Natural Born Killers

The 1990s was a time when hard news intersected with tabloid journalism pushing popular culture into new, salacious directions as nobodies like the Menendez brothers, John and Lorena Bobbitt, and Tonya Harding became instant celebrities via high profile violent cases while celebrities like O.J. Simpson became embroiled in the decade’s most notorious crime and subsequent court case that quickly turned into a media circus. This was aided and abetted by the rise of tabloid journalism with television magazine shows like A Current Affair and Hard Copy plying their trade in trashy celebrity gossip and true crime stories.

Back then, Oliver Stone had a knack for having his finger on the pulse of the pop culture zeitgeist as he proved with Platoon (1986) kick starting an interest in the Vietnam War, The Doors (1990) renewing interest in Jim Morrison and his band, and JFK (1991) launching a cottage industry of conspiracy theorists. Using the clout he had garnered from a run of successful films, he convinced Warner Bros. to help fund and distribute Natural Born Killers (1994), an experimental social satire under the guise of a lovers-on-the-run story that was popular at the time (see Wild at Heart, Kalifornia, True Romance, et al). He used a screenplay, written by then-up-and-coming Quentin Tarantino, as a foundation in which to lay his trademark socio-political beliefs only this time attacking the media, which, as one can imagine, did not endear the film to critics at the time.

Stone employed the flashy, multi-film stock blending of news footage with his own that he had done so effectively in JFK and deliberately pushed it to new extremes by also using front and rear-projection photography as well as cel animation to create “a vortex of the unreal," as one critic put it. Stone’s film adopts the style of the culture it parodies and attacks tabloid media and MTV culture by using the hyperkinetic editing tempo of music videos as well as the constantly changing points-of-view within the film to mirror our channel-surfing culture. The end result predictably courted controversy, divided critics, performed fairly well at the box office, and inspired several, real-life copycat killings.

Right from the get-go, Stone establishes the absurdist tone of his satire with his introduction of Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory Knox (Juliette Lewis), two murderous lovers on the run, as they kill a trio of rednecks along with everyone else in a diner save one (so that they can tell the media what happened). The director also uses this opening scene to introduce the frenetic, chaotic collage of film techniques that immediately draws attention to itself as a film. For example, when Mickey shoots and kills the cook we see it from his point-of-view, the bullet from the gun stopping for a second in front of the terrified person before hitting them. Afterwards, the couple celebrates their love for each other by dancing with a song straight out of a classic Hollywood musical, the lights going down as a display of fireworks is projected on a screen behind them. This is an exaggerated, heightened reality with its own set of rules as Stone challenges the way we watch a film.

The opening credits push it even further as Stone assaults our senses with a cacophony of sights and sounds with layers of songs and sound effects playing over a montage of Mickey and Mallory driving through rear-projected imagery, including landscapes from the American southwest and nightmarish imagery, like Mallory’s father (Rodney Dangerfield) foreshadowing things to come. The director is commenting on the chaos that pop culture had become in 1994 with so much stimulus bombarding us all the time. The irony is that it has only gotten worse.

The story itself is quite simple. After killing her parents, Mickey and Mallory go on the road, initiating a killing spree that not only draws the attention of the authorities, led by “supercop” Jack Scagnetti (Tom Sizemore), but also tabloid television journalist Wayne Gale (Robert Downey, Jr.) who all want a piece of them – the former wants to kill Mickey and have sex with Mallory, while the latter wants to use them to further his career.

Mickey and Mallory grew up on T.V. and it is how they view life. This is particularly evident in the sequence that depicts how the two met and fell in love. Stone frames it as a sitcom by fusing the sensibilities of I Love Lucy and Married…With Children with comedian Rodney Dangerfield, in a brilliant bit of casting against type, as her monstrous father. Mallory belongs to a white trash family where spousal abuse, incest and sexual abuse are all referenced while a laugh track uncomfortably exposes how contrived sitcoms are, manipulating how the audience is supposed to feel at a given moment. It makes sense that Mickey and Mallory’s backstory is depicted in this way. They would process all of the bad things they experienced through the medium they were exposed to for most of their lives. It’s what they know. This sequence, along with Mickey’s escape from a chain gang, thanks to a well-timed tornado that we see him riding towards on a horse, are the couple self-mythologizing their lives, reinterpreting them in a way that empowers them instead of making them victims.

If the first part of the film is Mickey and Mallory seen through their eyes then the next part is seeing them through Gale’s eyes on his tabloid T.V. show American Maniacs, which allows him to perform his own self-mythologizing. The opening credits hilariously show him breaking down a criminal’s door and then getting spit on by another crook during an interview. We see one of his Mickey and Mallory segments and how he manipulates events through dramatic re-enactments to paint the cops as heroes and the murderous lovers as villains on very simple terms. Stone cuts to Gale’s team putting together the segment with one crewmember bemoaning the reusing of footage from a previous show. Gale scoffs, “You think those nitwits in zombieland remember anything? It’s junk food for the brains. Filler. Fodder. Whatever.” With his exaggerated Australian accent, Downey is hilarious here as the egotistical Gale. This segment also shows how Mickey and Mallory become a media sensation all over the world with one idiot saying, “If I was a mass murderer, I’d be Mickey and Mallory.” Stone is taking dead aim at the deification of murderers like Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy who became infamous for killing people and glorified in film and T.V.

