Natural Born Killers

Natural Born Killers was based on a screenplay written by Quentin Tarantino, in which a married couple suddenly decide to go on a killing spree.[8] Tarantino had sold an option for his script to producers Jane Hamsher and Don Murphy for $10,000 after he had tried, and failed, to direct it himself for $500,000.[9] Hamsher and Murphy subsequently sold the screenplay to Warner Bros. Around the same time, Oliver Stone was made aware of the script. He was keen to find something more straightforward than his previous production, Heaven & Earth (1993), a difficult shoot which had left him exhausted.

David Veloz, associate producer Richard Rutowski, and Stone rewrote Tarantino's script, keeping much of the dialogue but changing the focus of the film from journalist Wayne Gale to Mickey and Mallory. The script was revised so drastically that Tarantino was credited for the story only.[10] In a 1993 interview, Tarantino stated that he did not hold any animosity towards Stone, and that he wished the film well.[11]

Initially, when producers Hamsher and Murphy had first brought the script to Stone's attention, he had envisioned it as an action film; "something Arnold Schwarzenegger would be proud of."[12] As the project developed however, incidents such as the O. J. Simpson case, the Menendez brothers case, the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan incident, the Rodney King incident, and the Federal assault of the Branch Davidian sect all took place. Stone came to feel that the media was heavily involved in the outcome of all of these cases, and that the media had become an all-pervasive entity which marketed violence and suffering for the good of ratings. As such, he changed the tone of the film from one of purely action to a "vicious, coldhearted farce" on the media.[13] Coloring Stone's approach to the material, and contributing to the violent nature of the film, were the anger and sadness he felt at the breakdown of his second marriage.[14] He also said in an interview that the film was influenced by the "vitality" of Indian cinema.[15]

Stone cast Woody Harrelson partly because, "frankly, he had that American, trashy look. There's something about Woody that evokes Kentucky or white trash."[16] At the time, Harrelson was primarily known for his comedic performances, namely his role on the sitcom Cheers, and Stone was compelled to cast him against type.[17] Stone cast Lewis for similar reason, noting that, despite her success as portraying a defiled teenage daughter in Cape Fear (1991), he felt she could "pull off white trash, too. Juliette has malice in her eyes. She's got adorable eyes, but they jump and they gleam. I just felt they [were both] right. They didn't feel like they were upper-class people."[16] Stone tried to convince Lewis to gain muscle mass for her role as Mallory so that she looked tougher, but she refused, saying she wanted the character to look like a pushover, not a bodybuilder.[18]

Robert Downey Jr. was cast as Wayne Gale, the reporter chronicling the Knoxes;[19] Downey prepared for his role as reporter Wayne Gale by spending time with Australian TV shock-king Steve Dunleavy, and later convinced Stone to allow him to portray Gale with an Australian accent.[17] Tom Sizemore was cast as Detective Jack Scagnetti, the psychotic police officer with murderous impulses himself,[20] while Tommy Lee Jones was cast as Dwight McClusky, a prison warden who appears in the last act of the film.[20] Rodney Dangerfield, primarily known as a stand-up comedian, portrayed Mallory's rapist father and was allowed by Stone to rewrite all of his own character's lines.[21]

Principal photography took 56 days to shoot.[18] Filming locations included the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge just west of Taos, New Mexico, where the wedding scene was filmed, and Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet, Illinois, where the prison riot was filmed. In Stateville, 80% of the prisoners are incarcerated for violent crimes. For the first two weeks on location at the prison, the extras were actual inmates with rubber weapons. For the subsequent two weeks, 200 extras were needed because the Stateville inmates were on lockdown. According to Tom Sizemore, during filming on the prison set, Stone would play African tribal music at full blast between takes to keep the frantic energy up.[12] While shooting the POV scene wherein Mallory runs into the wire mesh, director of photography Robert Richardson broke his finger and the replacement cameraman cut his eye. According to Oliver Stone, he was not popular with the camera department on set that day.[18] For the scenes involving rear projection, the projected footage was shot prior to principal photography, then edited together, and projected onto the stage, behind the live actors. For example, when Mallory drives past a building and flames are projected onto the wall, this was shot live using footage projected onto the facade of a real building.[18] An alternate ending was filmed but not used, in which Mickey and Mallory are shot dead by Arliss Howard's character.[22] Stone decided against using this ending because he believed "the 1990s were a time when the bad guys got away with it".[23]

