There were two main influences on Terrence Malick when making this movie. One of the main influences was film-maker Arthur Penn, Malick's mentor, who had directed what is probably the most famous "killing spree" movie of all time, Bonnie and Clyde. Bonnie and Clyde was in turn influenced by the French New Wave and became instantly influential on a younger generation of film makers. It also influenced a resurgence in "love on the run" movies that saw the leading characters, usually in a romantic relationship, engaging in horiific murder sprees, and Badlands was a culmination of all of these movies.
Malick was also intent on making a spiritual successor to Penn's seminal movie, rather than making a film that was seen as derivative. He did not want to elaborate on the story line, but instead wanted to feature the same elements, themes, cinematic styles and events as its predecessor. Bonnie and Clyde's violence is almost choreographed in its brutality but the violence in Badlands psychotic, matter of fact and driven in its intensity. Bonnie and Clyde was influential upon Malick and enabled him to develop a darker vision of American youth than his mentor had presented.
The other key influence on Malick was the real life couple upon whose life stories he had based his characters, although he initially denied this to be the case. In 1958, Charles Raymond Starkweather, nineteen, and his girlfriend, fourteen year old Caril Ann Fugate went on a killing spree in Nebraska and Wyoming between December 1957 and January 1958, although most of their victims were slaughtered between January 21st and January 29th Starkweather was ultimately executed just seventeen months after his arrest; Fugate was sentenced to jail, and was released after seventeen years incarcerated. The youth of the spree killers influenced Malick, who was fascinated by their complete lack of empathy for others and the ease with which they carried out the killings. It is this lack of empathy that he recreated in his characters, and that critics found disturbing, and also the quality that made them greatly different from Bonnie and Clyde, despite the obvious cinematic influence that Penn's film had been upon him.
