Newspaper Article

The messenger of violence shoots back ; The DVD release of the director's cut of Natural Born Killers has revived the controversy over a film thought by its critics to have more blood on its hands than any other. Oliver Stone explains to Xan Brooks why he is not responsible for copycat violence

2002

Overview

No film in recent decades has stoked as much controversy as Natural Born Killers. No film-maker, if his critics are to be believed, has quite so much blood on his hands as its director, [Oliver Stone]. In the eight years since its release, Stone's picture has been confidently linked to at least eight murders - from Barras and [Sarah Edmondson]'s wild ride, through the Texan kid who decapitated a classmate because he \"wanted to be famous, like the natural born killers\", to the pair of Paris students who killed three cops and a taxi driver and were later discovered to have the film's poster on their bedroom wall. David Puttnam (who had worked with Stone on 1978's Midnight Express) labelled it \"loathsome\". In the opinion of the Daily Mail, Natural Born Killers was simply \"evil\". If the media were looking for a fall guy, they found him in Stone. To his critics, he was a ready-made hypocrite: a rich kid who volunteered for Vietnam and then made Oscar-winning films (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July) lambasting the war; a peace-loving Buddhist who freely admitted that movie violence was \"cool\". His film, too, was derided as hypocrisy in action:a supposed satire on screen violence that wallowed in two hours of stylised atrocity and then berated the viewer for getting off on it. Natural Born Killers was a murderous instruction manual. Before permitting the release of Natural Born Killers in 1994, the censors insisted that Stone strip a whopping 150 shots from the film. The new version restores them all, from a loving camera zoom through a bullet-holed hand to a shot of Tommy Lee Jones's severed head on a stick. The director concedes that on one level this makes for a more violent film. But he stresses that the restored segments are so over the top that they emphasise his satirical intent. In other respects, the director's cut plays much like the original: an exuberant shotgun wedding of the crass with the sophisticated that closes with an extended channel-surf through the hot media imagery of the day (OJ Simpson, the Menendez brothers, the Waco siege). Viewed from our lofty 21st-century vantage-point, it already seems something of a timeperiod piece: a snapshot of a specific era in US culture; a tenuous accessory to crimes that have been duly tried, sentenced and consigned to history.

• Publisher: The Irish Times DAC
• Subject: Byers, Patsy / Edmondson, Sarah / Kubrick, Stanley / Stone, Oliver