Stone makes a point of showing that Mickey and Mallory’s relationship is far from perfect as evident when they have an argument over him leering at their female hostage while having sex. She gets dressed and leaves only to go off and seduce a young mechanic (Balthazar Getty) in an attempt to feel wanted and desired but also to feel powerful as she initiates everything only to kill him when he recognizes her and tries to force himself on her. Her conflict with Mickey comes to a head when they run out of gas in the middle of the desert and happen upon a Native American Indian (Russell Means). He takes them in and his hospitality is rewarded when Mickey wakes from a particularly vivid nightmare about his abusive childhood and accidentally shoots the man. It is significant that it’s the one death they are remorseful about as Mallory angrily chastises him. To make matters worse, they are both bitten by rattlesnakes and manage to make their way to a drugstore saturated with garish green lighting where they are apprehended by Scagnetti in a scene that visually references the savage Rodney King beating and are sent to prison.

A year later, on the eve of the couple being transported to a mental hospital by Scagnetti after being declared insane, Gale arranges with Warden Dwight McClusky (a wonderfully unhinged Tommy Lee Jones) a live, one-on-one interview with Mickey that will air immediately after the Super Bowl. Downey is awesome in the scene where Gale hypes the interview in the hopes of convincing Mickey to do it: “This is Wallace and Noriega! This is Elton John confessing his bisexuality to Rolling Stone! This is the Maysles brothers at Altamont! This is the fuckin’ Nixon/Frost interviews!” Downey picks just the right words at just the right moments to exaggerate with his outrageous Australian accent that is a masterclass in scenery chewing. The actor manages to take it up another notch during the actual interview as Gale tries to make it all about him.

Known mostly for his genial goofball on Cheers, Woody Harrelson’s turn in NBK was a revelation at the time as he fearlessly shattered preconceived notions to play an unrepentant mass murderer. His finest moment is the prison interview scene as Mickey is introduced with a freshly shaven head and espouses his personal philosophy to Gale: “Everybody got the demon in here. The demon lives in here. It feeds on your hate. Cuts, kills, rapes. It uses your weakness, your fears. Only the vicious survive…You know, the only thing that kills a demon: love.” Amidst all the serial killer psychobabble this is the only bit that feels sincere and is arguably the film’s central thesis, which would explain why it ends the way it does.

The last 30 minutes of NBK are an insanely staged prison riot inspired by Mickey’s interview. He uses it to orchestrate a rescue of Mallory and then an escape with Gale, his film crew and two guards as hostages. This allows Stone to cut loose with all kinds of crazy imagery as prisoners fight it out with guards while Mickey and his group fight their way through the chaos. Amidst it all, Mickey and Mallory have a romantic moment when they are reunited before finishing off Scagnetti. Meanwhile, McClusky is losing his mind while losing control of the prison. Tommy Lee Jones is particularly inspired during this sequence as he delivers an increasingly hysterical performance with Downey matching him in the larger-than-life theatrical department. It’s as if the two actors had a running bet on who could chew up more scenery. Upon reflection, I think Downey wins as Gale goes from hostage to active participant, shooting and killing a guard trying to kill Mickey and Mallory. When the group lays low in a bathroom, Downey takes it up another notch as Gale, drenched in blood and grime, breaks up with his wife and is dumped by his mistress. He is then led out through a throng of guards with a shotgun taped to his head, talking to stay alive while McClusky rants and raves. It is a brilliantly sustained sequence set to a hysterical pitch.

Coming off making Heaven & Earth (1993), Oliver Stone’s marriage was on the rocks. He and his wife Elizabeth were having trouble communicating and she was upset that he continued to give into his wilder tendencies for women, drugs and alcohol. In 1993, Stone had dinner with producer Thom Mount and actor Sean Penn, whose film The Indian Runner (1991) he had produced. They had a screenplay written by then-up-and-coming filmmaker Quentin Tarantino entitled, Natural Born Killers, a contemporary Bonnie and Clyde story about a killer couple made famous by tabloid press and reality T.V. At the time, Stone didn’t know that Penn was going to direct it and that the rights were controlled by Don Murphy and Jane Hamsher, two novice movie producers that envisioned a low budget version.

Hamsher and Murphy were working out of her dining room at the time. They were looking to collaborate with young writers. At a party in April 1991, two people mentioned that Tarantino was going to direct Reservoir Dogs (1992) and his script for NBK was “near brilliant.” They met him and read the script, immediately wanting to make it into a film. It was, however, not easy to categorize and so they had a tough time finding someone willing to finance it. Next, they tried approaching filmmakers but that didn’t work either. They eventually met with Mount and he gave it to Penn.

