The Making Of Natural Born Killers
An excessive director. A pissed-off writer. 375 Category A prisoners. On-set shotguns. And alleged copycat killings. From frenzied inception to ferocious reception, the making of a media monster...
This piece originally appeared in Total Film, and is credited to Andrew Webster and Richard Luck.
"Natural Born Killers is as revolutionary as the Guttenberg Bible," Oliver Stone buddy James Woods once exclaimed. "Oliver is doing work that it it were by Orson Welles would be hailed as genius."
Woods is famed for overstatement, but there's no denying that NBK is a watershed movie. Its origins lay in a so-so Quentin Tarnatino script but in Stone's hands, the picture would puncture America's obsession with serial killers while slating the base behaviour of a pit-bull media. It upset people the world over, forced Warner Bros to reject a UK video release and, in the opinion of some, inspired a number of copycat crimes. No wonder Natural Born Killers has its own bloated subsection in the file marked 'Controversial'.
Back before he brewed up his own storm with a little number called Reservoir Dogs, video shop clerk Quentin Tarantino busied himself writing a Badlands-esque story of murderous lovers on the run and a multi-film stock kill-spree flick. The former became Tony Scott's True Romance, while the latter fell into the fists of film students Jane Hamsher and Don Murphy. As Murphy recalls, "Quentin was a writer we knew and liked. At first, everything he showed us was superficial but he was talented and had a way of putting a spin on old ideas that was original. We were promised a free option but because Quentin wanted a new car, we scraped together $10,000 and bought it from him."
With the script secured, Hamsher and Murphy, under the banner of J&D Productions, started touting it around Hollywood. After every studio in town rejected it, you can imagine the pair's ecstatic response when Oliver Stone pitched up. As big a name as Stone was, Jane Hamsher had her reservations. "I thought Stone tended to be a heavy-handed propagandist, and the women in his films made Barbie look like Sylvia Plath. I'd always thought in the press that he came across as a pompous bastard. I was struck when I met him that he didn't seem that way at all. He seemed very genuine and very sincere. But it depends what he's on."
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