1993. A clearing in the woods near Chicago, sun shining, puffy clouds. Robert Downey Jr, 27 years old, just a few months past his Best Actor Academy Award nomination for Chaplin, has been high or drunk or asleep for much of the last two months while filming this wild serial killer movie. Today he has dipped one of the front tails of his white button-down shirt in fake blood and pulled it through the unzipped fly of his suit pants, like a bloody phallus.
“Oh come on—that’s too much! You’re going too far, Robert.”
Oliver Stone, the director of the movie—now on its 55 of 56 days of filming—has won two directing Oscars. He is hollering in his gravelly, perpetually annoyed voice across the clearing at Downey, who opens his mouth to try to explain but is cut off.
“You’re ruining my movie! Forget the dumb dick idea. This isn’t…” Stone trails off, grumbling. “This isn’t some slapstick bullshit.”
Downey shrugs at his co-star Woody Harrelson, who smirks. Harrelson is bald, having shaved his head two weeks ago on camera after Stone declared that his character, a serial killer, should shave his head while in prison. (It was the first time in his life Harrelson had cut off all his famous blond hair.) Stone had known Harrelson from his work on Cheers, the sitcom in which he played a corn-fed, slow-witted bartender, before casting him as a killer—but Stone did know that Harrelson’s father was a convicted hitman (he murdered a federal judge), and when he looked at Harrelson, the director claimed he could see “murder in his eyes.”
Juliette Lewis, just 20 years old, stands nearby, holding a shotgun. In this scene, Harrelson and Lewis, as Mickey and Mallory Knox—lovers who kill more than 50 people in a cross-country spree—have escaped from prison during a riot. They have a hostage, Downey, in the character of Wayne Gale, a rapacious tabloid television journalist chasing the biggest story of his life.
Natural Born Killers would appear in theatres in the summer of 1994, just as the 24-hour news cycle was tightening its stranglehold on American life. CNN came on the air 1 June, 1980, and over the next decade, it would create a constant and insatiable desire for instant information—a desire it would then feed, ensuring its own existence. In 1982 the network unveiled CNN2, later renamed Headline News, a circadian presentation of bite-size stories, and by 1989 “the crawl” appeared along the bottom of the screen (except during commercials), tracking stock prices and later including sports scores and mini-headlines. MTV premiered on 1 August, 1981, and its manic, beat-driven, videos—essentially three-minute movies—were redefining the collective attention span.
Meanwhile, and perhaps because of all this, Americans were increasingly interested in watching crime and violence on television. Cops, the vérité-style documentary TV show in which viewers go on ride-alongs with police officers as they bust drug dealers and prostitutes, debuted in March 1989. In 1991, CBS decided to replace its straightforward nightly news program, America Tonight, with a more salacious show called CrimeTime After Primetime.
Crime and violence were everywhere in popular culture. The brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez murdered their parents in Beverly Hills in 1989, and we watched them walk in and out of courtrooms for years. In March 1991, Rodney King was savagely beaten by Los Angeles policemen—the footage captured on a nearby resident’s video camera became shock TV—and the ensuing riots in Los Angeles aired live and on repeat for weeks. In 1992, Joey Buttafuoco pleaded guilty to statutory rape after his 17-year-old girlfriend, Amy Fisher, shot his wife, Mary Jo Buttafuoco, in the face.
As Natural Born Killers was being edited, re-edited, sound-mixed, and eventually marketed on billboards featuring Harrelson’s shaved head, more stories made CNN Headline News: Lorena Bobbitt lopped off her husband’s penis while he was sleeping, claiming he abused her, and was found not guilty by reason of insanity. In Waco, Texas, a cult known as the Branch Davidians led by David Koresh, who thought he was Jesus, found itself in a standoff with the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and local police for 51 days—seemingly every minute of which was televised, with commercials—before the compound in which Koresh kept his disciples exploded in a ball of flames, killing seventy-six members of the cult, including women and children. Four ATF officers were also killed.
Tonya Harding, the crimp-haired figure skater, was banned for life by the US Figure Skating Association after her ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, hired someone to club the leg of Nancy Kerrigan, a princess-like Harding competitor, disabling Kerrigan.
We wanted juicy stories, but our brains had been trained to grow bored quickly, so we watched each juicy story half-anticipating the next, and the more violent or unsavoury it was, the more we (apparently) wanted to see. Then came the OJ Simpson car chase, when the world watched on live television as a football legend/movie star/sportscaster contemplated suicide while being chased down the freeway by half the LAPD as crowds cheered him on.
It was the apotheosis.
