After François Truffaut's departure from the project, the producers approached Jean-Luc Godard. Some sources claim Godard didn't trust Hollywood and refused; other allege he planned to change Bonnie and Clyde to teenagers and relocate the story to Japan, prompting the film's investors to force him off the project.
Although technically still the only film rated "M" by the MPAA (the early equivalent of the later "PG", introduced in 1973), since this rating no longer exists, all home video and DVD versions released after 1973 are marked "Not Rated".
At the time, this was Warner Brothers' second highest grossing film, after My Fair Lady.
Before deciding to play the role himself, producer Warren Beatty's first choice for the role of Clyde Barrow was musician and composer Bob Dylan, who resembled the actual Barrow more strongly than Beatty.
Bonnie's family reunion near the end was shot through a window screen to give it a hazy, nostalgic effect.
C.W. Moss mentions, in the first scene with Buck and Blanche, that Myrna Loy is his favorite movie star. Loy was supposedly a favorite actress of John Dillinger. In fact, when he was gunned down outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago, the film he had just seen was Manhattan Melodrama, in which Loy starred.
Cinematographer Burnett Guffey was dismissed during this production due to artistic clashes with director Arthur Penn (Guffey wanted more light - Penn wanted a more subdued tone). In the meantime, veteran cinematographer Ellsworth Fredericks replaced Guffey, but only for a brief period. Penn, realizing that he'd misjudged Guffey, ultimately reinstated him and Guffey went on to win a second Oscar for Best Cinematography for his efforts.
Co-writer Robert Benton got the idea for his script from his father who had actually attended the separate funerals of Parker and Barrow.
Contrary to the film's portrayal of Blanche Barrow inadvertently divulging the identity of C.W. Moss to Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, thereby setting Bonnie and Clyde's deaths in motion, in real life Hamer found Bonnie and Clyde through simple tracking methods. Hamer knew that they traveled in a loop. They would routinely start in Dallas, move north through Oklahoma and Kansas, cut east to Missouri, south to Arkansas and Louisiana, and west back to Dallas. Knowing that gang member Henry Methvin (on whom the C.W. Moss character is partly based) had family in Louisiana, Hamer struck a deal with Methvin's father (as seen in the movie) to set up Bonnie and Clyde.
Costume designer Theadora Van Runkle had to deal with Warren Beatty's worries (6'4") that he would be upstaged by Faye Dunaway(who stood 5'7"). This is why Van Runkle kept Dunaway in flat shoes throughout the film.
Debut of Gene Wilder.
During one of the bank robberies, Buck Barrow (Gene Hackman) does a leap over the tellers' cage. This was a stunt routinely pulled by John Dillinger, who in turn learned it from watching Douglas Fairbanks in the "Zorro" movies.
For the climactic massacre, Faye Dunaway's leg had to be tied to the gear shift to prevent her from falling completely out of the rocking car
Future film maker Curtis Hanson, who began his career as a photographer, took a series of modeling photos of Faye Dunaway which helped to get her the job as Bonnie Parker. According to Hanson on the Special Edition DVD Documentary, when Dunaway came under consideration, Warren Beatty called him and asked Hanson to bring a slide show presentation of the photos to show to both Beatty and Arthur Penn. After viewing the photos, Dunaway was cast. According to Hanson, Warren Beatty wanted to pay him for the photos but Hanson instead asked to accompany them to Texas so he could observe the filming to which Beatty agreed.
Half a dozen of the cars used in the movie, including the one stolen from Gene Wilder's character were loaned to the studio by a private owner who specialized in the restoration of Model A's, Roadsters, and Model T's, Mr. Seng of Castro Valley, California. His only requirement in loaning the studio his cars was that they were not to be shot up.
Heavily influenced by the French New Wave directors, mainly through its rapid shifts of tone and its choppy editing.
In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked this as the #42 Greatest Movie of All Time.
In a 1968 interview, Warren Beatty mentioned that his last conversation with ex-girlfriend Natalie Wood took place in the summer of 1966 when he tried unsuccessfully to get her to play Bonnie Parker in his film. Later that evening, she attempted to take her own life and was discovered by her live-in housekeeper.
In a TV interview director Arthur Penn pointed out that this film shows for the first time the firing of a gun and the consequences in one single frame. Before that you would see a gun being fired, then cut and the next scene shows the bleeding body. In Bonnie and Clyde you see a gun being fired into the face of a person without inter cut. This was incredible at the time and would have been censored in the past. (Such a shot had, however, had already been used in all three of the films Sergio Leone's "Dollars" trilogy.)
In one scene, while holding up a bank, Clyde Barrow tells a farmer he can keep his own money. ("Is that your money or the bank's?" "It's mine." "You keep it then.") In real life, it was bank robber Pretty Boy Floyd who allowed a farmer to keep his own money during a holdup.