Mount wanted Stone to produce the film under his company, however, after reading the script he wanted to direct. He said, “I felt attracted to it out of instinct…I know that starting to work on it has brought some turbulence up to the surface…there’s a demon in Natural Born Killers. There’s a demon that drives it. I can’t understand it exactly…but it captivates me.” Mount liked the idea of Stone directing and Penn was out, much to his chagrin. Stone also had to deal with Tarantino who was starting to get some clout in the industry after his debut film came out and wanted a say in the project. Stone remembers, “So I got an angry QT, an angry Sean Penn…There were a lot of legal hassles that we had to pay off to settle out people who might want to sue.”

Stone had to move fast. The wrap party for Heaven & Earth was on January 30 and on February 1, he put Murphy and Hamsher to work on Natural Born Killers. While editing the former he began production on the latter. Stone did not want to shoot Tarantino’s script as it was: “There was a structure and I liked the ideas and there were some very funny scenes, but it was not a movie I wanted to do…I always knew there was another level I wanted to try for.” He wanted to flesh out the relationship between Mickey and Mallory but didn’t have much time so he enlisted the help of long-time collaborator Richard Rutowski and tasked Hamsher with getting “one of your wild and crazy friends” to help them with rewrites. He wasn’t offering much money so she found David Veloz, fresh out of film school with no luck selling any of his scripts and ready to quit the business, whom she felt could write “extreme material that still retained its humanity.” He worked closely with Stone and added scenes like the argument the couple have in a motel room with a female hostage tied up in the corner. Stone also added a new first act with them on the road and flashbacks showing their backgrounds like the “I Love Mallory” sequence.

Rutowski introduced the idea of Mickey and Mallory wrestling with their inner demons and expressing them externally. Stone took Tarantino’s script and went deeper and bigger in scale. He said, “I didn’t want to make a realistic movie about serial killers. That was well done in Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer. I’m really onto something else. It’s a larger portion of American life that’s enamored of violence, enamored of crime, promotes it on television, and eventually lives and dies by it.”

When Stone’s long-time cinematographer Robert Richardson read the script he didn’t want to do it: “I simply didn’t have the level of respect that I’d had for the written material on, say, Born on the Fourth of July or JFK. Each of those aroused in me a great deal of historical respect and intellectual curiosity.” Stone admitted that he played the “friendship card” with Richardson as he was feeling very vulnerable with his divorce looming over him and felt abandoned. To counter Richardson’s dislike of the material, Stone argued, “As far as the morality of the story was concerned, I argued with him that it represented the culture we were in, and that the picture was a satire, which required us to exaggerate and distort in order to make our point.” Richardson agreed to do it out of loyalty to Stone but it was an unpleasant experience for the man: “The story brought up unpleasant memories from my own childhood, and those memories plagued me to such a degree that my nights were literally sleepless.”

Working on such dark material put additional strain on an already fractured marriage. Stone felt that counseling wasn’t working and turned to meditation and immersed himself in his work, using NBK as a way to deal with his own demons. The filmmaker originally envisioned it as a medium-budget film a la Talk Radio (1988) for $10-12 million but the more he worked on it, the bigger in scale it became. Arnon Milchan financed the film. It was their third collaboration together and as the budget increased they approached Warner Brothers in the hopes that they would not only distribute it but market it as well. Stone wanted to use their considerable resources but the subject matter scared them and so they used their leverage when it came to casting.

Originally, Stone wanted Michael Madsen, who he had worked with on The Doors (1991), to play Mickey Knox and Juliette Lewis to play Mallory Knox, who convinced the director that she was right for the part and that “only I could play somebody who could tear your throat out with her bare hands.” The studio felt that the former wasn’t a big enough movie star and suggested Woody Harrelson instead. Stone agreed and with Robert Downey, Jr. cast as Wayne Gale – someone that Stone had always wanted to work with – he made a deal with the studio. The casting of Harrelson surprised many as all he was really known for at that point was the dumb but sweet bartender on the T.V. sitcom Cheers. Stone had done his homework. At the time, Harrelson’s father was serving a double life sentence for the murder of a federal judge and it was rumored that he was one of the “three tramps” arrested in Dallas the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. For the role of Warden McClusky, Stone had approached Jack Palance but once he read the script he turned down the part as he felt the film was too violent. On short notice, Stone asked Tommy Lee Jones, who had already worked with him on JFK (1991) and Heaven & Earth, and he agreed.

Rehearsals did not go well as Juliette Lewis showed up unprepared. She repeatedly missed kick-boxing lessons, shooting practice and workout sessions that were to develop her into a warrior character like Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). Instead, she showed up to rehearsal one day and ordered room service, eating and smoking while Stone was trying to work. Meanwhile, Jones worked closely with hair stylist Cydney Cornell to achieve the distinctive look of McClusky: “I always thought those little pencil-thin toothbrush mustaches were really stupid. Huge Carl Perkins sideburns. They said, ‘What do you want your hair to look like?’ I said, ‘I think it ought to look like a ’57 Studebaker.’”

