Natural Born Killers: A story of Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino’s dispute over the 1994 film
Since I saw Natural Born Killers at a friend’s house in high school, I have it as one of the best movies of the 90s and one of director Oliver Stone’s best films. Mickey and Mallory Knox, brilliantly played by Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis, are seen on a road trip across the country express their love for each other through murder and mayhem is a wild and thrilling experience like no other.
So you can imagine how I felt when I found out that Quentin Tarantino, who wrote the original screenplay, was not a fan of Natural Born Killersto put it mildly. Over the years, the director of films such as pulp Fiction, Reservoir DogsAnd Once upon a time in Hollywood has expressed his displeasure with the film and the changes Stone made to the material. While it’s not one of the biggest feuds in Hollywood, the story behind it is still quite fascinating.
Quentin Tarantino wrote “Natural Born Killers” but then switched to “Reservoir Dogs”
Before Quentin Tarantino made a name for himself as one of Hollywood’s most promising young filmmakers, he started out selling screenplays. True RomanceDirected by Tony Scott in 1993, and Natural Born Killers were two of the most notable. Sometime in the early 90s, before he made his directorial debut with Reservoir DogsTarantino wrote the Natural Born Killers Script that contains all these Easter eggs in the Tarantinoverse present throughout the film
When speaking with Roger Ebert In 1994, Oliver Stone addressed various aspects of the film, including Tarantino’s decision to pass on the project and sell it to someone else instead. In the chat, Stone said “it was a clever script,” but Tarantino didn’t want to do it and took on the directing role instead DogsBut as we all know today, that was not the end. In fact, it was just the beginning.
Oliver Stone believed that his massive changes to the story of Natural Born Killers would have angered Tarantino
From what we hear, Tarantino’s original version of Natural Born Killers was a more straightforward and less exaggerated version than what we saw in the final product, and that’s because Stone made some massive changes to the story and central argument. While many of the main players were present in both versions, Stone’s revisions focused more on attacking American pop culture and the social climate of the time, something he said IndieWire in 2019 was one of the reasons why the Kill Bill Director was angry:
He wrote the original script and we bought it. It was all done legally. A lot of money was paid. His opinion, yes, he didn’t like it, but I don’t know if he ever saw it. He went around saying that and I don’t think that was the right thing to do. But that was one of my many problems. Despite everything, we did well.
These changes ultimately led to Natural Born Killers feels less like a movie and more like a two-hour video essay about the country’s obsession with the likes of OJ Simpson, the Menendez brothers, and “if it bleeds, it’s a headline” journalism. Oh, and it pretty much predicted the reality TV craze that followed a few years later.
Although Natural Born Killers is now considered a cult classic, it was considered one of the worst films of 1994
Natural Born Killers is one of the most iconic films of 1994, but although the film enjoys cult status today, it was not received so well by critics 30 years ago. In the same year pulp Fictionprobably Quentin Tarantino’s best worktook the world by storm, changed the face of Hollywood and was the top film of Rolling Stone According to critic Peter Travers, Stone’s cross-genre experiment did not get off so lightly.
In his reviews, Travers wrote that the film “revels in the violence it supposedly condemns.” He was not alone, as the film was universally panned by critics at the time. But hey, sometimes it’s good Films receive unnecessarily harsh reviews.
In 1994, Stone said he understood Tarantino’s point of view, but he did not like the fact that he publicly panned the film
When asked about the critical reaction to his film and the comments Tarantino made about it after its release, Stone said: MovieMaker Magazine In 1994, he said that while he understood from a screenwriter’s perspective why he was upset, he did not realize how far things had progressed:
All I can say is that I understand his objection from a screenwriter’s point of view, but the fact that he was slamming the film in newspapers and magazines all over the world was very unprofessional and appalling in the sense that he had not seen the film. I don’t think it’s right in our film culture for filmmakers to smear other filmmakers. I think it’s wrong.
In the comments, Stone detailed the changes his team made to the script, including expanding the Knox couple, and even praised Tarantino’s story. He also added that several of his scripts were changed by directors in his early days, but he “never went out with the axe to the director.”
A legal dispute arose after Tarantino made plans to release his original screenplay in 1995
Almost 25 years before the publication of the expansive Once upon a time in Hollywood RomanizationTarantino made plans to release a paperback version of his original Natural Born Killers screenplay. Although the script finally hit shelves in 1995, Stone and the film’s producers fought a legal battle to prevent its release.
According to the IndependentStone and his team argued that since Tarantino had sold the rights to the script years earlier, he had also given up his publishing rights. After its final release, the script joined other Tarantino projects such as Reservoir Dogs, pulp FictionAnd True Romanceboth of which were published as paperbacks at the same time as the release of their respective films.
Tarantino claims he has never seen “Natural Born Killers” from start to finish
With so much grief that Tarantino has inflicted on Stone and his colleagues over the years, you would think he had watched Natural Born Killers countless times. But as he said in a 2007 Interview with Opie & Anthonyhe never fully understood it:
I never sat down and watched the movie from beginning to end. I went to the theater to see it once, and the scene I’m about to mention is so bad that I had to leave. Since then, I’ve seen little snippets of it on cable or something.
The scene Tarantino was referring to was the satirical “I Love Mallory” sequence in Juliette Lewis’ character’s house with Rodney Dangerfield. He said it was so bad and made him so angry that he dropped his name as screenwriter and just kept the “story by” credit instead, losing a lot of money in the process.
2024 is the 30th anniversary of Natural Born Killers‘ release, now would be a good time to revisit the film that some love and others hate. No matter how you feel about it, I will officially say that it is one of the best movies on Netflix at the moment, and I plan to watch it again very soon.
