08. Classmate Edward Brackman claims the extensive voiceover was used to patch up holes in the narrative.
The audience is guided on the strange journey by Holly and Kit in “Badlands” by Sissy Spacek‘s evocative and not particularly plot driven voiceover, but according to Jake Brackman, it was more by necessity than design. “There were so many holes in the storytelling because of the constraints and difficulties of the shooting that it entailed a tremendous amount of fooling around with the voice-over to tell the story, and also to conceal the expositional nature of the voice-over by putting in a lot of oblique voice-over that was not at all expositional,” he told GQ. “It was like patching the holes in the road.”
But speaking to Sight & Sound, Malick says he had a very specific purpose for Holly’s narration. “There is some humor in the picture, I believe. Not jokes. It lies in Holly’s mis-estimation of her audience, of what they will be interested in or ready to believe. She seems at times to think of her narration as like what you get in audio-visual courses in high school. When they’re crossing the badlands, instead of telling us what’s going on between Kit and herself, or anything of what we’d like and have to know, she describes what they ate and what it tasted like, as though we might be planning a similar trip and appreciate her experience, this way.”
And certainly, to this day, both Spacek and Sheen relish even the brief morsels of dialogue they got in the film. “The way he used narration was so amazing. On the screen, you’d see the flattest, most uninteresting landscape you’ve ever seen in your life, and the voice-over would be, “Kit told me to enjoy the scenery. I did.’ Or ‘Kit shot a football. He said it was excess baggage.’ I don’t typically remember dialogue years after making a film, but periodically in life, someone says something, or something happens, and I’ll get a cue from ‘Badlands.'” Spacek told GQ. Sheen adds, “I couldn’t tell you what I said yesterday, but that dialogue, oh yeah. Easily. Easily.”
09. Terrence Malick makes a cameo in the film.
The reclusive, press shy director did the unthinkable and actually appeared in “Badlands.” It’s hard to believe but as Martin Sheen recalled to GQ, the director stepped in when an actor didn’t show and had serious thoughts about re-shooting the scene with the actor convincing him not to. “One day an actor didn’t show up to play a part, so Terry did. He’s so self-conscious, and he did not want to be in the film, and he told me he was going to re-shoot his character. I assured him that I would never shoot that scene with anyone but him. We’d had this extraordinary time together, and I knew that he would never go on camera again the rest of his career,” Sheen said. Take a look at the scene below (via FILMdetail).