The famous Coca-Cola polar bear ad[24] is seen twice during the film. According to Stone, Coca-Cola approved the use of the ad without having a full idea of what the film was about. When they saw the completed film, they were furious.[18]

Natural Born Killers was filmed and edited in a frenzied and psychedelic style and features both color and black and white cinematography, as well as animation (directed by Mike Smith),[25][26][27] and other unusual color schemes and visual compositions.[17] Editing of the film lasted approximately 11 months, with the final film containing almost 3,000 cuts (most films have 600–700).[18] The film also employs a wide range of camera angles, featuring Dutch tilts prominently throughout, with the camera rarely angling along a horizontal field of vision.[28] Film scholar Robert Kolker notes that the Dutch angle's employment in the film is "the visual equivalent of a profound dislocation, a loss of object constancy, the slipperiness of subjectivity itself."[29] Kolker comments that, unlike such films as Bonnie and Clyde from which Natural Born Killers draws influence, "from the very beginning...  the viewer is forced into a dual situation, neither one of which allows easy access to the main characters. One situation, continued throughout the film, is a kind of rhythmic attention created by a startling flow of images. Stone builds his visuals on unexpected linkages and disorienting juxtapositions within the shots and edits."[8]

Because the film is thematically preoccupied with media, Stone sought to implement visual elements of popular television into the film's visual tableau:[30] "It had never quite been done before – a mixture of stocks and styles. I was influenced, I have to say, by MTV and some of the styles I saw in the early '80s and '90s on television. But no one had tried that style over the course of 90, 100 minutes."[17] Commercials which were commonly on the air at the time of the film's release make brief, intermittent appearances as well.[31]

Concurrent with Stone's preoccupation with television as both a visual and thematic reference point, portions of the film are narrated through parodies of popular television series, including a sequence presented in the style of a sitcom about Mallory's dysfunctional family (titled I Love Mallory), a parody of I Love Lucy.[32] In the film's final montage, splices of real-life television news coverage of various criminal cases of the time are included, such as the O. J. Simpson case, the Menendez brothers, and the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan incident.[5] Film scholar John Kenneth Muir notes this inclusion as an "exclamation point" concluding the film's thesis: "It seems to say, 'Welcome to the tabloid-TV culture of America in the 1990s, where crime pays and pays well.'"[5]

The film's soundtrack was produced by Stone and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, who reportedly watched the film over 50 times to "get in the mood".[18] Reznor reportedly produced the soundtrack while on tour.[33] On his approach to compiling the soundtrack, Reznor told MTV:

I suggested to Oliver [Stone] to try to turn the soundtrack into a collage-of-sound, kind of the way the movie used music: make edits, add dialog, and make it something interesting, rather than a bunch of previously released music.[34]

Some songs were written especially for the film or soundtrack, such as "Burn" by Nine Inch Nails.

Other critics found the film unsuccessful in its aims. Much of the criticism centered around the perception that the film was not effective as a satire and its message was muddled. Janet Maslin of the New York Times wrote, "While 'Natural Born Killers' affects occasional disgust at the lurid world of Mickey and Mallory, it more often seems enamored of their exhilarating freedom. If there is a juncture at which these caricatures start looking like nihilist heroes, then the film passes that point many times."[41] Hal Hinson of The Washington Post voiced a similar concern, saying "'Killers' is intended as a gonzo critique of the mass media and, by extension, of the bloodthirsty legions of couch potatoes whose prurient taste guarantees that the garbage rises to the top of the charts. But the film doesn't make it as a piece of social criticism. Primarily this is because the movie's jittery, psychedelic style is so obviously a kick for Stone to orchestrate. Bloody, pulpy excess is his thing; it's what he does best.”[42] Hinson noted the film also loses its "symbolic footing" when it transitions into a prison film.[42]

Some critics felt the film's focus on the mass media as the main culprit of society's ills rang hollow or that the film did not adequately hold the characters of Mickey and Mallory accountable for their actions. Maslin continued, "for all its surface passions, Natural Born Killers never digs deep enough to touch the madness of such events, or even to send them up in any surprising way. Mr. Stone's vision is impassioned, alarming, visually inventive, characteristically overpowering. But it's no match for the awful truth."[41]

James Berardinelli gave the film a negative review but his criticism was different from many other such pans, which generally said that Oliver Stone was a hypocrite for making an ultra-violent film in the guise of a critique of American attitudes. Berardinelli noted that the movie "hits the bullseye" as a satire of America's lust for bloodshed, but repeated Stone's main point so often and so loudly that it became unbearable.[43]

