Natural Born Killers (1994) | The Director's Cut | Full-Length Commentary
Added 2021-12-25 20:01:59 +0000 UTCFull-Length Commentary for Natural Born Killers (1994) The Director's Cut
This is a watch-along.
Comments
Don't think I've seen this one in over twenty years. It's a tough watch, for sure, but very interesting. A deliberate exercise in overkill. Stone's earlier films in the '80s were much more straightforward and conventional in terms of editing, cinematography and narrative structure but starting with THE DOORS in 1991 he started to get all loosey-goosey with all these things and developed a rapid-fire, almost stream-of-consciousness method of presenting his stories. This movie especially goes nuts with quick cuts of stock footage and rear-projection imagery illuminating characters' psyches or flashbacks to their childhood. (Stone's best use of this style of storytelling is probably in the films JFK and NIXON, which are some of the best films of that decade I think.) This started out as a section of either a screenplay or a story treatment written by Tarantino, or maybe Tarantino and his PULP FICTION co-writer Roger Avary, called THE OPEN ROAD. There's some confusion about this as some people say it was an 80 page synopsis and others say it was a gigantic screenplay of anywhere from 500 to over 1000 pages. THE OPEN ROAD also contained the initial seeds of his TRUE ROMANCE screenplay and may have also had characters or scenes which made their way into PULP FICTION. Tarantino supposedly had the story structured around the Wayne Gale character and intended to play him. The Tom Sizemore character, Scagnetti, has the same name as the (unseen) parole officer assigned to Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen) in RESERVOIR DOGS. When Mickey is talking about coming from violence and being born into violence this is actually drawing on Woody Harrelson's personal life. His father Charles was a contract killer who was tried several times for committing murder-for-hire, finally ending up in federal prison after being convicted of assassinating a federal judge for a drug trafficker. Charles Harrelson was also a minor figure in JFK conspiracy theories, as he bore a strong resemblance to a group of strangely well-dressed and clean-cut "hobos" who were allegedly arrested by Dallas PD for vagrancy and then released later without being charged, the implication being that they were snipers being protected and then smuggled out of the city by complicit policemen after Kennedy's assassination. This has never been proven true. The Owen character at the end is supposed to be a supernatural figure, or maybe an imaginary one, it's not really clear. He might be a personification of Mickey and Mallory's "Demon." We see Owen at the very beginning of the movie, sitting at a booth in the diner reading a newspaper before everyone else gets massacred. In the original ending he turns on Mickey and Mallory after they decide to leave killing behind - to leave HIM behind, I guess - and so he murders them. But Stone felt that it made more sense storywise to let Mickey and Mallory get away with everything they've done.
Patrick Flanagan
2021-12-26 07:30:45 +0000 UTCTo be fair, Tarantino wrote the script as a star vehicle for himself, playing the RDJ role. Which would have been terrible. (He finally got to play an Australian in DJANGO at least)
Patrick Flanagan
2021-12-26 00:13:25 +0000 UTCActually, Tarantino hated Stone's NBK. He claimed that Stone rewrote a lot of it and didn't much liked his direction style. QT hated it so much that he requested to only receive credit for the story instead of writing. As for True Romance, that was directed by Tony Scott and QT liked and approved that film.
Joe Lazarus
2021-12-25 23:54:21 +0000 UTC