By 1993, Stone and his wife were separated and principal photography began on NBK in New Mexico. He set a blistering pace, shooting in several cities in a short period of time, which meant six and sometimes seven-day weeks with 16-17-hour days. By all accounts it was a wild shoot as on-set doctor Chris Renna remembers one night hearing a lot of noise coming from Lewis’ hotel room and four in the morning. He checked it out and found her and Tom Sizemore bouncing up and down on her bed with the Rolling Stones on the radio. Lewis then wanted to order cornflakes from room service even though Sizemore claimed he couldn’t eat them. She ordered eight boxes anyway and proceeded to feed him a bit of them. He spit the food all over her and the bed. He got mad and she apologized.

Stone shot the film on a wide variety formats: color and B&W 35mm, B&W 16mm, Super 8, Hi8, and Beta. According to Richardson, “We’re going for the grittiness you get from Super 8 or 16mm – a lot of the violence is being done with those formats.” Stone also used front and rear-projection techniques, computer graphics, bluescreen, and cel animation. In addition, he hired Paul Stojanovich, who had worked on the reality T.V. show Cops and the sensationalist talk show Geraldo, to design and direct the style of Wayne Gale’s American Maniacs tabloid show.

Stone devised a stylistic blueprint for specific parts of the film intended to simulate channel-surfing:

“At the beginning of the movie these two young people are really desensitized to violence. The concept is that the live in T.V. world and don’t realize the consequences of their actions…We incorporated those ideas into the movie by using rear-screen images. We wanted to give a sense of the schizophrenic madness of the century and to convey the feeling that the characters’ minds are hopped-up and speedy.”

Stone then changed the look of the film after Mickey accidentally kills that Native American Indian and he and Mallory are bitten by rattlesnakes: “The whole mood of the lighting changes into a greenish, poisonous hue to reflect the idea that the fun has ended.” In addition, each significant character got their own distinctive look with Gale getting a “television magazine” style, Scagnetti, “a lurid, pseudo-Mickey style because Scagnetti wants to be Mickey and possess Mallory,” and for McClusky, Stone wanted to create “a scary, ominous prison that suggested punishment.” For the climactic prison riot, “the look is one of complete chaos – everything but the kitchen sink.”

After New Mexico, filming moved to Joliet, Illinois at a large prison known as Statesville. Of the 2300 inmates, 800 expressed an interest in being part of the film with only 342 cleared by the authorities to actually participate. It was a tough shoot as Richardson said, “I hated it there. Besides the difficult conditions, there is a real racial attitude in the prison because you’ve got thousands of mostly black men being incarcerated and ruled over by mostly white guards. A lot of them resent us being here.” The demands of shooting there increased the budget as did using rear-screen projection while also taking more time. In one day there were five injuries on set and on the next day during the scene where Scagnetti bursts into Mallory’s cell and tries to rape her, Lewis passed out between takes, tired from being up until five in the morning. A few takes later she achieved the energy levels Stone wanted and accidentally smashed Sizemore in the nose for real. He began bleeding and after it was decided that his nose wasn’t broken they finished the scene, using it for the shot.

Stone yelled at her and said later, “We’ve been having all these problems, and she wasn’t responding, I had a bunch of squibs going off, and she was missing her cues, her lines, her marks, and I said, ‘Look, people can get hurt. It’s a real serious thing, you can’t just take it that easy. You have to do it right.’” The prison scenes were the most expensive and difficult to shoot as they filmed in a real prison with real inmates and real weapons. There were limitations where they could shoot and for how long. He ran into problems with the prison authorities when he told them that he wanted to use prop guns during the riot scenes as they were worried that the weapons would be disassembled and used to make real weapons. Stone made a few calls to the right people and the prison authorities allowed it so long as real inmates weren’t near the filming area.

For six weeks the production split their time between shooting the prison riot scene on location and on a large film stage with technical consultant Dale A. Dye and stunt coordinator Phil Nelson staging the sequences. They studied case histories of prison riots and looked at what kind of weapons inmates would make, what from and where they would hide them. They also talked to corrections officers about homemade weapons. Dye said, “This is not a protest, but a riot. These guys aren’t going to hold signs that say, ‘You piss me off.’ They’re going to pop your eye out of its socket and skull-fuck you.” He remembered one take during the riot scene where someone started firing their gun before action was called: “The prisoners freaked out. They and I thought the guards were really firing. There was sheer panic and terror.”

In addition to producing, Hamsher was instrumental in picking songs for the film’s eclectic soundtrack. She wanted alternative rock music in the film and made mixed tapes for Stone of music she wanted to use: L7, Jane’s Addiction, the Velvet Underground, and Diamanda Galas among others. She wanted to challenge Stone and figured he would never go for it but much to her surprise he loved it and even played some of the music during filming to set the tone for a given scene.

Filming wrapped in July and the monumental task of editing all the footage that had been shot began. Stone kept asking Milchan if he could make NBK NC-17 and the mogul agreed but argued that it would limit the places to advertise and screen it. Milchan said, “What he was doing was testing how far he can go…My guess is that he will go for the most extreme version possible. He’ll test it. Push it as far as he can.” Sure enough, the film went to the rating board five times before it got an R rating.

