1994’s “Natural Born Killers” turns 30 years old this month, and it’s still a bloody reminder of ‘90s excess—or, maybe, just excess from director Oliver Stone, who seemed to be pushing cinema to its limits in the anarchic movie. Given the anniversary, much of the cast was recently tapped to discuss the film in a recent Esquire feature. Three decades later, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis, Stone, and others in the movie all looked back and reflected on this controversial and incendiary film.
Downey, playing salacious Aussie TV journalist Wayne Gale, was struggling with addiction at the time, and Esquire dove right into some of the insanity of the movie immediately, saying that RDJ had been “high, drunk or asleep” for the better parts of two months of filming.
The magazine, recalling an incident, described a scene where Downey dipped the tails of his white shirt in fake blood and then pulled it out through the zipper of his pants—suggesting a blood phallus, and Stone apparently immediately objected.
“Oh, come on—that’s too much! You’re going too far, Robert,” Stone told Downey of the bloody insinuation.
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You’re ruining my movie! Forget the dumb dick idea. This isn’t… This isn’t some slapstick bullsh*t,” Stone yelled. Downey complied, but Stone changed his mind and thought maybe that his actor was on to something. “Wait, wait—wait a second. Let me see the dick thing again,” Stone then told him, and Downey obeyed.
“Pull it back a half inch,” Stone told him. “All right. Let’s go.” The rest would become cinematic history.
Downey admitted in the new interviews that “the only time I was awake was between Action and Cut,” but praised the Oscar-winning filmmaker. “With this movie, Oliver Stone has got something that still bears reexamination.”
Woody Harrelson recalled Downey banging on his door at midnight, wanting to party. He had been hyper-prepared for the next day of shooting and went to bed relatively early.
“Fucking here’s Downey,” Harrelson laughed, recalling the scene. “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.”
Stone seemed to concur and suggested drugs were rampant on set. “I have to say, it was a zoo in the sense the actors were all on different kinds of trips,” he said. “I think Woody was the most sane.”
“Natural Born Killers” was based on a script from Quentin Tarantino, who ripped it out of an idea from “True Romance” and expanded it. But Tarantino famously hated Stone’s adaptation of his work and disavowed it to this day.
It’s a long and detailed piece, so definitely give the full article a read.