The 1994 movie Quentin Tarantino admits he couldn’t stand: “I hated that f*cking movie”
Quentin Tarantino is a very particular director, enjoying near neurotic control over his films, the dialogue, the cinematography, the soundtrack and everything in between.
His research begins years before production ever begins and involves extensive note-taking and study, often looking to the history of cinema for inspiration, from the samurai movies of Akira Kurosawa to the delicate thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock.
A student of cinema, first and foremost, Tarantino is proud to claim that he never went to film school, preferring in his youth to envelop himself in the world of movies, from homegrown greats like Robert Altman to icons of world cinema such as Takashi Miike. “[My] head is a sponge. I listen to what everyone says,” he once told The Talks in reference to his encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema and the world around him, “I watch little idiosyncratic behaviour, people tell me a joke and I remember it”.
Such is why Tarantino chooses to almost always direct his own screenplays, claiming total creative control over how his intricate scripts are translated onto the screen. When Quentin Tarantino’s career was still in its infancy, however, the director was still in search of his first big break and found himself selling two of his original scripts, True Romance and Natural Born Killers, in order to fund his directorial debut, Reservoir Dogs in 1992.
Directed by Tony Scott, True Romance was the first of the two to hit cinemas, with the fairytale drama starring Patricia Arquette and Christian Slater as two lovers on the run from a drug gang. Beloved by fans and movie stars alike, with none other than Margot Robbie walking down the aisle to the film’s soundtrack, True Romance was the first sniff of success for Tarantino.
While True Romance bathed in success, Natural Born Killers experienced a more tumultuous time under the limelight and was heavily criticised for its controversial themes. The film follows a married couple, Mikey and Mallory Knox (Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis), who suddenly decide to go on a killing spree, attracting an unhealthy amount of media attention across the way.
They’re characters which Quentin Tarantino has recently revealed to be fantasy versions of the two lead characters from True Romance, with the director stating, “In the original script, Clarence wanted to be in the movies, he wanted to be a screenwriter…But the script he’s writing is Natural Born Killers”.
Continuing, Tarantino adds: “So the thing is that you’d have the situation where you would see Clarence and Alabama do their things and then he’d read her scenes from the [Natural Born Killers] script. And then you’d see this fantasy version of Mickey and Mallory, the sexy young couple sociopaths serial killers on the run”.
Based on an original screenplay by Tarantino, the final script was heavily revised by director Oliver Stone and writer David Veloz, with the original writer being left only with just a story credit. Much of Tarantino’s smooth dialogue was kept by Stone and Veloz, though a renewed focus was given to both Mickey and Mallory Knox as opposed to the journalist character Wayne Gale. At the time of the film’s release, Tarantino stated that he held no animosity toward the film and the director and insisted that he wished it good success at the box office and beyond.
That initial diplomacy did not last. As time went on, Tarantino became increasingly frustrated with how far the finished film had drifted from his original vision, particularly in its tone and emphasis. While elements of his dialogue and core ideas remained, the overall execution felt чуж to him, transforming what he had conceived into something far more abrasive and chaotic than intended.
It ultimately became a question of authorship and control. For a filmmaker so closely tied to his own words, seeing them reshaped without his guiding hand proved too much to ignore. What began as a pragmatic decision to sell a script in order to fund his own career ended in a rare moment where Tarantino openly distanced himself from a project, reinforcing just how central creative ownership has always been to his work.
Once Quentin Tarantino attempted to publish the original screenplay for the film, as he had with his screenplays for True Romance, Reservoir Dogs, and Pulp Fiction, the producers of Natural Born Killers tried to sue the director, claiming that he had forfeited the publishing rights when he sold the script. Furious, Tarantino disowned the film and urged fans of his to avoid it at all costs, denouncing the film, the director stated: “I hated that fucking movie. If you like my stuff, don’t watch that movie”.
Stone later reflected on Tarantino’s venomous stance towards the film, exclaiming: “I don’t think it’s right in our filmmaking culture for filmmakers to trash other filmmakers… We take so much from press, especially if you’re established, that it’s mean-spirited… I never went out with a hatchet for the director, because I understand the nature of the medium, which is that it is the director’s call”.
Indeed, when it comes to the ardent passion of Quentin Tarantino, there are very few filmmakers who compare, so when he asks you to avoid Natural Born Killers, you best heed his word.
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