The Wild Thriller Quentin Tarantino Wrote, Hated, and Disowned is Now on Prime Video
Last Updated: May 1st, 2024
In 1994, Quentin Tarantino wrote a screenplay for a little movie you might know by the name Natural Born Killers. Yet, while Tarantino retains a “Story By” credit on the final release, his name is absent from the screenplay.
That’s because Tarantino and director Oliver Stone had considerable disagreements over the direction this classic interrogation of the media’s glorification of violence should take. Resultantly, Stone and writer David Veloz heavily revised the screenplay, with Tarantino later publicly disowning the film entirely. If you want to see what all the hubbub was about, you’re in luck—Natural Born Killers is currently available to rent online.
Per Prime Video: A young couple blast their way across the country–and into media stardom–in Oliver Stone’s controversial look at violence and the media.
Natural Born Killers is a favorite among many. Stars Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis are phenomenal, even if, retrospectively, the movie isn’t quite as subversive as it might have seemed upon release. Still, it’s a good time, and even with the heavy revisions, it still bears Quentin Tarantino’s trademark style and verve.
In 2019, speaking with Indiewire, Oliver Stone remarked, “[Quentin Tarantino] 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.”
More recently, Quentin Tarantino shared his thoughts, confirming Stone’s assessment that he’d never seen Natural Born Killers in its entirety. Speaking with Brian Koppelman on his podcast The Moment, Tarantino said, “Not that I’ve seen it all from beginning to end” when prompted on changes made between his version of the script and what was later filmed. He later added, “One of the things about that script, in particular, is that I was trying to make it on the page, so when you read it, you saw the movie, and it was like, why didn’t he do at least half of that?”
Dread Central reviewer Anthony Arrigo called it “a violent rollercoaster, careening wildly through a series of vignettes…bursts of hyper-violence, animation, black-and-white, and hallucinations” in his review of the recently released 4K remaster of the film by Scream Factory.
What do you think? Are you a fan of Natural Born Killers? Quentin Tarantino’s original draft is floating around on the interwebs for those interested. Let me know which version you think is better over on Twitter @Chadiscollins.
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