Oliver Stone On Doing Time For Natural Born Killers
A tale of spree killers directed by Stone and scripted by Quentin Tarantino – and to think, some people had the gall to call it controversial…
Oliver Stone’s never been scared to stick his neck out – hardly surprising since he did exactly that while serving in Vietnam. But with Natural Born Killers, a treatise on 20th century violence originally scripted by Quentin Tarantino, the Platoon director found himself up to his neck in a very different kind of shit.
The story of a young redneck couple who get their kicks slaughtering random strangers, Natural Born Killers was bound to stir the pot. Never being one to take things lightly, Stone was keen to push the envelope as far as possible and then a little bit more again. This extended to him trying to amp up the atmosphere on set by playing gangster rap and speed metal at eardrum-decimating volumes. He was also prone to firing shotguns in between takes.
As the director explains, “It was a young cast, every one of whom was nuts, so I had to make it a party on set from beginning to end. I don’t think we slept that much. I like to think of myself as a Method director and, to me, Natural Born Killers felt as to-the-edge as those ultra-violent Sam Peckinpah westerns like The Wild Bunch. So I said, ‘Let’s go for that feeling!’” This desire to make the shoot as crazy as possible led Robert Downey Jnr – then world renowned for his love of excess – to describe the production as being “like Purgatory with expenses.”
And then the director took the cast and crew into one of the most dangerous jails in the United States.
With a prison riot at the heart of his picture, Stone assumed it would add an air of realism were he to film in Joliet Penitentiary, an Illinois detention facility that was home to almost 400 Category A prisoners. Of course, Oliver being Oliver, he made sure to cast any number of real cons. “The guys were great,” he remembers. “The part of the jail we filmed the riot in, The Roundhouse, if you were held there then you had to have at least two life sentences. It was insane. My favourite shot in NBK is when Tommy Lee Jones’s prison warden looks over his shoulder and sees 2,000 fucking maniacs coming at him. That’s the way I felt.”
A film that divided both critics and audiences alike, no one could decide whether Natural Born Killers was dangerous garbage or incendiary satire. Oliver Stone, though, has no doubts what the film’s really about. “Violent crime in America is statistically flat per capita. It’s the perception of crime that’s accelerated, because the media can make money selling it. And since violent crime is now the number one concern of the voter, the politicians promise more law and order. Basically, more fascism is what you get: more cops, more prison, more oppression. And it’s going to get worse. Trust me, fear is the future.”
I remember thinking it felt like a MTV version of Badlands