Stone saw his film “constructed via television and as a homage to T.V…There’s the aggression of the imagery, the channel-surfing philosophy of moving on.” He also felt that it was not “an easy movie to settle into, you can’t get a point of view, you have to surrender to the movie. If you resist the movie with conventional ethics, you’ll have a problem.” Not surprisingly, the studio and exhibitors were apprehensive about this ultraviolent film bound to be controversial. An unnamed studio executive admitted, at the time, that it was “a very difficult film to sell. How do you sell a film about two despicable people and the media turning them into heroes?” They opted to play up the social satire aspect rather than it being about vicious killers.

Predictably, Natural Born Killers polarized critics. In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “Despite isolated moments of bleak, disturbing beauty, it is finally less an epiphany than an ordeal. Not for the first time, Mr. Stone assembles an arsenal of visual ideas and then fires away point-blank in his audience’s direction…While Natural Born Killers affects occasional disgust at the lurid world of Mickey and Mallory, it more often seems enamored of their exhilarating freedom.” The Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers wrote, “Stone calls this bile satire. But it’s not satire to skewer idiots. Satire respects the insidious power of its targets. Satire takes careful aim; Killers is crushingly scattershot. By putting virtuoso technique at the service of lazy thinking, Stone turns his film into the demon he wants to mock; cruelty as entertainment.” In his review for the Washington Post, Hal Hinson wrote, “The main problem with Killers, though, is that it degenerates into the very thing it criticizes…Killers is intended as a gonzo critique of the mass media and, by extension, of the bloodthirsty legions of couch potatoes whose prurient taste guarantees that the garbage rises to the top of the charts. But the film doesn’t make it as a piece of social criticism. Primarily this is because the movie’s jittery, psychedelic style is so obviously a kick for Stone to orchestrate.”

Not all critics hated the film. Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and wrote, “Seeing this movie once is not enough. The first time is for the visceral experience, the second time is for the meaning. As we coast into a long autumn where the news will be dominated by the O.J. Simpson trial, Natural Born Killers is like a slap in the face, waking us up to what’s happening.” Newsweek magazine’s David Ansen wrote, “In Natural Born Killers something revelatory happens. The movie is enlightening, not because it transmits new information, but in the way that movies enlighten, through a synergy of images and rhythms that makes us sense the world in a new way…Stone’s flabbergasting movie cannot be dismissed; it must and will be fought over.”

Natural Born Killers reflects the rise of sampling culture in the ‘90s with hip-hop and industrial music sampling clips from movies, T.V. and other music. Stone does this both audibly, with collages of songs and dialogue that plays over certain scenes, and visually as Mickey and Mallory watch clips of movies that Stone himself wrote – Midnight Express (1978) and Scarface (1983). It was a technique that he had started using in JFK and perfected with NBK to mimic the sensation of changing channels complete with a commercial. Exploitative T.V. shows like A Current Affair no longer exist as all news has become fear-mongering in nature. Take Inside Edition and replace it with Fox News or MSNBC where there is no absolute truth, which continues to make Stone’s film relevant. What NBK is trying to say is that you can’t trust any of these things. You have to trust yourself. You have digest all of this information, figure out what is misinformation and decide for yourself.

SOURCES

Pizzello, Stephen. “Natural Born Killers Blasts Big Screen with Both Barrels.” American Cinematographer. November 1994.

Riordan, James. Stone: A Biography of Oliver Stone. Hyperion. 1995.

Russo, Francine. “There’s A Riot Going On.” Village Voice. August 23, 1994.

Smith, Gavin. “The camera for me is an actor.” Film Comment. January-February 1994.

Smith, Gavin. “Somebody’s gonna give you money, you do your best to make ‘em a good hand.” Film Comment. January-February 1994.

Smith, Gavin. “Oliver Stone – Why Do I Have to Provoke?” Sight and Sound. December 1994.

Weinraub, Bernard. “How a Movie Satire Turned into Reality.” The New York Times. August 16, 1994.

Williams, David E. “Overkill.” Film Threat. October 1994.

Platoon

Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) was not the first film about the Vietnam War. It was, however, the first one to be made by a man who had served as a foot soldier (with the 25th Infantry Division) in the conflict. Before it was the rah-rah propaganda of The Green Berets (1968). The melancholic drama of The Deer Hunter (1978). The surrealism of Apocalypse Now (1979). Although, in good company with many outstanding films about one of the most combative periods in our country’s history, both stateside and overseas, they lacked the gritty realism of Platoon. Stone’s film not only captured the sights and sounds of what it was to be a soldier in those impenetrable jungles, but also got the little yet crucially important details – their lingo, the tight brotherhood in each squad and the way they carried themselves as well as how they carried their equipment. Through every vein of the film runs an authenticity that only a filmmaker like Stone could give it.

