Did Oliver Stone ruin ‘Natural Born Killers’?
Early in his career, Quentin Tarantino not only announced himself as one of America’s best contemporary film directors but also proved his worth as a screenwriter. Alongside Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino wrote films for others, including Tony Scott’s True Romance and Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers.
The latter film was released in 1994 and starred Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis, Robert Downey Jr, Tommy Lee Jones, and Tom Sizemore. Harrelson and Lewis play Mickey and Mallory Knox, a married couple who become lovers and mass murderers as a result of their kindred childhood-traumatised spirits and set off on a killing spree while being somewhat glorified in the media.
There’s always a danger when it comes to being a film’s screenwriter and not its director, though, and Tarantino quickly found that Stone had made heavy revisions to the original screenplay along with David Veloz and associate producer Richard Rutowski. Tarantino did receive a writer’s credit even though he distanced himself from the film and actually thought that Stone had ruined it.
“I think [Tarantino] was hurt that I rewrote it so much,” Stone once noted in an interview with Roger Ebert. “But I told him that I really can’t make what he, as a 26-year-old, would make as a first film. As a 47-year-old filmmaker, it doesn’t interest me. I want another level of socio-political comment and I want to deal with the whole justice system. I want to deal with the killers; where they come from, who their parents are.”
Stone argued that Tarantino wanted to focus on violence in a shocking way, which, given his early history as a director, is more than understandable. However, Tarantino has always insisted that his version of the Natural Born Killers script used the motif and theme of love as its central jumping-off point.
The Pulp Fiction writer claimed that Stone misunderstood Mickey and Mallory and that he largely ruined their story in his screenplay rewrites. Take, for example, the pair cheating on one another – this is something that Tarantino believed would have never occurred given the deep love that runs between the film’s two main characters.
“The point of the thing,” Tarantino once told Brian Koppelman, “Is they unnaturally live for each other at the expense of everyone else on the planet Earth. The killing spree is the sacrament of their love.” There was also annoyance in Tarantino that all the hard work seemed to have been already done for Stone, and he still decided to make serious changes.
“One of the things about that script, in particular, was that I was trying to make it on the page,” Tarantino added. “So when you read it, you saw the movie. And it’s like, why didn’t [Oliver Stone] do at least half of that? It was done for him!” Regardless of how the final film came out and whether Stone indeed ruined Tarantino’s story, Natural Born Killers remains a classic of 1990s cinema, a visceral love tale from the hearts and minds of two of the greatest directors of all time.
Check out the film’s trailer below.
Never Miss A Take
The Far Out Quentin Tarantino Newsletter
All the latest Quentin Tarantino content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.