Script To Screen: “Badlands”
A memorable scene from the 1975 movie Badlands, written and directed by Terrence Malick.
A memorable scene from the 1975 movie Badlands, written and directed by Terrence Malick.
Plot Summary: Based on the Starkweather-Fugate killing spree of the 1958, in which a fifteen-year-old girl and her twenty-five-year-old boyfriend slaughtered her entire family and several others in the Dakota badlands.
The movie version of the scene:
It’s almost word for word an exact translation to the screen. But watch what Malick does with “They continue dancing,” a few nice camera shots to let the moment breathe. Any fans of Badlands? Where does it fit in the list of Malick movies?
One of the single best things you can do to learn the craft of screenwriting is to read the script while watching the movie. After all a screenplay is a blueprint to make a movie and it’s that magic of what happens between printed page and final print that can inform how you approach writing scenes. That is the purpose of Script to Screen, a Go Into The Story series where we analyze a memorable movie scene and the script pages that inspired it.
For more articles in the Script To Screen series, go here.