Did You Know?

During filming, Juliette Lewis actually broke Tom Sizemore's nose when she slammed Scagnetti's face into the wall.

During filming, director Oliver Stone would play African tribal music at full blast on the set, as a way of keeping a frantic mood.

This film contains almost 3,000 cuts. Most films have 600-700. Negative cutter Donah Bassett cut 4000 negative images into the film, the most complex job ever undertaken by a negative cutter.

Another Quentin Tarantino name: Mickey and Mallory kill a cop named Gerald Nash. In Reservoir Dogs, the cop who is tortured and murdered is named Marvin Nash. The actor who played Marvin Nash, Kirk Baltz, plays Roger, a member of the TV crew in Natural Born Killers.

The prison riot was filmed at Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet, Illinois. 80% of the prisoners there are there for violent crimes. For the first two of four weeks on location, the extras were actual inmates with rubber weapons. For the other two weeks, over 200 extras had to be brought in because the Stateville inmates had been placed on lockdown.

Mallory's mother (Edie McClurg) has blue hair, just like the mother of the psychopath Alex in A Clockwork Orange.

The interview between Wayne Gale and Mickey was based upon Geraldo Rivera's interviews with Charles Manson and the infamous Mike Wallace interview with Manuel Noriega.

In late 1994 the film was banned from theatrical distribution in Ireland. However, the Irish Film Centre, which is a membership club and not subject to the same rules as public theaters, booked the film and had it scheduled to screen for a month long run in early 1995. However the film censorship board threatened legal action if the film was shown and it was withdrawn.

The guns Mickey uses in the pharmacy are a Beretta 93R and a Wildey Magnum (the same gun is also featured in Death Wish 3).

In an infamous incident after the film had been released, Oliver Stone and Time Warner were sued by Patsy Byers, with the support of author and film producer John Grisham. In March 1995, 18-year-old Sarah Edmondson and her boyfriend Benjamin Darras (also 18) allegedly dropped acid and watched 'Natural Born Killers'. Later that night, Sarah shot and paralyzed Byers, a store clerk in Ponchatoula, and Benjamin killed cotton gin manager William Savage in Hernando, Mississippi. John Grisham was a personal friend of Savage's, and after the murder, Grisham publicly accused Oliver Stone of being irresponsible in making the film, arguing that filmmakers should be held accountable for their work when it incites violent behavior. Byers decided to take legal action against Stone and the studio, and supported by Grisham, she used a "product liability" claim in the lawsuit, which argued that Stone had incited the teenagers to commit the crime. Initially, the case was dismissed in January 1997, on the grounds that filmmakers and production companies are protected by the First Amendment. However, in May 1998, the Intermediate Louisiana Court of Appeals overturned the lower court's decision, and the case went ahead. The attorneys for Byers' attempted to prove that Stone and Warner were culpable in the murder and in Byers injury because they had purposefully meant to incite violence by "distributing a film they knew, or should have known would cause and inspire people to commit crimes". All of Hollywood eagerly awaited the outcome of the trial, because if Stone was found guilty, it would mean a drastic reexamination of the industry practices and would carry all kinds of far reaching implications as regards the content of movies. However, in a landmark decision, Byers' action was thrown out of court in March 2001, and its dismissal was rubber-stamped by the Louisiana Court of Appeal in June 2002.

Trent Reznor watched the film over 50 times to "get in the mood" for mixing the soundtrack.

Coca-Cola approved the use of the Polar Bear ads for its product in the movie without having a full idea of what the movie was about; when the Board of Directors saw the finished product, they were furious.

According to director Oliver Stone, actor Rodney Dangerfield didn't understand the film during shooting and didn't understand what Stone was trying to do by shooting such a dark subject as a father molesting his daughter in the style of a 1950's sitcom. As such, he found it very difficult to perform his part. Stone was delighted however when the film came out and Dangerfield's performance was hailed as one of the movie's strongest points.

Acclaimed as the #1 film of the 1990s by Entertainment Weekly.

The car featured in the film is a 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T convertible.

In the UK, the film's video release was to be the same week that Thomas Hamilton walked into a primary school in the Scottish town of Dunblane and killed 16 children and a teacher before killing himself, shocking a nation unused to such gun crimes. Warner Brothers immediately went to the British Board of Film Classification to take another look at the certification granted the film. The BBFC however stood by their decision, so Warners took it upon themselves to withhold video release. Thus, when the film had its terrestrial TV premiere on the UK's channel five two years later, it became one of the few films to be broadcast on television without having a video release beforehand.

