Badlands (film) - Production

Production

Malick, a protégé of Arthur Penn (whom he thanked in the film's end credits), began work on Badlands after his second year as a student at the American Film Institute. "I wrote and, at the same time, developed a kind of sales kit with slides and video tape of actors, all with a view to presenting investors with something that would look ready to shoot," Malick said. "To my surprise, they didn't pay too much attention to it; they invested on faith. I raised about half the money and executive producer Edward Pressman the other half."

Principal photography took place in the summer of 1972, beginning in July, with a non-union crew and a considerably low budget of $300,000 (excluding some deferments to film labs and actors).

The film was edited by Robert Estrin; Billy Weber is credited as associate editor. Both he and the art designer Jack Fisk went on to work on all of Malick's features made to date.

Though Malick paid close attention to period detail, he did not want it to overwhelm the picture. "I tried to keep the 1950s to a bare minimum," he said. "Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything. I wanted the picture to set up like a fairy tale, outside time." Malick, at a news conference coinciding with the film's festival debut, called Kit "so desensitized that can regard the gun with which he shoots people as a kind of magic wand that eliminates small nuisances." Malick also pointed out that "Kit and Holly even think of themselves as living in a fairy tale", and he felt that was very appropriate as "children's books like Treasure Island were often filled with violence." He also hoped a "fairy tale" tone would "take a little of the sharpness out of the violence but still keep its dreamy quality."

Warner Brothers eventually purchased and distributed the completed film for a sum just under a million dollars.