Natural Born Killers: A History Of Oliver Stone And Quentin Tarantino's Feud Over The 1994 Movie
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Ever since I saw Natural Born Killers at a friend’s house in high school, I’ve considered it one of the best ‘90s movies as well as one of director Oliver Stone’s greatest films. Watching Mickey and Mallory Knox, played brilliantly by Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis, go on a cross-country road trip expressing their love for one another through acts of murder and mayhem is a wild and transfixing experience like no other.
So, you can imagine how I felt way back when as I discovered that Quentin Tarantino, who wrote the original screenplay, was no fan of Natural Born Killers, to put things mildly. Over the years, the director of movies like Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has voiced his displeasure with the movie and the changes Stone made to the material. It’s not one of the biggest Hollywood feuds, but the story behind it all is still rather fascinating.
Quentin Tarantino Wrote Natural Born Killers, But Moved On To Reservoir Dogs
Back before Quentin Tarantino made a name for himself as one of the brightest young filmmakers in Hollywood, he got his start selling screenplays. True Romance, directed by Tony Scott in 1993, and Natural Born Killers were two of the most notable. Sometime in the early ‘90s, before making his directorial debut with Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino penned the Natural Born Killers screenplay, which explains all those Tarantinoverse Easter eggs present throughout the movie
When speaking with Roger Ebert in 1994, Oliver Stone touched on various aspects of the movie, including Tarantino’s decision to pass on the project and instead sell it off to someone else. In the chat, Stone said “it was a clever script,” but Tarantino didn’t want to do it and instead moved on to direct Dogs. But as we all know now, that wasn’t the end of it. In fact, it was just the beginning.
Oliver Stone Thought His Massive Changes To Natural Born Killers' Story Upset Tarantino
By all accounts, Tarantino’s original version of Natural Born Killers was a more straightforward and less over-the-top version than what we saw with the final product, and that’s because Stone made some massive changes to its story and central argument. While a lot of the major players were present in both versions, Stone’s revisions focused more on attacking American pop culture and the social climate of the times, something he told IndieWire in 2019 was one of the reasons the Kill Bill director was upset:
He wrote the original script, and we bought it. It was all done legally. A lot of money was paid. His opinion, yeah he didn’t care for it, but I don’t know if he ever saw it. He went around and said that and I don’t think it was the right thing to do. But that was one of my many problems. We did well in spite of it all.
Those changes ended up making Natural Born Killers feel less like a movie and more like a two-hour video essay about the country’s obsession with the likes of O.J. Simpson, the Menendez Brothers, and “if it bleeds it leads” journalism. Oh, and it pretty much predicted the reality TV craze that followed a few years later.
Though Natural Born Killers Is Now Considered A Cult Classic, It Was Considered One Of 1994's Worst Movies
Natural Born Killers is one of the most iconic movies from 1994, but while the movie now has cult classic status, it wasn’t all that well received by critics 30 years ago. The same year Pulp Fiction, arguably Quentin Tarantino’s best work, took the world by storm, changed the face of Hollywood, and was the top film of Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers, Stone’s genre-bending experiment didn’t get off so easy.
In his listings, Travers wrote that the movie “gets off on the violence it pretends to be condemning.” He wasn’t alone, as the movie was generally trashed by reviewers at the time. But hey, sometimes good movies get unnecessarily harsh reviews.
In 1994, Stone Said He Understood Tarantino's Point Of View, But Didn't Care For Him Trashing The Film Publicly
When asked about the critical response to his film and comments Tarantino made about it upon its release, Stone told MovieMaker Magazine in 1994 that while he understood why he was upset from a screenwriter’s point of view, he didn’t appreciate how far things had gone:
All I can say is I understand his objection from a screenwriter’s point of view, but going all over the world and trashing the picture in newspapers and magazines was very unprofessional, and appalling in the sense that he had not seen the movie. I don’t think it’s right in our filmmaking culture for filmmakers to trash other filmmakers. I think it’s wrong.
In the comments, Stone explained the changes his team made to the script including expanding the Knox couple, and even complimented Tarantino’s story. He also added that several of his screenplays were changed by directors in his early days but he never “went out with a hatchet for the director.”
There Was A Legal Fight After Tarantino Made Plans To Publish His Original Screenplay In 1995
Nearly 25 years before releasing the expansive Once Upon a Time In Hollywood novelization, Tarantino made plans to publish a paperback version of his original Natural Born Killers screenplay. Though the script would eventually land on shelves in 1995, Stone and the film’s producers led a legal fight to prevent it from being published.
According to the Independent, Stone and his team argued that because Tarantino sold the rights to the screenplay years earlier, he also surrendered his publishing rights. Once finally published, the script joined other Tarantino projects like Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and True Romance, which were both released as paperbacks upon their films’ respective releases.
Tarantino Claims To Have Never Seen Natural Born Killers From Start To Finish
As much grief as Tarantino has given Stone and company over the years, you would think he would have watched Natural Born Killers countless times. However, as he revealed in a 2007 interview with Opie & Anthony, he’s never seen it all the way through:
I’ve never sat down and watched the movie from beginning to end. I went to the theaters once to see it and the scene that I’m going to say is so bad that I had to leave. Since then, I’ve seen little bits of it on cable or something.
The scene Tarantino referenced was the satirical “I Love Mallory” sequence at Juliette Lewis’s character’s house with Rodney Dangerfield. He said it was so bad and made him so mad he took his name off as screenwriter and instead only kept the “story by” credit, giving up a ton of money in the process.
With 2024 being the 30th anniversary of Natural Born Killers’ release, now would be a good time to revisit the film some love and others love to hate. No matter how you feel, I’ll go on the record saying it’s one of the best movies on Netflix right now and I plan on watching it again very soon.