If the aforementioned films had been released too close to the war, Platoon came along at just the right moment when enough time had passed so that the American public was more receptive to revisiting a war that tore this country apart, from decorated officers coming home to college students who had never touched a gun in their lives. It struck a chord with people in a way that previous films had not. Stone’s film was a commercial and critical success, catapulting him and his young cast of up and coming actors into the spotlight while also kickstarting a cottage industry of Vietnam War-themed films (Full Metal Jacket; Hamburger Hill), television shows (China Beach; Tour of Duty), novels (Chickenhawk; Going After Cacciato), and even comic books (The ‘Nam).

Platoon focuses on the 25th Infantry, Bravo Company in September 1967 with new recruit Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) as the audience surrogate and our introduction to this world. We see the war through his eyes, from that first blast of bright light as he walks off the plane with other new recruits and they see a collection of body bags. They are then taunted by a group of battle-hardened veterans heading home. That will be them some day... if they live long enough.

Stone cuts to the jungle with a beautiful establishing shot from a helicopter to show how impenetrable it is before dropping us in the middle of dense foliage that makes it hard to see more than a few feet in front of you. Robert Richardson’s cinematography conveys the dense landscape and how difficult it must’ve been to navigate, especially for a new recruit like Chris whose inexperience is glaringly obvious as he brings too much gear, becomes dehydrated and is eaten alive by red ants.

Stone spends the first ten minutes immersing us in the jungle with the sounds of birds and other exotic animals and the oppressive heat that you can see on the sweaty, tired faces of the soldiers. We observe how they interact with each other adopting lingo that is a mixture of Vietnamese and military jargon before Chris’ voiceover narration kicks in and he gives us initial observations after a week of being there.

The film’s rich atmosphere is evident in the first set piece where the platoon sets up to ambush the enemy in the middle of night during the pouring rain. Stone ratchets up the tension as Chris wakes up after falling asleep to see the man who relieved him on watch now asleep and several silhouetted figures emerging from the shadows. Chris is frozen by fear and indecision – does he go for his rifle or the explosives that were set up for the ambush? Stone shows how hard it is to fight in the jungle with a night-time ambush that goes bad. Everything happens so fast and is so chaotic that it is hard to follow what is going on until it’s all over.

Thirty minutes in and Stone establishes a platoon divided into two factions: the “heads,” dope smoking guys who listen to rock ‘n’ roll music, just want to survive the war and go home, and the “juicers,” beer-drinking lifers that listen to country music and who actually like it there or, at the very least, believe that what they are doing is right. The leaders of these two groups, Sergeant Elias (Willem Dafoe) and Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger), are polar opposites that Chris gravitates towards and must ultimately choose between. Stone makes it pretty clear which side he prefers by having Chris initiated by the heads and bonds with them over Motown music and pot.

Stone shows how the deaths of three of their own angers and frustrates the platoon and they direct their wrath on a nearby village with Barnes focusing their rage through him. It is an ugly sequence as the soldiers kill animals and villagers, in particular, a harrowing scene where Kevin Dillon’s psycho redneck brutally kills a handicapped young man. Things go from bad to worse when Barnes interrogates the village chief and when he doesn’t get the answers he wants kills the man’s wife and then puts a gun to his young daughter’s head until Elias intervenes.

The village sequence is important in that it is the catalyst that causes a serious fracture within the platoon, one that has serious repercussions later on. It also symbolizes America’s might makes right mentality, underlining how out of control things got over there as the line between the enemy and innocent villagers became so blurred that for some there was no difference. This sequence also shows how the frustration and madness of the situation could get out of hand with horrible results.

Stone does a good job of getting the pulse of both sides of the platoon, letting us know where Barnes and Elias are coming from. For the former, he believes Elias is like the politicians in Washington, D.C., “trying to fight this war with one hand tied around their balls,” while the latter admits to Chris that he’s disillusioned with fighting this war, sagely predicting, “What happened today is just the beginning. We’re gonna lose this war. We’ve been kicking other people’s asses for so long I figure it’s time we got ours kicked.” It’s a nice, quiet moment between Chris and Elias that Willem Dafoe handles wonderfully with a world-weary subtlety much as Tom Berenger approaches his scene with a less-is-more attitude. His intense, thoughtful stare says it all and one rightly assumes that these moments are the calm before the storm.

At that point in his career, Willem Dafoe was known for playing bad guy roles in films like Streets of Fire (1984) and To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) and so casting him as a good guy in Platoon must’ve seemed like a gamble. Dafoe is excellent as a dedicated soldier who takes the time to teach Chris a few things in order for him to survive. It’s a very soulful performance as he acts as the platoon’s conscience. Elias cares about his men and wants to see them all go home alive.

In contrast, Tom Berenger had been known for playing lightweight, good guy roles but caught Stone’s eye with his layered performance in The Big Chill (1983). He gives an absolutely ferocious performance as an intense, imposing figure, a malevolent force of nature with a penetrating stare and a twisted scar down one side of his face. Barnes rules his men with an iron fist. He’s a tough man who leads by example, strict and unwavering in his beliefs. He is concerned only with maintaining his functioning war machine and when he spots a spanner in the works, as he does with Elias, he sees it as a malfunctioning part that must be removed and replaced.