Premiere voted this movie as one of "The 25 Most Dangerous Movies".

When producers Jane Hamsher and Don Murphy first brought Quentin Tarantino's screenplay to Oliver Stone's attention, Stone's initial idea was to make a lighthearted all-action blockbuster. His previous film, Heaven & Earth, had been a difficult shoot which had failed at the box office, and he saw 'Natural Born Killers' as a way to make a fun movie and play with genre conventions. As he puts it himself in Chaos Rising: The Storm Around 'Natural Born Killers', he planned to make "something Arnold Schwarzenegger would be proud of." As the project developed however, Stone found the movie getting deeper and deeper, and soon all hopes for a simple action spectacular were gone.

Director Oliver Stone calls the frequent cuts to black and white, where dialogue is often repeated with a slightly different intonation, "vertical cutting". Stone explains that the idea behind the technique is to create an outer moment (the color footage) and an inner moment (the black and white footage) at the same time. For example, he explains this in relation to the waitress in the opening scene (O-Lan Jones), who whilst taking Mickey's order in the 'outer' scene is actually flirting with him (or thinking about flirting with him) in the 'inner' scene. Also in the opening scene, when the cowboy ('James Gammon') refers to Mallory as "pussy", there is a flash cut to Mickey covered in blood; this is Mickey's 'inner' moment.

Oliver Stone wanted Juliette Lewis to bulk up for the role of Mallory so that she looked tougher, but Lewis refused, saying she wanted the character to look like a pushover, not like a female bodybuilder. In the end, Stone agreed, but he insisted she take kick-boxing lessons so that she looked credible when fighting.

According to director Oliver Stone, the use of TV commercials was an attempt to illustrate the comforting power such commercials have. Every commercial comes after a horrific moment or a flash cut of a demon, and Stone's idea was that commercials work to soothe people after they have been exposed to something extreme.

The show 'American Maniacs' is based upon Hard Copy.

The scene where the police beat up Mickey and Mallory at the pharmacy was purposely shot as a spoof of the Rodney King incident.

Scagnetti's (Tom Sizemore) story about how his mother was killed was based upon a real life incident involving one of America's first mass murderers, Charles Whitman, who did actually shoot people randomly from a tower.

Whilst shooting the POV scene where Mallory runs into the wire mesh, director of photography Robert Richardson broke his finger, and the replacement cameraman cut his eye.

Oliver Stone's least favorite scene in the film is when Mickey overpowers the prison guards after the interview with Wayne Gale (Robert Downey Jr.) is terminated. Stone feels that the device of having Mickey distract the guards by telling a joke is too unrealistic.

Mallory's line to Scagnetti about him being "so specific" when he asks her to pinch his nipple was improvised by actress Juliette Lewis on set.

Mickey (Woody Harrelson) calls Mallory (Juliette Lewis) "Mal" - translated to Spanish "Mal" is the common word for "Evil".

Woody Harrelson, in an interview, spoke about the rape scene between Mickey and the hostage he takes. He expressed his hope that Oliver Stone did not add any additional footage of the controversial part into the Director's Cut. He was promptly told on camera that Stone had indeed done so.

Steve Buscemi and Tim Roth were both offered the same unspecified role and turned it down. Jane Hamsher claims in her book about the movie that they did so because Quentin Tarantino told them he would never cast either of them in any of his movies again if they took the role.

Director of photography Robert Richardson hated the script and didn't want anything to do with the film, but director Oliver Stone used their close friendship to persuade him into accepting the job. For numerous reasons, Richardson called shooting the film a "nightmare" and one of the worst experiences of his life. The story brought up bad memories from his childhood, leading to insomnia and a dependence on sleeping pills throughout the entire shoot. During location scouting, his wife Monona Wali nearly died from an illness (and they later came close to divorcing because of the film). While filming a difficult scene he broke his finger, and the replacement cameraman cut his eye. Near the end of shooting, his brother went into a coma. However, Richardson has said that all of these problems actually provided him with the creative energy he needed to shoot the film.

Deputy Sheriff Duncan Homolka's (Joe Grifasi) name is a reference to Karla Homolka who, with her husband Paul Bernardo murdered two teenage girls and her own sister.

The camera never angles on a straight, horizontal level throughout the whole film.

The film features Rodney Dangerfield's first and only dramatic performance.

Richard Rutowski:  a demon during the prison riot

Hank Corwin:  is the headless man in the living room.