This final scene of Natural Born Killers would represent the American media landscape stripped to its essence. “With this movie, Oliver Stone has got something that still bears reexamination,” Downey says to me in one of our conversations about the movie. Indeed, a reckoning with the movie’s climactic moment, and with the film itself now, 30 years on, seems essential. The forces then being unleashed, and depicted in the movie, have only accelerated in their power and reach in the decades since. “It’s an intelligent film—especially with all the layers that we see now in it,” Juliette Lewis says. Though the term embed typically connoted a journalist reporting with a squadron of fighters in a war, here was the tabloid news reporter embedded with his criminals as they committed their crimes. Mallory—one of the very killers he is reporting on!—is holding the camera, filming him, because his crew has all been murdered. After Gale delivers his sign-off and prepares to continue following the couple as they escape, they inform him that no, that is not the plan.
The plan is that they will kill him off.
This all started several years before when a nerdy former video store clerk named Quentin Tarantino and his nerd-friend Roger Avary wrote a screenplay. It was a sprawling script and from it, Tarantino had carved the story that became the 1993 movie True Romance, starring Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette and Gary Oldman and Val Kilmer. He mined it further, turning a dream sequence into another stand-alone screenplay, and this one he called Natural Born Killers.
Like most screenplays, it sat mouldering, and he was moving on to other projects, starting with a script called Reservoir Dogs. Tarantino didn’t even really like Natural Born Killers, and he gave the rights to his friend Rand Vossler. Vossler did not, Tarantino told friends, have the makings of an auteur, and Tarantino assumed this would be the last he would hear of NBK.
But Vossler aspired to become a director, and he actually tried to get the thing made. He optioned it to a couple of wannabe producers Tarantino knew, Jane Hamsher, who had recently graduated from USC film school, and her producing partner, another USC scrapper named Don Murphy. Hamsher was spunky and could be hotheaded, Murphy was a scatterbrained grump and, between the two of them, they had produced zero movies. But when they worked as a team, somehow each one pushed the other in the right ways.
To make a long, convoluted story only a little less long and convoluted, according to Killer Instinct, a 1997 memoir by Hamsher: Tarantino, feeling hot after the success of Reservoir Dogs, reneged on his free option to Vossler and demanded USD10,000, which Murphy and Hamsher coughed up (Hamsher had to borrow from her mother); Tarantino (allegedly) tried to torpedo the project because he kind of hated it and didn’t want someone else making it; a producer named Thom Mount (Bull Durham, Tequila Sunrise) heard about the script because he was at the same agency as Tarantino and, according to Murphy, talked up the script to Stone at a dinner party; and Stone eventually read the script and, improbably, decided he wanted to direct it.
Tarantino’s script didn’t dig deep into Mickey and Mallory as people. Stone wanted a love story between two well-developed characters who just happened to enjoy killing people. He was shooting a film called Heaven and Earth in Thailand and didn’t have time to rewrite NBK himself, so he asked Murphy and Hamsher to find a writer to rework Tarantino’s script—another improbable and odd move by Stone, a controlling director known for keeping a tight team.
They knew just the guy—or rather they knew a guy: David Veloz, who had been a year behind them at USC, had no credits to his name, was a devout Mormon, and had recently promised his wife that he would quit writing and they would move out of Los Angeles.
The producers took Veloz to “some crappy vegan Krishna restaurant in Culver City,” he says and offered him the job of rewriting a script for Oliver Stone. Veloz was ecstatic, read the script, and had ideas. “Roger Avary”— Tarantino’s writing partner at the time, who would share the Academy Award as co-writer of Pulp Fiction—“told me later that this whole script was an inserted dream that they thought would fit into True Romance,” Veloz says. “It was those characters from True Romance having a fever dream about seeing themselves as serial killers. It didn’t feel like a feature film with a beginning, middle and an end. I thought, Maybe I can give it a structure and emotional poignancy—and a beginning, middle, and end.”
The night before the day of the first shoot, Stone was rehearsing some of the main cast, including Downey and Harrelson. Around 9pm Stone told Downey he could leave for the night but that he wanted to go over a few more things with Harrelson.
As Downey was leaving, he whispered to Harrelson, “I’ll come find you in an hour.”
This movie was a big break for Harrelson—he was leaping from a sitcom to starring in an Oliver Stone movie—and he wanted to be at his best. And now Downey, at the peak of his party era, wanted to hang out later.
“I thought: That’s. Not. Good,” Harrelson says. “But I said, ‘Eh…okay?’”
Stone worked with Harrelson for about another hour and then Harrelson went to his hotel room. He drank water and did breathing exercises. He read over his lines for the next day. He was getting “hyper-prepared.”
Ten o’clock came and went.
Ten-thirty.
Eleven.
“Finally, I’m thinking, Man, thank God, I dodged a bullet,” Harrelson says. He went to sleep.
A little after midnight, Harrelson was woken up by a pounding on his door: “Fucking here’s Downey,” Harrelson says, shaking his head and laughing. “He’s like, You ready to go? And he’s with a guy wearing military garb, who he had just met. The guy opens his coat and he’s got every kind of fucking drug. He’s just ready to rumble. Downey used to go hard. That whole movie—it was a very combustible group of personalities.”