Stone got in trouble with the Native American community for the use of Russel Means.[44]

At the 1994 Stinkers Bad Movie Awards, Harrelson was nominated for Worst Actor but lost to Bruce Willis for Color of Night and North. The film was nominated for Worst Picture but lost to North.[45]

• 2nd – David Stupich, The Milwaukee Journal[46]
• 8th – Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times[47]
• 8th – Michael Mills, The Palm Beach Post[48]
• 8th – Christopher Sheid, The Munster Times[49]
• Top 10 (not ranked) – Bob Carlton, The Birmingham News[50]
• Honorable mention – Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times[51]
• Honorable mention – Dennis King, Tulsa World[52]
• Honorable mention – Howie Movshovitz, The Denver Post[53]
• Honorable mention – Dan Webster, The Spokesman-Review[54]
• Best-worst movie – Todd Anthony, Miami New Times[55]
• 1st worst – Peter Travers, Rolling Stone[56]
• 1st worst – Dan Craft, The Pantagraph[57]
• 2nd worst – John Hurley, Staten Island Advance[58]
• 10th worst – Glenn Lovell, San Jose Mercury News[59]
• 10th worst  – Sean P. Means, The Salt Lake Tribune[60]
• Worst films (not ranked) – Jeff Simon, The Buffalo News[61]
• Top 4 worst (not ranked) – Stephen Hunter, The Baltimore Sun[62]

For the film's 25th anniversary in 2019, critics wrote about the film's impact in popular culture and its relevance today. Writing for The Guardian, Charles Bramesco argued the film's rebuke of the media as responsible for violence does not hold up to current times. Bramesco wrote, "With every public bloodbath [in the news today], discourse inches closer to accepting their root cause as a combination of lax gun laws and an undercurrent of psychosis endemic to those feeling marginalized from society. Stone’s inquest may have been a shock to the system at the time, but his tracing of that psychosis back to the evils of television scans as borderline reactionary to present-day sensibilities."[32] Bramesco also noted the film's inclusion of Native American mysticism into its plot felt like a "white understanding of native culture."[32]

In contrast, critic Owen Gleiberman said the film still "captures how our parasitical relationship to pop culture can magnify the cycle of violence...'Natural Born Killers' was the movie that glimpsed the looking glass we were passing through, the new psycho-metaphysical space we were living inside — the roller-coaster of images and advertisements, of entertainment and illusion, of demons that come up through fantasy and morph into daydreams, of vicarious violence that bleeds into real violence.”[10]

Natural Born Killers was released on VHS in 1995 by Warner Home Video.[63] A director's cut version of the film was released the following year on VHS by Vidmark/Lionsgate, who also released a non-anamorphic DVD of the director's cut in 2000.[64] Distribution rights to Stone's director's cut reverted from Lionsgate to Warner Bros. in 2009, after which Warner issued an anamorphic DVD edition[64] as well as a Blu-ray.[65]

After Quentin Tarantino attempted to publish his original screenplay to Natural Born Killers as a paperback book, as he had done with his scripts for True Romance and his own directorial efforts, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, the producers of Natural Born Killers filed a lawsuit against Tarantino, claiming that when he sold the script to them, he had forfeited the publishing rights; eventually, Tarantino was allowed to publish his original script.[66] Tarantino disowned the film, saying, "I hated that fucking movie. If you like my stuff, don't watch that movie."[67][68]

When the film was first submitted to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), employees told Stone they would give it an NC-17 unless he edited it. As such, Stone removed some violence by cutting approximately four minutes of footage and the MPAA re-rated the film as an R. In 1996, a Director's Cut was released on home video by Vidmark Entertainment and Pioneer Entertainment.[69] Warner Home Video later released this cut on Blu-ray.[70]

The film was banned in Ireland, including – controversially – from cinema clubs. The ban was later lifted.[71][72] In the UK, though the cinema release was delayed while the BBFC investigated reports that the film caused copycat murders in the USA and France, it was finally shown in cinemas in February 1995.[73][74]

The original intended UK home video release in March 1996 was cancelled due to the Dunblane massacre in Scotland. In the meantime, Channel Five showed the film in November 1997. It was finally released on video in July 2001.[75] Entertainment Weekly ranked the film as the eighth most controversial film ever.[76]

From almost the moment of its release, the film has been accused of encouraging and inspiring numerous murderers in North America, including the Heath High School shooting and the Columbine High School massacre. The Columbine killers even code-named their attack: "NBK", an acronym for Natural Born Killers.[77]