Kirk Ellis is the author of the new book They Kill People: Bonnie and Clyde, a Hollywood Revolution, and America's Obsession with Guns and Outlaws. He also has written the book Ride Lonesome, and is a screenwriter whose work includes HBO's John Adams.
Q: What inspired you to write a book focused on the film Bonnie and Clyde?
A: For me, Bonnie and Clyde is one of the small handful of "perfect" American films that remains fresh every time you see it -- essentially flawless.
Director Arthur Penn himself marveled at how the movie never seem to date, and I think the reason lies in the way he tapped into something deep-rooted in the American psyche.
I'd been wanting for some time to write something addressing our propensity for a certain kind of violence, which Penn above all his contemporaries made a recurring theme in his work.
The movie's timelessness provided the perfect lens through which I could examine how historical reality is gradually but irrevocably overtaken by myth -- and what consequences ensue.
It was an irresistible opportunity to investigate how our national self-image as what John Adams called "a nation of laws, not men" is so at odds with our propensity to enshrine lawbreakers as folk heroes and our status as an armed society.
Q: The author Hampton Sides said of the book, “Kirk Ellis, a true connoisseur of cinema, deftly uses an iconic movie as a jumping-off point for a much larger study of America’s disturbing obsession with guns and our propensity not only for violence but for celebrating and romanticizing it. Ellis’s argument—that gun culture is central to our national identity—is hard to dismiss." What do you think of that assessment?
A: Among the early readers, both Hampton and Betsy Gaines Quammen recognized and appreciated how They Kill People isn't a traditional "movie" book.
From the beginning, I wanted to use Bonnie and Clyde as the entry point to examine our uniquely national obsession with outlaw culture and how that has become inextricably intertwined with firearms. In that sense, I took my cue from Penn and screenwriters David Newman and Robert Benton, who saw the Barrow Gang story not as history, but in then-contemporary terms.
As a writer of historical drama for film and television (John Adams, Into the West, Franklin) I know what it's like to shape factual material into compelling narrative, and thought I could bring those decades of experience to the writing of the book. So I'm extremely gratified that authors of Betsy and Hampton's caliber understood and complimented its structure.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: I began work on the book at the height of the pandemic, a time when archives were closed and travel constrained.
I needed first to become conversant not only in the particulars of Bonnie and Clyde's production, but also in the real story of the Barrow Gang, the outlaws who preceded them, and the whole tortured history of firearms in America and Second Amendment scholarship -- all of which I threw myself into with the usual enthusiasm, research being the best part of the process.
I was well into the writing before I was able to access the Warner Bros. archives at the University of Southern California, when I could finally put my hands on Warren Beatty's and Jack Warner's personal copies of the script, among other treasures.
But what really unlocked both the "reel" and "real" stories for me was a location trip to the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex timed to coincide with the original shooting schedule. Penn and his production designer, Dean Tavoularis, found the rural towns they selected virtually unchanged in the ‘60s, and they remain that way today.
Q: Especially given the current political climate, what do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: Regrettably, America's gun problem isn't going away any time soon, so They Kill People will always be of the moment.
For that reason, I made a rigorous effort to avoid any sort of polemics and the overt comparison to events that may have happened during the research, writing and editing of the book. That sort of didacticism can badly date your material and alienate half your potential audience. Much better to allow readers to draw their own conclusions.
At this year's Telluride Film Festival, someone asked Werner Herzog, whose brand of documentaries is uniquely personal yet non-judgmental, what he thought of political filmmaking. "Political filmmaking is propaganda," he answered instantly, "no matter who makes it."
The same goes for nonfiction. I wanted to write a book that people would read and hopefully think about regardless of their beliefs on, say, the Second Amendment, not one designed to preach to a particular choir.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: The double disaster of COVID and a nearly year-long industry shutdown (full disclosure: I was a Writers Guild of America strike captain here in Santa Fe, New Mexico) prompted a retrenchment and destabilization that hasn't yet righted itself. There are fewer job opportunities for fewer people on fewer productions, no matter one's stature or longevity in the industry.
AI -- the greatest gift to plagiarism yet invented -- has started to realize the dream of Griffin Mill, the protagonist of Robert Altman's 1992 film The Player, a studio executive who dreamed of the day when movies could be made without the "interference" of writers and directors.
But even before the strikes, my attention had turned more and more to nonfiction writing, where you don't have someone giving you notes before you've even written a word. So while I'm involved in a couple of pending film projects, I'm also completing a proposal for the next book.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I'm a regular poster to Facebook and Instagram and other social media outlets.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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