(Downey had already perfected his Steve Dunleavyan Australian accent for the Wayne Gale character. “That night that I wouldn’t let Woody Harrelson sleep before a key scene, I don’t think I broke dialect all night,” Downey says. “And I’m not a Method guy. God bless Woody. I mean, I was an absolute savage. However, we were all young enough that our resilience factor was cubed compared to if we had been middle-aged guys.”)
The first scene shot was the first scene of the movie, and it’s one of the scenes from Tarantino’s script that survived intact: Mickey and Mallory in a diner in a dusty landscape, middle of nowhere. A few rednecks, a waitress, and a cook, most of whom end up dead. Key lime pie is involved.
Juliette Lewis had been working out with Dale Dye, an ex-Marine and sometime actor who had served as a military advisor on Stone’s films going back to Platoon (1986). Stone charged him with training Lewis, chiselling her frame to match Mallory’s tough interior with an almost superpowered physique. “I’m relatively infamous, if you will, for putting actors through a regimen that will shape them up a bit,” Dye says. “So I would go by where she was staying and run her through a regimen that would shape her up in terms of muscle tones so that it would show on camera.”
By the first day of filming, she and Dye had a good thing going (“a Dutch-uncle relationship,” he says), and she was primed for the fight scene in which Mallory eviscerates several large men with roundhouse kicks and vicious left jabs, all while hip-swivelling to the music on the jukebox.
“Nowadays it’s commonplace for women to do fight sequences, but I do want to go on record: That might have been the first of its kind! To use the left jab,” Lewis says. “I trained extensively for that fight. It was all orchestrated, even how you land it. There’s a lot of technical stuff that goes into it—to make something look fucking wild. And that line, ‘How sexy am I now?’ is all improvised. ‘Are you flirting with me?’ Oliver signed off on all of it. He wanted everything I had to give.”
The fight choreographer was Benny Urquidez, a Zen-like stunt coordinator whom everyone called Benny the Jet. “In nature, if a woman’s baby is in danger, she can lift a car. So that state of mind, where they can draw that kind of power, is where we wanted to take Juliette: to that state of mind where she could lift, throw, and be in that kind of a craze, and it can be believable,” Urquidez says. “Juliette is a great actress, and she became stronger. She pulled it off.”
One of the movie’s most famous scenes embodies writer David Veloz’s genius: It’s a dream Mickey has of when he first met Mallory, which doubles as a flashback to Mallory’s traumatic childhood. It was written and filmed as a cheesy sitcom called I Love Mallory, with a laugh track. If it’s possible to engender sympathy for a sociopathic serial killer, this scene does it but the scene also represents one of the movie’s central themes: that television was transforming a generation of people into catatonic, glazed-eyed consumers who were inured to violence.
Rodney Dangerfield, the legendary comedian Stone had seen in the 1986 goofball comedy Back to School, played Mallory’s abusive, filthy father. (“That’s why I cast him—I was a huge fan of Back to School,” Stone says, smiling at how surprising he knows this sounds. “That’s when I said, He’s perfect for Natural Born Killers.”) Edie McClurg, the supremely gifted character actor, was Mallory’s giggling, enabling, pathetic mother; and Stone’s real-life son, Sean, just nine at the time, played Mallory’s brother, Kevin, made up with Gene Simmons face paint. And there is Lewis, perfectly angelic and awkward in braces, hiding pain behind her eyes. Finally, Harrelson, as Mickey the meat-delivery man, enters to loud canned applause.
It’s an American freak show.
Stone was in the middle of a divorce from his wife, Sean’s mother, and Sean travelled to the set with a babysitter and a French cousin on his mother’s side. “I remember Rodney was so concerned about some of the jokes he had to say—he was looking at my dad like, ‘You sure you want me to say this in front of your son?’” Sean says. “And my dad was like, ‘He doesn’t even know what you’re talking about.’ Which is kind of true. The sexual stuff, the incest.”
During this scene, special-effects makeup head Matthew Mungle recalls, that one of the costumers noticed that Dangerfield’s scrotum was visibly hanging out of his boxer shorts. This was a delicate situation because nobody wanted to humiliate Rodney Dangerfield. The solution they came up with was that Mungle would pretend to touch up Dangerfield’s makeup while the costumer deftly placed a towel on the actor’s lap to hide the testicles. Dangerfield never noticed.
The NBK cast and crew traversed the American southwest for the next few weeks. “The magic of this movie was it was like a travelling caravan. It reminded me very much of the circus,” Lewis says. “Everyone had their various rental cars or vans, and it’d be like, ‘We’re going to Winslow—when are you leaving?’ ‘Six am’ ‘Okay.’”
Stone and first assistant director Herb Gains kept to a tight schedule, which was not always easy, even for a dictator like Stone. There were, according to just about everyone, drugs. “I have to say, it was a zoo in the sense the actors were all on different kind of trips,” Stone says. “I think Woody was the most sane.”
