My Extraordinary Ordinary Life

by Sissy Spacek

  Jack later admitted that he often was quietly watching me from another room while I explored the set. Badlands was like an enormous art project for him, and Terry and I were his grateful beneficiaries.

  Terry Malick only shoots in natural light, so Jack would build several identical sets with skylights and windows facing different directions so that Terry could keep shooting as the sun moved across the sky. Terry rarely saw the sets before they were finished. He told me that working with Jack was like being on an Easter egg hunt—he never knew what wonderful things he would find when we arrived at a location. Usually, Jack would have just left, leaving behind an abundance of riches, and a complete environment for us to work in.

  Terry and Jack never mapped out exactly how a set should be built. They didn’t use storyboards or even color sketches. Instead they would have a conversation about what each scene might entail, but they didn’t have to talk much. Jack and Terry’s work together is very instinctual. They were already developing a kind of shorthand with each other, one that has intensified and deepened with each film they’ve done together. On Badlands, when they were discussing Kit and Holly’s hideout in the woods, Terry mentioned the two fugitives might have built a wickiup or lean-to made of sticks, and Jack just nodded his head.

  What we found the next day on the banks of the Arkansas River was almost beyond belief. There was a magnificent tree house built up among sprawling old Cottonwood trees, made out of branches and twigs braided together with rope. It had ramps and rope swings, and a crow’s nest where Jack had placed a copy of Kon-Tiki for Holly to read. That had a lot of meaning for me. It was the book my mother read to my brothers and me to keep us occupied during one long car trip to the Rio Grande Valley and back. There were other wonders Jack had imagined for us: a framed Maxwell Parrish print hanging on the tree house wall, soft pillows and blankets that made a bed; chickens living beneath a woven basket; booby traps and a covered pit that Kit could use to hide from bounty hunters. As soon as Martin and I saw the set, we started acting like children romping in a playground.

  While Jack set the stage, Terry gave us the words to say and the freedom to inhabit our characters. Martin and I both loved working with Terry. We trusted him completely, and he coaxed the most nuanced performances out of us by trusting us back.

  By now my relationship with Jack was in full bloom. When I arrived in Colorado, I was still sort of seeing that “Oh yeah, and don’t answer the phone while I’m gone” guy back in LA. Once I left town, he started sending me messages. But I was so involved in the filming and having so much fun with Jack that I never answered them.

  I’d found my soul mate, and didn’t try to hide it. But Terry didn’t realize what was going on until well into the summer. We were filming a scene where Martin and I were dancing in the dirt beneath the tree house, while “Love Is Strange” played on the portable radio. It was a beautiful but bizarre moment in the film, and Martin was being playful. We were shuffling and spinning around when he decided to ad-lib a move and kick me in the behind with his boot. All of a sudden, Jack walked into the shot while the camera was rolling and said, “I don’t think you need to do that.” They were all shocked. Jack has an almost Zen-like calm about him, and this was a side of him that none of them had seen before. But I got the joke. Jack’s humor is deadpan; he was kidding around. Terry just shook his head and kept rolling.

  One day after filming at the tree house, Jack invited me on our first official “date.” He wanted to take me by boat down the Arkansas River back to the Capri Motel. That sounded like fun to me, so the crew left us out in the Cottonwood grove and drove on back to town. Jack’s dog, Five, went everywhere with him, and this time was no exception. So off we went, the three of us. No sooner had we launched that rickety little boat than it started taking on water. We sank fifty feet downstream. Luckily the Arkansas is shallow in the summer, and we made it to shore … just as a massive thunderstorm blew in across the prairie. There was all kinds of thunder and lightning and pelting rain. But we were so mad about each other that Jack and I just figured it was part of the adventure, and we started walking back to town in the storm. When we didn’t show up at the motel, alarmed crew members sent out search parties to find us and bring us in. But we didn’t want to be found and would jump into wet ditches whenever we saw a car coming.

  By the time we made it back to the Capri, our friends were about to call the sheriff to start dragging the river. It never occurred to us that anyone would be worried. And some weren’t.

  We were still soaking wet and covered with mud when we walked into the restaurant, hoping for a hot cup of tea. Terry was eating dinner and looked up at us with a beatific smile.

  “Oh, you’re back,” he said. “How was your boat ride?”

  Before long, Jack and Five moved into my motel room. I had everything all neatly arranged, with my clothes lined up in the closet and toiletries carefully laid out in the bathroom. Jack carried in a cardboard box stuffed with jeans, dark blue shirts, paintbrushes, and spare motor parts. Five ate human food, mostly chicken, sometimes bones and all. Sometimes Jack liked to feed her in the parking lot. It was a bit of an adjustment for me.

  Jack and Five had to move out again a few weeks into the filming because my parents decided to drive up from Texas in their brand-new Buick to visit me. They wouldn’t have understood our living arrangements. My parents got a room at the Capri and drove out to the set with us. They loved meeting Terry and his first wife, Jill, and they seemed to like Jack, who was introduced as our art director. After seeing us together for a while, they must have figured out that something was going on. And Daddy even thought enough of Jack to let us borrow the Buick one afternoon, but probably regretted his decision after Jack drove it off-road to check on one of the locations and brought it back covered with dust and dog hair. The next morning, when my dad was backing out of the motel parking lot, he got a flat. When we saw him later he said, “You won’t believe this, but they found a chicken bone in my tire!” I looked at Jack, and Jack looked at Five. My dad never suspected a thing.

