I didn’t initially set out to write a book about Bonnie and Clyde per se,” says Emmy Award–winning screenwriter Kirk Ellis of his new book, They Kill People: Bonnie and Clyde, a Hollywood Revolution, and America’s Obsession with Guns and Outlaws. Prodigiously researched, the work is a compelling braid of its subtitles. Cineastes will savor the detailed descriptions of the genesis and filming of the famous movie; historians, the backstory of America’s romance with guns and violence; and Hollywood history buffs, the ways in which Bonnie and Clyde upended production codes and changed on-screen depictions of sex and violence for good.
It’s all connected, Ellis maintains. “I’ve been interested for a long time in the twisted intersection of American history, American identity, and firearms,” he tells me, adding that he didn’t want to pen a book on gun culture alone, lest it be seen as a polemic. As a writer and film and TV producer who has specialized in historical drama, he says he is keenly aware of how “fact gets transferred into legend, legend becomes myth, and then we tend to see the past through a lens that isn’t accurate.”
Bonnie and Clyde offered a “throughline into that story.” The 1967 biographical crime film, which is one of the few that Ellis considers “perfect,” follows Clyde Barrow, Bonnie Parker, and the Barrow Gang, who were real-life figures, through their Great Depression–era crime spree, which ended with their violent deaths in 1934. Because the film dealt with outlaws not yet mythologized—“they’re a bit too recent in American history”—the book offered Ellis a way to look at that history through the lives of Bonnie and Clyde’s protagonists, the film itself, and how the film speaks to contemporary society. Like many today, Bonnie and Clyde were famous for being famous; they were also bank robbers, kidnappers, and murderers.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
The film is set during the Depression, came out during the ’60s, and in many ways is still relevant today. Why?
At the 40th anniversary of the film’s release, [director] Arthur Penn said, “This movie doesn’t date. I don’t know why, but every time I look at it, it seems fresh.” And I think the reason is because the collaborators [Penn, producer and star Warren Beatty, and screenwriters Robert Benton and David Newman] tapped into something fundamental in the American psyche.
What is that?
I think it’s the way our society is underlain by violence. And that any situation, as humorous as it may be in the film, really lives on this narrow ground between humor and tragedy, and always bridged by violence. In the Depression, the anger was the same among the youth as it was in the ’60s. Today, we look at the film, and we see it through the lens of school shootings and Second Amendment issues, all of which were part and parcel of what was happening at the time the film was made.
So is Luigi Mangione, the man accused of murdering the UnitedHealthcare CEO in 2024, a descendant of Bonnie and Clyde?
One of the traditions I look at in the book is the notion of the so-called social bandit, normally described as the person who steals from the rich and gives to the poor, or rights wrongs on behalf of those who have been betrayed or dispossessed. That is certainly the legend of Jesse James and Billy the Kid, both of whom were Clyde Barrow’s role models, and it derives from the fact that we see ourselves as Americans as children of rebellion, children of insurrection. So when you’re talking about Luigi Mangione, you could be talking about Timothy McVeigh, you could be talking about Kyle Rittenhouse. Do they see themselves as heirs to that? Regrettably, I think they do.
How did this film revolutionize Hollywood?
Bonnie and Clyde did for the first time in an American film what movies in Europe had been doing for some time. Not to the same level of explicit sex and violence, but both the writers and director were inspired by the directors of the French new wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, fill in the blank. And those films were noted for their lack of classical continuity. The American cinema prided itself on perfect continuity of movement from shot to shot and from scene to scene. This film broke all those rules. The concluding master sequence [the massacre deaths of Bonnie and Clyde] really did redefine the way screen violence was treated in American cinema, and the film was equally controversial for its sexual content. This was the Pillow Talk era, still.
Is the film a Western, and if so, in what way?
One of the least known things about Bonnie and Clyde is that throughout its development and production it was seen as, to quote one person involved with the film, “a low-budget Western that is not going to be very good.” And it’s impossible when you start looking at this film and the story of the Barrow Gang and the trajectory of American history not to look at it as a modern Western.
Bonnie and Clyde are outlaws in the sense of traditional Hollywood Westerns: wrong side of the law, can’t catch a break, not allowed to go straight. But instead of riding horses, they’re riding around in stolen Ford V8s. There is a direct line, historically, from—let’s start with Jesse James and the Civil War through Billy the Kid through the motorized outlaws of the Great Depression. It’s all the same.
Why does this film speak to us now?
Americans cannot get enough of outlaws. They cannot get enough of this idea of sticking it to the man, whoever the man happens to be. And whether they are noble outlaws or unregenerate gangsters or criminals like Bonnie and Clyde, the story is still compelling because we project ourselves into those people. I think my argument in the book is that we do that subconsciously, and the darkness in ourselves leads us to want to live those lives.•
THEY KILL PEOPLE: BONNIE AND CLYDE, A HOLLYWOOD REVOLUTION, AND AMERICA'S OBSESSION WITH GUNS AND OUTLAWS, BY KIRK ELLIS
Anne Pedersen is an award-winning writer and a visual artist. She has also worked as a print and television journalist and a motion picture studio executive.