Harrelson laughs about this, knowing his marijuana use is legendary. (He recently opened a dispensary in West Hollywood.) “I will say this, and Oliver reassured me of this: I don’t want to say I was the moral centre in this movie, but I was the one doing the least amount of drugs! Which is—it’s never happened in my career or my life. And no one’s ever done more drugs than me, but I was Mother Teresa on this one.”
And Downey? “The only time I was awake”—he can barely talk through his own laughter—“was between Action and Cut.”
Producer Clayton Townsend tried to keep to a tight budget in all of this. One issue there was that Hank Corwin, the editor, was racking up bills. Stone had assembled a team that would allow him to upend the conventions of filmmaking. “I was in a mood,” Stone says. “Let’s use what we know about how fractured the modern mind is, and let’s bring it to this. Bring everything we can throw in the kitchen sink.” His longtime cinematographer, Bob Richardson, at first didn’t want to work on the film. But according to producer Don Murphy, Stone lured him by promising Richardson he could have the freedom to make the film visually wild, using multiple film stocks (video, 16mm, whatever he wanted). And Corwin, who came out of the commercial world and had never edited a feature film, had the idea of projected weird images behind the actors—galloping horses, seahorses, bumblebees—an MTV-style effect that made some scenes feel like an acid trip. These projections are known as plates, and Corwin called the ones he envisioned for Mickey and Mallory “psychological plates.” For his work in TV commercials, Corwin was used to buying expensive stock film footage whenever he needed it. But this wasn’t in the NBK budget. Fortunately, when he showed Stone his first version of a scene with these—“it was the sea monsters”—Stone loved it. “But then Clayton walked up to me after,” Corwin says. “I thought he was laughing, but he was so upset he was almost crying, because I had just spent a fortune on all this footage, and this was the first time I’d shown Oliver anything.” The budget was approved.
Stone was hungry for ideas that would add to the innovative look he craved. In the story, Mickey and Mallory end up on a Native American reservation, where an old chief, played by the late Russell Means, helps them. As they listen to him, Corwin and Richardson project the words TOO MUCH TV across their bodies. In the end, Mickey kills the chief, and Mallory unloads on him. “Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad!” she shouts, in what became one of the film’s more haunting scenes.
“That’s improvised,” Lewis says. “If you look at the movie, I repeat phrases. And that was me playing with making a sentence or a word mean several different things. For instance, I say a lot in the film, ‘Do you think I’m pretty? How sexy am I?’ And then also ‘bitch.’ When I say to Rodney Dangerfield when we kill him, ‘You stupid bitch. You stupid bitch’—it’s her working out traumatic phrases that were said to her and then I’m parroting them back to others. These were things that I came up with to do. And so when I yell, ‘Bad, bad, bad!’ to Woody, they’re like bullets to me. I’m yelling at him like a dog because that’s what was said to me.”
For the pre-climactic scene in which the law—in the form of Tom Sizemore’s cop, Jack Scagnetti, a very bad man—finally corners Mickey and Mallory, location manager Jacolyn Bucksbaum found a cavernous, abandoned big-box store near Albuquerque, New Mexico, to serve as the Drug Zone, a sickly-green pharmacy where Mickey and Mallory seek a snake-bite remedy. (The giant pharmacy bathed in green light was another invention from the mind of David Veloz.) To make the whole store glow green, production designers Victor Kempster and Richardson oversaw the replacement of hundreds of traditional fluorescent lightbulbs with green ones—the only way to create the sickening green light back then.
The screenwriter on any movie is not typically present during the shoot except for a day or two here and there when he or she is invited to the set. Veloz was there for the Drug Zone shoot. “And Oliver is up on a giant ladder, like God,” he remembers. “He’s up above everyone yelling like Napoleon, ‘Action!’ And I’m standing there looking up at him, looking at this thing that I wrote that’s happening. It’s this big, final, wide shot, and he gets down—this plays into all my daddy issues—and he puts his arm around me and says, ‘What do you think? You made this, kid!’ I’m like, Fuck.”
The last bit to film before the crew packed up and headed to Chicago for the third-act prison riot was Mickey getting arrested in front of the Drug Zone after a shootout with the police. Stone took the opportunity to motivate Harrelson by warning him that if any mistakes were made, it would take 90 minutes—an eternity, costly of time and money—to set up the scene again.
“The police come, and I have to run across from one—it’s a checkout counter, and I’m running across and they’re shooting out the windows, the cops. And I jump behind another thing and—anyway, we’re doing that. And I mean, it’s a lot. I was reloading and doing all kinds of shit—it’s all one continuous thing, all happening quickly. And right before, Oliver comes up and gives me a little pep talk. He goes [Harrelson mimics Stone in a quiet, high voice], ‘It’s an hour and a half to reset. Don’t fuck up.’ [Then yells, as Stone] ‘Rolling!’ I’m like, motherf—are you serious? I’m not feeling enough pressure already?”
