting, “There were days that we were knocking down 10,000 feet [of film].” So no surprise, the editing on the film took another ten months, but that’s the process Malick appears to love the most.
“We were in the editing room on ‘Badlands’ for ten months. It was a long time,” Associate Editor and now longtime Malick associate Billy Weber recalled to GQ.” Terry loves editing. More than shooting. In the editing room, you feel like you’re not being rushed into decisions. We put in twelve to fourteen hours a day.” And despite all the people that had their hands in the pot, the final result is pure Malick.
“There were three cinematographers [Brian Probyn, Tak Fujimoto and finally Stevan Larner], lots of editors, sound men,” Art Director and another longtime Malick collaborator Jack Fisk told the Guardian. “Except for the actors, the art department was the only one that completed the film. If the picture survived all those problems, it’s because one thing was consistent: Terry Malick’s vision.”
And on Malick’s subsequent films, his penchant for cycling through numerous members of technical staff would continue. “The Tree of Life” has five credited editors, “The Thin Red Line” has three and “The New World” comes in at four.
06. Terrence Malick went at least $35,000 over budget due to the ever expanding shoot (and was probably not helped by the massive fire on set).
“Badlands” had the tiny budget and difficulties most independent productions face — it was budgeted at $300,000 with producer Edward R. Pressman who put in half, with Malick putting in $25,000 of his own money and raising the rest — but Malick’s organic shooting approach eventually caused the production to go over budget.
But according to Billy Weber on the Criterion edition of “Days Of Heaven,” “Badlands” was made for $350,000 and was bought by Warner Bros. for $900. It was actually shot for $700,000, but $350,000 in costs was deferred until later. “Everyone got paid, but it never made money, it never turned a profit,” Weber said on the disc.
“We were shooting tons of film, which we were not budgeted to shoot. And our schedule was getting extended, which we were not budgeted for,” assistant director Bill Scott told GQ. But it wasn’t just Malick’s own habits that caused costs to rise as a fire on the set likely didn’t help matters. During the scene in which Charlie burns down Holly’s home, three cameras were destroyed and sent at least one person to the hospital.
“Everyone could smell the fumes and we were getting light-headed. Roger [George, special effects]’s assistant lit the torch and said, ‘Are you ready?’ The next thing I remember hearing was a WHOOSH! And I just turned the camera on. I thought this was planned,” recalls Best Boy Doug Knapp. “I bailed out the door. Roger was completely surrounded by flames.”
“I remember seeing Roger on the ground outside later, wrapped. He was a real mess. The local hospital wasn’t equipped to handle him, and there was concern about the great expense of getting him a medical helicopter, but they realized there was no choice. They flew him back to the Sherman Oaks Hospital,” Knapp continues. “All the cameras were engulfed and destroyed. The fire strained relationships, and there were lawsuits afterwards. People were wondering if they were gonna get paid, and they started leaving,” said Tony Palmieri who worked the Assistant Camera. “We were down to maybe five crew members.”
The film wound up going $35,000 over budget, forcing Malick to take writing assignments to help pay for the editing of the film. Yet despite the complications, production plowed on and even now as Malick gets more money and resources to work with, great efforts are taken to keep an intimate feel on set. “The movies and the budgets have gotten bigger, and we take pains to hide stuff from him, so he doesn’t see how many trucks are parked around the corner. Because it doesn’t help him,” says Jack Fisk. But that doesn’t really matter. Malick would be happy shooting film all by himself.
“I don’t think Terry ever finished. I think we all left him in the desert alone,” Palmieri says. Fisk adds, “I think when he left it was snowing. He stayed after everybody else, still shooting. He doesn’t like to stop.”
07. Terrence Malick and producer Lou Stroller got into a fist-fight on the set of the movie.
While Terrence Malick’s faithful actors and crew members stayed with the film through thick and thin, producer Lou Stroller was feeling the effects of Malick’s unorthodox methods.
“Lou realized more than anyone how dangerous circumstances were, given our budget,” Assistant Director Bill Scott told GQ and eventually Stroller and Malick literally came to blows.
“Lou Stroller made some comment about Mrs. Malick, and Terry was not having it, and beat the hell out of him. In true Texas style—he was so Texas. Didn’t even hesitate, just started swinging,” Martin Sheen recalls. “They were down like two buffalo—they were big guys—and they were on the ground, rolling around, and Terry just whupped him. Oh, I acted outraged—’What a breakdown of discipline, this fighting on the set!’—but I couldn’t have been prouder of him. Can you imagine? If more directors would beat up their producers, we’d have a lot more artistic freedom.