Late in Platoon, Berenger delivers a fantastic monologue when Barnes confronts the heads, sharing his worldview with them. He even calls them out, telling them to kill him in almost pleading fashion that is unpredictable, only adding to the tension of the scene. It’s a speech that runs the gamut and the actor works the scene, moving around the space, and interacting with everyone around him in a way that is impressive to watch. Berenger hadn’t really done anything before this film to suggest such intensity and his performance was a revelation and is still his best to date.

Stone assembled an impressive cast of young actors that included Johnny Depp, Keith David, Kevin Dillon, Forest Whitaker, and John C. McGinley who appear with varying amounts of screen time. McGinley, for example, makes the most of his moments as the cocky sycophant O’Neill and Dillon is particularly memorable as a racist murderer while Depp and Whitaker hardly get any time to make an impact.

The battle scenes have a visceral, you-are-there feel to them as Stone wisely opts to eschew a manipulative score for the jarring sounds of battle as orders are barely understood amidst the sounds of explosions and gunfire. Soldiers are killed from inexperience and ineptitude as much as for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now presented very stylized representations of combat in Vietnam while Platoon is much more realistic, presenting it as noisy and chaotic.

Platoon packs in a lot of stuff during its running time: botched ambushes, the destruction of a village, discovery of an underground bunker, and a climactic, large scale battle that probably wouldn’t have all gone down in such a limited time frame, but Stone isn’t interested in making a documentary. His film is a dramatization of a composite of several events that gives the audience some idea of what it was like there and what these guys went through. Chris’ voiceover narration gets a bit pretentious at times but that’s the point as he comes from an educated background of privilege, fancying himself a literary chronicler of his platoon’s exploits. The images of what he experiences are so powerful that they render his sometimes cliché musings ineffectual.

After dropping out of Yale University and a stint with the Merchant Marines, Oliver Stone enlisted the United States Army, arriving in Vietnam on September 15, 1967 as a member of the second platoon of Bravo Company, third battalion, 25th Infantry Division. He was wounded twice and awarded the Bronze Star for combat gallantry and a Purple Heart with Oak Leaf Cluster. He was later transferred to the First Calvary Division and finally returned to the U.S. after more than 15 months in 1968.

By mid-1976, Stone’s marriage had broken up, he was struggling financially and his screenwriting career had yet to take off. Ever since he had returned from Vietnam in November 1968, he had wanted to write about his experiences in the war: “I realized I had forgotten a lot in eight years. I thought, ‘If I don’t do it now, I’m gonna forget.’ It’s part of our history nobody understands—what it was like over there.” Stone decided that he would write about his experiences as truthfully as possible, making only slight adjustments, changing some names and combining a few characters. “It took me eight years to get to that screenplay, because I couldn’t deal with it before. I needed the distance.”

Stone finished the script in a few weeks, finding it challenging in getting the tone right and also the character of Elias, which he envisioned as a “free spirit, a Jim Morrison in the bush.” With only one B-horror movie (Seizure) to his credit, Stone couldn’t find anyone willing to buy his script until Sidney Lumet showed some interest and toyed with the idea of directing with Al Pacino starring. After the scripts for Midnight Express (1978) and Scarface (1983) were made into wildly successful films, filmmaker Michael Cimino, whom Stone co-wrote the script for his film Year of the Dragon (1985), encouraged him to get Platoon going again with him in a producer capacity. In 1984, Stone cast it and went to the Philippines to scout locations. Dino de Laurentiis, who agreed to back it, pulled out. He was willing to cover the $6 million budget but could not find a distributor willing to take a chance on the commercially risky project.

Stone took the project’s collapse hard and felt that his career was over. In addition, De Laurentiis refused to give Stone back his script until he paid for the cost of the Philippines location scout. This experience, and witnessing how his script for 8 Million Ways to Die (1985) was completely rewritten, made Stone wary of making Platoon for a Hollywood studio. In 1985, he successful wrestled the rights for his film away from De Laurentiis and gave the script to producer Gerald Green. He sent it to John Daly over at Hemdale, a small British independent production house. Both Daly and Green loved the script and wanted to make it with Stone as director and Orion Pictures as distributor. Producer Arnold Kopelson, a lawyer turned movie producer, read the script and felt it was a game changer. He contacted Green and told him that he would raise the money for Platoon.

After making Salvador (1986), Stone launched right into Platoon in February 1986, two weeks before the former was released in theaters. The filmmaker was locked into a tight nine-week shooting schedule and used the same crew that worked on his previous film. In addition, he hired retired Marine Corps captain and Vietnam War veteran Dale Dye as technical advisor. It would be the beginning of a long-standing collaboration between the two men over many films.