Stateville Correctional Facility in Crest Hill, Illinois, opened in 1925 with a layout that remains unique among American maximum-security prisons. At its core sits a large cylindrical building, with four stories of cells around the perimeter, like tiers in an arena. All the cells face a circular ground floor in the middle, and in the centre of the floor, like a gladiator in a colosseum, stands a guard tower. They call it F-House.
For the climactic third act of Natural Born Killers, Oliver Stone had several requests for Bucksbaum. First, he needed a prison that would permit a film crew to shoot in the prison for two weeks. He needed to hire actual inmates as extras, essentially playing themselves. And he needed a structure that would allow Richardson and him to shoot from every possible angle, squeezing maximum drama from each frame. For this movie that was unlike anything anyone had ever seen, they wanted to show prison in a way no one had ever imagined.
F-House was perfect.
Bucksbaum negotiated a deal with the Illinois Department of Corrections to film a riot at the prison over a total of about fourteen days. The warden of Stateville, Salvador Godinez, warned her that the moment anything went wrong, production would be shut down immediately. Godinez showed Bucksbaum a suitcase full of all kinds of innocuous-seeming objects that prisoners had turned into shivs and other weapons. Every morning, he told her, every vehicle, cast member, and crew member would enter through a sally port, a secure, windowless, barb-wired vestibule where every piece of equipment would be searched, inventoried, and marked, a process that would be repeated on the way out each night.
Godinez was right to be worried. The third act of the script called for mayhem in the prison: Mickey is in his maximum-security cell. Wayne Gale has been allowed into the prison to conduct a live interview with Mickey. Mallory is zombielike in her cell, and Scagnetti is in the prison to oversee the Knoxes’ transfer to another facility. He is given a tour by the warden, Dwight McClusky (Tommy Lee Jones). During the live TV interview, Mickey takes Wayne as a hostage and goes to find Mallory, whom Scagnetti has been harassing to the point where she headbutts him, breaking his nose. With Mickey and Mallory on the loose and the guards panicking, unrest cascades through Stateville and the prisoners start a massive riot. McClusky is beheaded. Mickey and Mallory blast their way out of the prison with the help of a gentle guard (Arliss Howard).
By the time the prison scenes were filmed, Lewis, who, like Harrelson, appears in nearly every frame of Natural Born Killers, was exhausted. And yet she and Harrelson had reached a transcendent rhythm between them as actors. After grinding through the early killing spree in the first few weeks of shooting, they had achieved a perfect equilibrium, moving almost as one person.
Lewis had taken to going barefoot much of the time. Even in character, she was barely wearing makeup, evidence of Mallory’s evolution from awkward teenage misfit to androgynous killing machine who cuts her own hair. She had walking pneumonia and had lost weight. On top of all that, shortly before the movie started Lewis had broken up with Brad Pitt. (“I felt bad for her,” Harrelson says. “I could tell that whole thing really hurt her, and yet here she is. She’s going to work the next day.”)
“When we first did the orientation in the prison, it was me, Sizemore, Downey, Harrelson, Oliver Stone,” Lewis says. “So there is the deep knowledge of, if someone’s going to take a hostage and try to escape, who are they going to take? I know this. There was a very rabid fear in my heart. A pitter-patter. They have gun towers, and you’re walking on the plank right next to open cells, like, ‘Hi, rapist.’”
Bucksbaum, too, felt it. As the location manager, she was there every day. “It was very uncomfortable as a woman working in the prison,” she says. “I wore sunglasses because the guys were not nice, and they would ‘Hoot, hoot!’ and do whatever they do.”
Even Dye, as tough a military man as they come, felt it. “There’s something about a prison. It smells. And you noticed it immediately when you got there,” he says. “Prisoners have a way of communicating with each other. I could hear them singing in this chant-and-response sort of thing. It would travel all around the cell block, and there was something weird and scary about it. You felt, God, I could be attacked from any direction here.”
Stone was determined to use dozens of inmates as paid extras. Stone understood that this would be fun and different for these inmates serving life sentences, to be a part of a movie for a couple of weeks—but that it was not just any movie. It was this movie, a story about the deification of criminals and killers, about a system that profits from glorifying crime, then crams the people convicted of those crimes into dirty cells for the rest of their lives while viewers wait for the next show trial.
“Those are real people in the film,” Stone says. “I recognised several faces of homicidal killers in there, but in our movie, they’re having a ball. Look at them having a ball! They’re letting it all out. There was one fellow, an older man who had killed his wife with a pipe, and he had a grin on his face. I used him in a scene with a Black inmate, and they were fighting, and the looks they give each other—all those guys—they really are the real fucking faces! So when you hear Mickey’s interview on the TV, hear him talking about the real life, the urge to purify, to get rid of the cant, the hypocrisy—he’s talking to them. And I think a lot of those guys recognised a bond.”
