One of the unusual things about Malick is how much life he lived before he was bitten by the film-making bug. He studied philosophy at Harvard and Oxford, where he wrote a doctoral thesis on the concept of the world in Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Wittgenstein; then he worked as a photographer and wrote for theNew Yorker, before studying film at the American Film Institute Conservatory under George Stevens.
He did a rewrite on the Dirty Harry script for Warner Bros – the serial killer in his version was a vigilante – and Marlon Brando was considered for the lead part. When Clint Eastwood was cast, however, Malick’s script was dropped in favour of an earlier one. The thought of American cinema’s premier Emersonian polishingDirty Harry’s one-liners (“You’ve gotta ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Does your ruin benefit the earth, does it help the grass to grow? Well, does it, punk?”) remains in the realm of conjecture.
So, the man who made Badlands was no neophyte film geek, but an accomplished person, a student and a writer, fluent in Spanish and French, possessed of a quiet confidence that led people to predict great things. While shooting Badlands, he fed Sissy Spacek her lines on rolled-up pieces of paper like love notes, peppering her with questions: “What do you think of this? How do you think Holly would do this?” Spacek remembers, “Right away, he gave me ownership of the character.”
Malick told Sheen, “That gun is like a magic wand.” The spell under which the actors worked was so intense that the finished film came as something of a shock. “He’s a killer . . . a horrible killer,” said Sheen of the character he played, after seeing the film for the first time, as if he had realised it only then.
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