Oliver Stone wanted “Natural Born Killers” to be released in its natural form.
The director told Esquire for the 30th anniversary of the feature that he was initially frustrated by Warner Bros. demanding the film be cut down to receive an R-rating. Juliette Lewis and Woody Harrelson led the feature that was originally written by Quentin Tarantino as an expanded scene of “True Romance.”
According to Stone, Bob Daly and Terry Semel, the co-chairmen of Warner Bros. at the time, were “kind of steamed” after the first screening of the film. The first cut of the film was strongly NC-17, which studio WB did not want to release. Stone had previously worked with Warner Bros. on “JFK” (1991) and “Heaven & Earth” (1993).
“It broke my heart because they were cutting so much,” Stone said, “and at one point we reached this level where I couldn’t go on. I was just cutting it, trying to make them happy. 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.’”
After the film was released in August 1994, a couple from Oklahoma claimed the feature inspired them to murder a cotton-gin manager while robbing a convenience store. A lawsuit was filed against Warner Bros. and director Stone by the convenience store’s clerk, though the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case and it was ultimately dismissed.
“It was a joke,” Stone said. “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’?”
Harrelson has an entirely different take on the film’s legacy.
“I don’t know why it gets such grief,” Harrelson said. “It’s a fucking comedy! It’s a romantic comedy, to be specific.”
Stone’s been speaking out about the film being misunderstood for years now.
“Its violence was satiric. I had a history of making films with realistic violence, and I thought it was clearly not literal, but metaphoric, over-the-top, not even close to real,” Stone said in 2019. “Rodney Dangerfield drowns in a fish tank! It was intended to poke fun at the madness of our system. American life is lived on television.”
He added: “We barely got it made to Warner Brothers. I wanted to make ‘Natural Born Killers,’ and they did not. They were worried about the violence. They gave me a list of actors and they were all impossible to get into the movie because they’d all turned it down.”