Many of the inmates at Stateville were, as Harrelson put it, “hardcore.” “It wasn’t like a, you know, held-up-the-grocery-store prison,” he says. By the time Stone had the idea that Mickey should shave his head in prison, Harrelson had a good head of hair and sometimes wore it in a ponytail as Mickey. To see how he would look bald, Matthew Mungle created a skullcap for Harrelson as a test, and they all thought it gave Mickey the appropriate combination of menace and sexual charge. So Harrelson shaved his head on camera—obviously, they had only one take to get it—and after that, he felt a bond almost too close. “Every time I’d come in, these guys were yelling down to me from the windows, ‘Fucking skinhead!’ And I started yelling all this shit back, ‘Fuck you, motherfucker!’ I was just in the mindset of Mickey Knox by that point, so I wasn’t probably doing smart stuff. Otherwise, I probably would have just ignored it. But it’s not really in my disposition to ignore being called skinhead and shit. Aryan.”
Arliss Howard, 38 at the time, had recently become a parent. He had worked with Stanley Kubrick on Full Metal Jacket and with Robert Towne on Tequila Sunrise and was always asking Stone a lot of questions. (Kubrick had once told Howard that he should direct movies, which Howard took as a compliment until Kubrick added, “Because then you’ll understand what a pain in the ass you are.”) Stone liked setting up what Howard interpreted as spontaneous improvisational scenes off-camera, and one day early on at Stateville the director pointed to a small man sitting alone at a table and told Howard to go talk to him. “He killed his whole family,” Stone said—he had a way of saying shocking things in an offhand way. The man was balding and had a friendly face and thick glasses. Howard went over and sat next to the man and said hello. Right away Howard could smell the stale, warm scent of prison homebrew on the man’s breath.
Howard fidgeted and stammered out a few small-talk questions before saying, “Oliver says you’re here because you killed your family.” Immediately, the man smiled and said, “Oh no, no. I love my family. I had a wife and two beautiful little girls. Everything I did was for them. I worked a couple of jobs. And one night I fell asleep and another man got up and he walked down the hall, and I watched him.”
“That was all he said about it, man,” Howard says. “The guy had developed a language for living with what he had done.”
On the set, Stone achieved a purposeful chaos, somehow knowing just how wild to let things get while exercising what had become his signature gruff authority. “It was like a precision-executed three-ring circus ballet,” Downey says.
Tommy Lee Jones: “It was certainly under control, and apparently chaotic. But what are the elements of control in cinema? Well, the lens—and it was never in danger, never at sea, and never improvisatory.”
Jones’s performance as Dwight McClusky, the prison warden, was quickly evolving into a piece of performance art. (“I mean, Tommy Lee Jones, dude,” Downey says, shaking his head. He holds his hands in a prayer position in front of his mouth, looking up while he thinks of the perfect words: “He was putting on a clinic in off-the-chain acting.”) The warden was the scariest kind of person: a narcissistic fool with a cruel streak. He is intoxicated by Jack Scagnetti’s fame and craves for Gale to get him on TV. He cares not a lick about the incarcerated humans in his charge. He dresses as a 70s-era dandy, hair in a bouffant and the thinnest of moustaches.
The look was Jones’s vision, and it started with his instructions to his longtime hairdresser, Cydney Cornell. “At the very beginning of Natural Born Killers, she said, ‘Okay, Tommy Lee, what do you want to look like?’ Referring to the hair. And I said, ‘I think I would like to look like a 1955 Studebaker.’ And she instantly knew what I meant. And off we went to create that hair, the sideburns, the moustache—which wasn’t real, by the way. That pencil-thin, toothbrush moustache is much easier to manufacture and glue on than it is to grow.”
(When Dale Dye, an old friend of Jones’s, first saw his hair, he said, “Oh God, you’re going to go on camera like that?”)
Jones had experienced a maximum-security prison once before—Utah State Prison in Draper—when he played Gary Gilmore in The Executioner’s Song in 1982. He felt comfortable at Stateville—“we’re supposed to be able to do our work no matter what’s going on around us”—and rather than interviewing inmates, he listened and watched. He heard and saw snatches of prison life. As they prepared to film the riot, Jones was walking through a crowd of inmates and passed a skinny Black guy who was talking to a tall white man who wore a white shirt and a necktie. Jones heard only this, from the white man: “No, no, no, man. You threaten me, you’re going to the hole. I’ll see you in one year.”
“It was just one of those conversations,” Jones says. “Neither one of them knew I was listening. It was a small insight, I think, into how life works.”
The riot scene begins when Mickey takes Wayne hostage while hundreds of inmates are watching the interview live on TV throughout the prison. They witness the kidnapping, and then, as Dye put it, “the defecation hit the oscillation.” Dye, in costume as a guard, was in the middle of the prison with stunt coordinator Phil Neilson, dressed as an inmate, the only two non-guards among the “rioting” inmates. They were pumping shotguns and discharging blank shells while inmates threw chairs and fought. Jones and Sizemore walked amidst the riot, doing their dialogue, when a carton of milk flew down from one of the tiers of cells and hit Jones in the face. This was not in the script, but Jones did not break character. When Stone called “Cut,” Jones wasted no time cleaning the milk off his face.