  Jack and his dog moved back in after my parents left, but the motel room was getting awfully cramped. We decided to pool our living allowances and rent a small single-wide in the trailer park across the street for $55 a month. We decorated our new home with props from the film. This was my chance to impress Jack with my domestic skills, so I decided to cook him dinner. I wasn’t eating meat at the time, but he loved it. So I made him a hamburger. It was so memorable he saved the recipe:

  HOW TO MAKE A HAMBURGER

  Ingredients:

  ONE HALF POUND LEAN GROUND BEEF.

  10 SALTINE CRACKERS.

  1 ½ CUPS WESSON OIL.

  1. Crush crackers and mix with lean ground beef.

  2. Form into a softball-sized sphere.

  3. Add Wesson oil to iron skillet.

  4. Put ground beef softball in the center of the skillet.

  5. Turn on stove.

  6. Cook until done.

  Jack never said a word when I mixed that prime ground beef with crackers. And he didn’t even snicker when I plopped it into a skillet of cold oil. All he did, when I decided the meat was done, was wad up a huge ball of paper towels to try and soak up some of the grease. And then he ate the whole thing. Now, that’s love.

  Food was never very important to me. I was like my mother that way. She made wonderful, healthy meals, but she never liked to cook. When we were little, lunch would be sliced tomatoes, a wedge of lettuce, and a hard-boiled egg. She could make all the standard Southern dishes, like fried chicken, corn bread, and beans with ham hocks, but she never really enjoyed it. I remember when the space program was in the news, she said to me, “Sissy, one day we won’t have to cook at all! We won’t even have to eat! We’ll just take a pill.”

  When I was little, my favorite snack was a sugar sandwich. I’d sneak into the kitchen and climb up on the counter to get out the sugar and white bread. I always thought I’d hidden the evidence, u
ntil Mother would walk into the kitchen and feel that telltale crunch under her shoes. “Sissy! Who’s been into the sugar?”

  My dad was the real cook in the family. He loved making sweets, especially fudge and popcorn balls and pulled taffy. It must have come from his Moravian ancestry, where food was the centerpiece of every family gathering and sharing a meal was the ultimate expression of love. I think that’s why I tried so hard to cook for Jack, but most of the time, Five was the only one who really enjoyed my efforts.

  At first I was afraid that Five would be jealous of me, because she was so devoted to Jack. He had gotten her three years before as a puppy in a pet shop in Pennsylvania Dutch country. Nobody could tell him what breed she was. She had long, shaggy hair that covered her face, like an English sheepdog, but she was much smaller and pure black. Her unusual name was decided long before she was born. When Jack was in seventh grade and delivering newspapers at five o’clock one morning, it just came to him: One day I’m going to have a dog and name it Five. He must have had a thing for numerals; Jack had also had a cat called Two-and-a-half. Five was so smart and well behaved that she never ran around or made a sound while we were filming. She did whatever Jack asked her to do, and she followed him like a shadow. Five always sat between us in the front seat of Jack’s truck, and she’d lean against me. At first I thought she was trying to push me away from Jack, but that wasn’t the case. She leaned on the people she liked, and it meant that she had accepted me.

  Maybe she was also grateful that I saved all of our lives one night when we were riding around in that van.

  Much of the story of Badlands is told in voice-over by my character, and one scene called for Holly to describe seeing the distant lights from the oil fields around Cheyenne. Since there were no flaming derricks nearby, Jack had built enormous bonfires out on the prairie to create the effect. When the sun went down, Jack lit the fires and Terry started filming. We were sitting in Jack’s van, watching the fires and listening to Terry and the crew on our walkie-talkie, when Jack noticed that one of the burning piles had started to go out. “Got to go stoke that fire!” Jack said, as we suddenly went tearing across the desert at top speed. Of course he didn’t turn on his headlights, because that would have wrecked the shot. We were bouncing along at fifty miles per hour, which normally would have seemed like fun to me, but we were off the road and couldn’t see a thing in front of us in the moonless night. I started yelling at him to stop, but he kept going. Finally I screamed so loud there was nothing he could do but slam on the brakes.

  Then we heard Terry’s voice over the radio. “Cut!”

  Jack switched on the headlights. We were teetering inches away from a twenty-foot drop into a ravine. If I hadn’t screamed, we would have sailed off the edge and landed facedown, with no seat belts or air bags to save us. After that Jack was afraid not to listen to me.

  Both Jack and Terry had this idea that the prairie was as flat as it looked, and they always took crazy risks driving around on it. One afternoon Terry wanted to shoot some scenes of Kit racing around in a stolen car on the open range. The crew turned a Corvair into a camera car because it had a rear engine and a trunk in the front. They removed the trunk lid and strapped Terry inside with a camera in his hands and a football helmet on his head, then someone drove the Corvair across the desert at top speed while Terry filmed. I’ll never forget the image of him zooming across the plains in a cloud of dust, wearing that silly football helmet.

