Badlands Quotes

I grew up with Apocalypse Now and Badlands, so I had a real awe thing going.

I call this my church house trilogy. Souls` Chapel really was music from the Mississippi Delta, which to me is a church within itself. The Delta is the church of American Roots music. The Badlands is a cathedral without a top on it. And the Ryman has been called the Mother Church of Country Music, but to me it`s the Mother Church of American Music. If you can think it up, it`s been done there. In my mind, this is kind of a spiritual odyssey as much as anything else, and I had the settings of three churches to make it in.

(on working with Martin Sheen on "Badlands") Martin Sheen was extraordinary. He`s a very gifted man. He`s from a working class family, so he had all the moods down for the film. And when he wasn`t before the cameras, he was helping in the background, wrapping cables, packing up light reflectors. One day I found him going around a gas station and picking up aluminum snapback lids from soda cans. He knew they didn`t exist in 1959.

(On Badlands (1973)) I tried to keep the 1950s to a bare minimum. Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything. I wanted the picture to set up like a fairy tale, outside time, like Treasure Island. I hoped this would, among other things, take a little of the sharpness out of the violence, but still keep its dreamy quality.