After every take, the prison had to be scoured for blank shells. Stone would call “Cut!” and Dye would oversee the collection of shells. In one section of F-House, for example, Dye had loaded fifteen blanks into modified shotguns. A sweep of the floor yielded only fourteen shells, and Stone couldn’t begin another take until the fifteenth was found. It was a pain in the ass and there were splinters of breakaway chairs and spilt milk and shit everywhere, but this was one of Warden Godinez’s non-negotiables.
One prison scene that was not filmed at Stateville: The final confrontation between Scagnetti and Mallory in her cell. Mallory was supposed to be sleeping when he arrives, then wake up in a sort of catatonic haze, then violently lunge at the cop. The problem was when the camera was rolling and Sizemore yelled into the cell, “Rise and shine, Knox!” Lewis didn’t wake up. Stone was told that she was asleep, and he said, “She’s supposed to be asleep!”
No, Oliver, Sizemore said. She’s asleep.
Eventually, she came to, and on the next take, she ran at Sizemore and head-butted him in the nose hard. Sizemore bent over and grabbed his nose, which was bleeding a ton—through the prosthetic nose he was already wearing to make his nose look broken. Matthew Mungle: “I push on the foam-latex broken nose and blood just starts seeping out of it. I said, Okay, I think she busted your nose. So I had to peel the latex broken-nose piece off. And we already had a real broken nose there! So we went on shooting. Oliver said, Oh, great, let’s use it!”
It was time for the prison break.
The prelude was Wayne Gale’s live interview with Mickey Knox, a brilliant scene executed by Downey and Harrelson—even though Downey had been out just hours before. “The day that we did the prison interview, I had been out on the town, nine sheets to the wind. And then everything on the schedule got moved up, and suddenly I needed to be there in two hours. To this day, it was one of the most mortifying notifications I’ve ever received, because it was a seven-page scene. I got to set and I was absolutely useless. I was then given a therapeutic injection of ‘B12 vitamins’—I’m just going to put that in quotes, italics, underlined, and question marks on either side. And I have never in my life experienced a more delightful nine hours. But! I looked at the pages left to right, spread out on the floor—only twice—and was off-book. And—it’s the only time this happened during that shoot: You know how sometimes there’s applause from the crew after takes when people are doing movies and really nail it? When I finally got through that day—and Woody nailed it, nailed it, nailed it—then they had to turn around on me. The entire crew applauded because I think intuitively they know that I should not have even been anywhere but an emergency room that morning.”
Mungle had crafted a perfect replica of Jones’s Studebaker-styled head, which was placed on a stake and held aloft by the inmates like the Olympic torch. Arliss Howard, as a kind of guardian angel in the form of a prison guard, was leading Harrelson and Lewis through the riot, his affect calm and his words gentle. Harrelson held Downey as a hostage. This is the climax of Tarantino’s satire, the moment when the maniacs take charge, looking saner than anyone in sight.
After the riot, in the small clearing under the puffy clouds, Downey, as Gale, is begging the couple not to murder him. (“This is not about you, you egomaniac,” Mickey says in response, almost apologising, patting Gale on the cheek. “I kinda like you.”) But this is Stone’s warning. In its bloodthirsty pursuit of the story, the media has literally freed the jailed killers. The story has superseded the rule of law, the United States of America has become an asylum run by the inmates, and the culpability lies with a bewildered media represented brilliantly by Downey.
Downey is sober today, a first for him on this shoot. He has been pretty well bombed out of his mind for most of the filming, but today he is clear-eyed and rested. This is the last scene of the movie, his execution, and he is ready. He pulls the bloody shirttail back through his fly and zips up his pants.
“Wait, wait—wait a second,” Stone is saying now. “Let me see the dick thing again.”
Downey’s famous elastic eyebrows go up, his eyes wide. Okay, his face says. He yanks the bloody shirt-tail through his fly again. Stone stares, hand on his chin. Everyone’s looking at him—Harrelson, Lewis, Downey, Richardson. At forty-seven, Stone had already directed half a dozen films that would establish him as one of the great filmmakers of the twentieth century: Platoon. Wall Street. Born on the Fourth of July. The Doors. Salvador. JFK. Highly original movies whose brilliance could be found around their edges, in the jolts of electricity that Stone brought to his storytelling. He had found a way to make blockbuster hits for major studios with movies that somehow felt personal, even scrappy.
Finally, Stone says: “Pull it back a half inch.”
Downey obeys, reaching into his pants and tugging the front tail back in a bit. Stone nods.
“All right. Let’s go.”
And for a brief second in the final scene of Natural Born Killers (filmed the same month as the Lorena Bobbitt news), you can see Downey’s joke in the form of a twisted, bloody root sticking out of Wayne Gale’s fly.