  It quickly became clear to everyone that Terry would die to get things right. He was—and is—an artist and a perfectionist. We’d be shooting one scene and he’d look over and the moon would be coming up, so we’d all drop everything and rush to get that shot. We were running around like the Channel 5 News Team, Terry later joked. Jack and I thought it was a brilliant and exciting way to work, but the crews tended to disagree. One morning Terry came out of his motel room with all the actors in tow. The production team had set up ahead of us down the road somewhere, but Terry liked the light where we were, so he said, “Okay, we’re gonna film here.” The producer said, “We can’t do that! We’ve already sent all the equipment over to the location!”

  “I don’t care,” Terry said in his soft drawl. “I’m shooting here.”

  There was a lot of eye-rolling among the camera operators and grips. Terry had never completed anything longer than that short in film school, and most of the crew figured they knew more than he did. Which may have been true. But Terry never lost sight of his vision, and he fought for every foot of film he shot. And he shot a lot of film. Thousands and thousands of feet; he was insatiable. By midsummer he was already over budget and behind schedule. It seemed like every day the production was about to be shut down for lack of funds.

  The low point came when a special effects man named Roger George flew in from Hollywood to stage the fire in Holly’s house. Rather than build special sets to burn, he decided to film the fire inside an abandoned house—which seemed risky to Jack. But since George was the pro, everyone went along with him. Roger liked to coat everything with rubber cement and then light it up for dramatic effect. He and his team were walking around the house in gum boots, pouring rubber cement on piano keys and slathering it on walls. Everybody was getting lightheaded, including Jack, who stepped outside the house for some fresh air. The idea is to wait for the fumes to dissipate and then set a controlled burn in each room. But Roger’s young assistant apparently didn’t get that memo, because as soon as they were done, he lit the match. Roger was screaming, “Nooooooo!” when the house went up in a fireball. The crew, the cinematographer—everybody started diving out the windows. Roger ran outside, engulfed in flames. He had to be medevaced to a hospital in California, where he recovered from serious burns. It was a miracle that nobody was killed. The house burned to the ground, along with the equipment and the cameras.

  After that, most of the crew quit, figuring they wouldn’t be paid. Only the actors and the art department lasted for the whole shoot, which went on for sixteen weeks. What remained of the crew operated out of my dressing trailer, which was the only vehicle left behind. I ended up catering their meals, which shows how desperate things had become. Luckily they enjoyed peanut butter and jelly.

  But we soldiered on. Edward Pressman, one of the producers, needed to borrow more money to complete the film. He asked for $100,000 and the bank turned him down. Then Ed’s mother, a colorful and savvy businesswoman who ran the family toy company, stepped in to help. “Never think small,” she advised. So she went to the bank, asked for $1 million, and they gave her the $100,000 we needed to keep going.

  By the time we wrapped, Jack was painting the leaves green at some of the locations, because the season had changed to fall. He and I rented a small U-Haul trailer and filled it with some of the treasures we’d saved from the set. Then we loaded Five into the red van and pointed it west on the interstate, heading back to Los Angeles and a new life together. As we were pulling out of La Junta, we passed Terry’s Volkswagen bus on the side of the road. He stood smiling next to it with his wife, Jill, his Great Dane, and an Aeroflex camera. He had about twelve rolls of film left, and he wanted some more nature shots.

  It turns out that Terry Malick liked editing even more than he liked shooting film. Badlands took ten months to cut, and he decided to write an extended voice-over for my character to help knit together the narrative. He stapled quilts to the walls of one bedroom in his house, and we recorded the voice-over there. It is some of the most beautiful language ever written for film, and I still get chills hearing it. But it also contains the funniest, most deadpan lines I’ve ever read. “Kit shot a football. He said it was excess baggage.” Or, while looking out at the bleak, featureless landscape, Holly says, “Kit told me to enjoy the scenery, and I did.” The genius of Badlands is that Terry somehow made it possible for the audience to forgive Holly for her complicity in the murders because of her innocence and pliability. Or, as she puts it, “When Kit says ‘frog,’ I jump.”


  When Badlands was finally finished, I went along with Terry to present it at the New York Film Festival. We were both exhausted, living on nerves and excitement, when we finally took our seats at the Lincoln Center premiere. Terry and I grabbed each other’s arm like kids as the film rolled along on the big screen. But we were shocked that the audience watched in utter silence. Badlands is by no means a comedy, yet there are many funny parts; but nobody even chuckled. There was applause at the end of the screening, but we had the sinking feeling that the audience didn’t get the film. Or maybe they thought it was inappropriate to laugh at a couple of killers, no matter how ironic or funny the lines.

  But no matter. The critics loved Badlands and instantly recognized it as a landmark in American cinema, even though it would never be a hit at the box office. The studio didn’t know what to do with it, how to market it. But I realized even then that I had been a part of something great. I’d been a part of making a nearly perfect movie, and if I never did another film again, it would be okay, because it was enough to have done Badlands.