Oliver Stone's killer instinct - motion picture director - Interview

Interview, Sept, 1994 by Graham Fuller

Whatever you think about Oliver Stone's macho left-wing discourses on recent American culture, his movies comprise a full-blooded cinema of conscience that has never lurched into mere worthiness. Ill at ease with the placebo imperative of most Hollywood filmmaking, Stone is the extreme example of a modern director with his eye on the bigger picture, and it's to his credit that the big pictures he makes are, if often wayward, invariably electrifying to behold.

Stone's latest, Natural Born Killers, the zeitgeisty story of mass-murdering media darlings Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis), is his millennial crisis flick. Based on a Quentin Tarantino screenplay, it's a lurid, pop-crazy, telecentric mosaic of some 3,000 images that lifts off from JFK's brilliant assassination montage and descends into some kind of MTV hell. Anticipating critical vitriol and a possible banning of his film in Britain, Stone, forty-eight this month, was in a pensive mood when we talked at the Stanhope Hotel in New York in July.

GRAHAM FULLER: Was there something in the air that inspired you to make a movie about serial killers, or did you just happen upon Quentin Tarantino's script?

OLIVER STONE: It wasn't because serial killers were in the air. In the early '80s I had done extensive research on the Hillside Strangler case, but nobody wanted to produce a movie about it because it was such a grisly story. I loved Richard Brooks's In Cold Blood [1967] and had been very impressed with John McNaughton's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer [1990], though I never had any intention of doing Natural Born Killers with realistic violence. In terms of genre, I've always been an aficionado of road movies, muscle-car movies, and American prison pictures. Midnight Express [1978] was, in a sense, my prison picture, my homage to Cool Hand Luke [1967] and Papillon [1973], while Salvador [1986] had a little bit of the road in it. Coming off serious films like JFK [1991] and Heaven and Earth [1993], I wanted to do a tough action picture, and when I read Natural Born Killers I thought it was the right marriage of the road and the prison.

GF: Did you know instantly that Tarantino's script would have to be reworked?

OS: I felt it was a brilliant script but that I did not know enough about the killers from reading it. Quentin warned me, "You can never make these killers real. The movie's about the media, not about them." That was his caveat. I didn't quite agree with it. I wanted to know why they killed and to draw their lives into the history of violence in this century, which is why I have bits and pieces of arcana junking up their minds.

GF: Because you use bits of vintage TV footage, I wondered if you were suggesting that America's social malaise originated with television.

OS: No. In the motel scene you see images of Hitler, images of Vietnam, images of Stalin appearing in the window of Mickey and Mallory's room. It's the violence of the whole century. Television is just an expansion of it, because it gives us another opportunity to mirror events. In other words, we become a culture of gossip and a culture of surveillance. Everything is watched, everything is discussed. Everybody has their traumas put on television, everybody makes the news for fifteen seconds. Mickey and Mallory cannot make love in a motel without being watched by Stalin--or by one of their victims tied up in the corner. It's all about watching and it's all about shared experience. That we're all in the same circle of pain is very Jungian. The only character in the film who offers a way out is the Indian, whose transference of spirit to Mickey and Mallory sets up their ultimate redemption.

GF: Why was it necessary to make the carnage at the end, during the prison breakout, so graphic?

OS: The carnage represents the end of the world, the total insurrection of society. I wish I could have released the prerated director's cut of the film, because essentially what we filmed is that great Jim Morrison line, "...the whole shithouse goes up in flames." We had hundreds of real-life prisoners throwing stuntmen off pedestals and hanging and impaling people, sticking bananas and catheters up their asses. We showed the whole world coming apart.

GF: Are Mickey and Mallory a purging force, like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver [1976]?

OS: I think so. Through the power of their love, they are the purest element in the movie, whereas the warden [Tommy Lee Jones], for example, represents an insane prison system that's only into punishment, not prevention or any of the healthier ways of dealing with human suffering. And the cop [Tom Sizemore] represents how the police have become twisted, corrupt. The media itself is overstuffed. They give door-to-door coverage of everything and every insignificant thing becomes a major event: The Tonya Harding incident was a minor act of vandalism that made the front page of The New York Times over and over.

GF: You pack it all in there in that closing montage: the Menendez trial, Tonya, Waco, Lorena Bobbitt, O. J. Simpson.