After helming such instant classics as Pulp Fiction, Django Unchained, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino has earned a reputation as one of the most distinctive and idiosyncratic writer-directors in Hollywood. Plenty of other filmmakers have tried to replicate Tarantino’s style, but Q.T.’s own movies are wholly unique (despite overtly homaging countless existing movies).
Before making his directorial debut from his screenplay Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino sold two other scripts to be made by different filmmakers. These script sales allowed Tarantino to pay his rent and also put a dent in the headache-inducing cost of pre-digital independent filmmaking. Since each script was brought to life by a famous director with their own distinctive style, it’s interesting to see how each of them responded to Tarantino’s original material.
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These two scripts have surprisingly similar premises. They both revolve around a Bonnie and Clyde-esque pair of lovers on the run – a trope that Tarantino would later revisit with the characters of Pumpkin and Honey Bunny in Pulp Fiction – but the characterization of each couple is vastly different.
True Romance stars Christian Slater as Clarence, a comic book nerd, and Patricia Arquette as Alabama, the escort that Clarence’s boss hires to date him out of pity. When she genuinely falls for him, they hatch a scheme to cut ties with her pimp, Drexl, played by Gary Oldman in one of his most unforgettable bad-guy performances. Clarence goes to Drexl’s house, kills him, and makes off with a bunch of his cocaine. He and Alabama drive down to Hollywood to meet up with an actor friend who might know a producer who wants to buy an industrial amount of coke at a massive discount so they can retire to Mexico.
Natural Born Killers stars Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis as Mickey and Mallory Knox, a married couple who bond over having suffered through traumatic childhoods and spend the movie driving across America, killing random passers-by for fun. As the cops race to catch up with them, they amass a fan base across the country and an eccentric TV journalist (a hilarious turn by Robert Downey, Jr.) seeks to profile them for his exploitative true crime series.
True Romance was brought to the screen by Tony Scott, one of the most acclaimed action directors of all time. His credits include Top Gun, Enemy of the State, and Man on Fire. When Tarantino’s work first came across Scott’s desk, he read both Reservoir Dogs and True Romance. He initially wanted to direct Reservoir Dogs, but since Tarantino had decided to shoot that as his own debut feature, Scott took True Romance as a sort of consolation prize. Scott executed Tarantino’s True Romance script more or less as he envisioned it. His two main changes were linearizing the story, which was originally structured out of order like most of Tarantino’s early work, and giving Clarence and Alabama a happy ending because he’d become too endeared to the characters to end the movie with Tarantino’s bleak conclusion.
Natural Born Killers was directed by Oliver Stone, the politically charged filmmaker behind JFK, Platoon, and Born on the Fourth of July. Unlike Scott, Stone heavily reworked Tarantino’s initial script until it was essentially a shadow of its former self. Stone is renowned for reflecting poignant political messages in his movies. He tackled unscrupulous financial practices in Wall Street and told the classified story of Edward Snowden in a Hollywood biopic. So, it’s hardly surprising that his rewrites politicized the B-movie antics of Tarantino’s Natural Born Killers script.
After Tarantino had completed and sold his version of the script, cases like the O.J. Simpson trial and the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan incident dominated the news. Celebrity criminals like the Menéndez brothers and John and Lorena Bobbitt were becoming more and more prevalent. In light of this climate shift, Stone retooled Natural Born Killers as a sharp satire of the U.S. media’s glamorization of high-profile criminal cases.
Tarantino has said that he didn’t like how Stone directed Natural Born Killers. He told the Telegraph, “I hated that f***ing movie. If you like my stuff, don’t watch that movie.” But Stone’s heavily rewritten version still exhibits plenty of Tarantino’s stylistic hallmarks, like graphic violence, pitch-black humor, a pulpy tone, and an abundance of pop culture references.
There’s little evidence of Tarantino’s unmistakable dialogue style in Stone’s revised draft of Natural Born Killers, except in Tommy Lee Jones’ foul-mouthed prison warden character Dwight McClusky. True Romance, on the other hand, is filled with Q.T.’s lyrical, articulate dialogue. One scene in particular stands out as a perfectly written gem. Christopher Walken plays a Sicilian mob enforcer interrogating Dennis Hopper as Clarence’s dad, and Hopper gets on Walken’s nerves by telling him some little-known history about Sicily’s heritage. Tarantino said on an episode of The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith podcast that he considered True Romance’s Sicilian scene to be the greatest scene he’d ever written until he wrote the tense opening scene of Inglourious Basterds.
Both True Romance and Natural Born Killers initially underperformed at the box office. The latter barely broke even and the former failed to recoup its budget. But, like many box office bombs, they went on to become celebrated cult classics. Since Tarantino just wrote True Romance and Natural Born Killers and didn’t direct them, he doesn’t count them in the official canon that he plans to end after 10 movies. Still, they’re both interesting movies in their own right and if you’re a fan of Tarantino, they’re worth checking out just to see another filmmaker’s take on a now-familiar style.
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