Filmed, as the entire movie was, in the kinetic, jump-cut style pioneered by thousands of music videos on MTV, the scene was also reflective of the increasing prevalence of handheld video footage captured by civilians, a fascination that showed itself in Stone’s masterful use of the Abraham Zapruder film in JFK and that is magnified at the end of NBK by clips of the Rodney King beating. In this final scene, of Gale’s execution, we watch much of the action through Gale’s own camera, first as Mallory shoulders it like a bazooka aimed at Gale, and later through its viewfinder as it sits on the ground, tossed off by the killers, still recording as they fill Gale’s body with bullets and walk out of the frame.
It’s as if Stone, one of the defining directors of his time, is saying, “Fuck it,” dropping his camera in the dirt.
Bob Daly and Terry Semel, the co-chairmen of Warner Bros., the studio financing the film, were, according to Stone, “kind of steamed” after they saw the first screening of the film before it was released. Stone was represented by Mike Ovitz, the head agent at CAA, and the Warner guys complained to Ovitz that they were promised the film would have an R rating, not NC-17, and that there was no way the movie in its current incarnation would get an R. This pitted Stone against the Motion Picture Association of America, which confers movie ratings.
“It broke my heart because they were cutting so much, and at one point we reached this level where I couldn’t go on. I was just cutting it, trying to make them happy,” Stone says. “But really what upset them was the chaos. I said, You’re not objecting to anything physically that’s so grotesque. It’s about the chaos, and the idea of chaos—that’s what you’re objecting to.”
Warner Bros. got its R rating and Natural Born Killers was released on 26 August, 1994. It was the largest opening of Stone’s career and it grossed USD110 million on a budget of USD34 million—a huge amount of money at that time.
The outcry over Natural Born Killers was immediate and loud, and controversy would surround it for years. For example:
Dear Friend,
I just watched all I could stand of “Natural Born Killers.”
It’s about two young people becoming celebrities by committing a series of murders.
I kept thinking, with our streets under siege and our values decaying, why would anyone make a movie in which the heroes are twisted lovers on a killing binge?
Do you agree?
Are you tired of movies and songs “glamorising” rape, murder and drug abuse?
I am.
As I campaign for President, violence and sex in entertainment is what parents and grandparents talk of most. They are tired of movies and music oozing blood and sex.
But, too many of those who profit from these movies and songs claim their products are not part of the problem—that they are not influential to our young.
That is conveniently self-serving and horribly wrong.
That’s a campaign fundraising letter sent by Bob Dole to his supporters in 1996. Dole would later confirm that he never watched the whole movie (presumably contributing to his missing the point spectacularly).
In March 1995, seven months after its release, a couple from Oklahoma, 19-year-old Sarah Edmondson and her 18-year-old boyfriend, Benjamin Darras, dropped acid, watched the movie, and shot a convenience-store clerk, paralysing her, and a cotton-gin manager, killing him. Edmondson told police, “It was as if [Darras] was fantasising from the movie.” (But a year later, she told Vanity Fair, “It is not as great as I would like to make it be. I wish I could point the finger at Hollywood completely.”)
The cotton-gin manager turned out to be a friend of John Grisham’s, and Grisham—the prolific and wealthy author of legal thrillers—lambasted the movie in an essay in The Oxford American, the literary journal he financially backed. “Think of a movie as a product, something created and brought to market, not too dissimilar from… Ford Pintos,” Grisham wrote. “If something goes wrong with the product, whether by design or defect, and injury ensues, its makers are held responsible.” In a subsequent lawsuit brought against Warner Bros and Stone by the convenience store clerk, Stone was deposed twice. The US Supreme Court declined to hear the case and it was ultimately dismissed.
“It was a joke,” Stone tells me. “If they had allowed this suit to go through, it would mean, frankly, that all film, all television, is subject to the same violation that damages are provisions of any commercial product. It’s like if a vacuum cleaner blows up in your face—it’s the same thing. You’re saying a movie is a product with commercial liability. Can you say that? I don’t think so. Because what if you say, ‘This Beethoven sonata drove me nuts and I had to kill my wife’?”
There is an argument to be made that Natural Born Killers is the most misunderstood mainstream movie ever released. “Oliver Stone is a director who, barring Nolan and maybe a few others, is the highest embodiment of social commentary via cinema,” Downey says. “Oliver Stone has never made a movie that wasn’t saying something. Never.” Its violence is not stylised to be seductive, rather it is a grotesque and cartoonish rendering of the banal mayhem we were devouring on cable television. It was an incendiary critique of a culture in which the media had glorified violence and violent criminals—yet the film itself was wrongly vilified for doing the same thing. One of the reasons Natural Born Killers exists is to caution us. To caution the media against “being so simple-minded,” as Stone says, trafficking more and more in violence and crime. And to caution ourselves against giving in to our rankest obsessions, temptations, and fascinations.
It is also very funny, full of humour so dark it’s easy to miss that the joke is on us.
“I don’t know why it gets such grief,” Woody Harrelson says to me. “It’s a fucking comedy! It’s a romantic comedy, to be specific.”