When it came to casting, Stone saw Tom Berenger in The Big Chill and was impressed by his performance: “I felt like there was a redneck side to Tom, an ugly side that could really be seething, and I used it.” When it came to Willem Dafoe, Stone saw him in films like Streets of Fire and To Live and Die in L.A., “playing ugly roles and I thought there was something spiritually heightened because of the ugliness. So I went the other way.” Dafoe had met Stone when he first tried to make Platoon and then he almost got John Savage’s role in Salvador. Charlie Sheen auditioned for the role of Chris in 1983, but Stone felt he was “gawky and underweight,” according to the actor, and offered the role to his brother Emilio Estevez with Michael Pare cast as Barnes (both Mickey Rourke and Kevin Costner were considered for the part). When the film was restarted, Stone considered Keanu Reeves, Kyle MacLachlan and Johnny Depp for Chris. Sheen had made a couple of films and auditioned again, this time Stone cast him in the part.

The cast was scheduled to arrive in the Philippines in February 1986 shortly after the presidential election, but when it went sour people died and revolution erupted into civil war! President Ferdinand Marcos fled on February 25 and Corazon Aquino took over. Dafoe had flown in early and went to sleep in a Manila hotel only to wake up to the sounds of tanks in the streets. The rest of the cast flew in nine days later. Stone contemplated moving the production to Thailand, but it would have been a logistical nightmare. He held out and made new deals with the new regime, including renting all the military equipment from the government. Stone said, “I remember the helicopters were pretty dangerous because they weren’t maintained well.”

Once the cast assembled in the Philippines, Dye proceeded to put them through a grueling 14-day boot camp in order to get them in the foot soldier mindset: “Oliver said, ‘I want you to take them to the bush, beat them up, make them understand what it was like for you and me in Vietnam.’” Used to staying in hotels and being pampered, the actors underwent culture shock as they were constantly in the bush with no beds, bathrooms, hot showers or any of the creature comforts they were used to. Dye had them dig their own foxholes to sleep in, set ambushes, learn how to use various weapons, and go on ten-mile patrols with full gear and weapons. As Sheen later remarked, “This was a cram course in an infantryman’s life. And it was rough.”

At dusk on the first night, Dye asked the special effects people to stage a mortar “attack” without the exhausted actors knowing what was going on, yelling at them to return fire. Dye said, “It was utter chaos and they were shaking by the time it was dark.” The actors learned military lingo, listened to period music and had to refer to each other by the character’s names. After two weeks of this, they bonded and were ready to start filming. The cast went from training straight into principal photography. Dye remembers, “They were just flat exhausted and that was exactly the look that Oliver wanted.”

The production was not without its problems as the cast and crew endured fights, injuries, a near-fatal viper bite, insects, monsoon rains, and the firing of 4-5 production people. There were also several close calls with the helicopters, including cinematographer Bob Richardson almost getting clipped by the rotor of one. In another incident, Dye, Richardson and Stone were in a helicopter that almost hit a ravine! Stone remembers, “We scraped it by that much. We were so low, and these Filipino pilots are good, but they’re crazy.” With the start of the rainy season looming rapidly and running out of money, Stone compromised the last few shots in order to make the deadline and did it with a day to spare.

Platoon received mostly positive reviews from critics at the time. Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and wrote, “There are no false heroics in this movie, and no standard heroes; the narrator is quickly at the point of physical collapse, bedeviled by long marches, no sleep, ants, snakes, cuts, bruises and constant, gnawing fear.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote of Stone’s direction: “He doesn’t telegraph emotions, nor does he stomp on them. The movie is a succession of found moments. It’s less like a work that’s been written than one that has been discovered … This one is a major piece of work, as full of passion as it is of redeeming, scary irony.”

The Los Angeles Times’ Sheila Benson wrote, “This is movie-making with a zealot’s fervor … [Stone] clearly wants us to understand what fighting in that war was like. He succeeds with an immediacy that is frightening. War movies of the past, even the greatest ones, seem like crane shots by comparison; Platoon is at ground zero.” In her review for the Washington Post, Rita Kempley praised Berenger and Dafoe’s performances: “They are explosive, mythic Titans in a terrible struggle for the soldier’s souls.” Finally, Gene Siskel gave it four out of four stars and wrote, “Platoon is filled with one fine performance after another, and one can only wish that every person who saw the cartoonish war fantasy that was Rambo would buy a ticket to Platoon and bear witness to something closer to the truth.”

Platoon presents the Vietnam War as a moral quagmire, an impossible situation that the United States had no chance of winning because they were so out of their depth. All the average soldier could hope to do was survive. Stone’s film shows what it was like for them to be there with startling detail and authenticity, from the camaraderie to the madness. For Stone and a lot of veterans I imagine the experience of making the film and seeing it was therapeutic. After years of being looked down on by an uncaring public that saw the war as an embarrassment, Platoon was an opportunity for veterans to get some much deserved and long overdue respect.

SOURCES

Nashawaty, Chris. “Oliver Stone Talks Platoon and Charlie Sheen on the Vietnam film’s 25^th Anniversary.” Entertainment Weekly. May 24, 2011.

Norman, Michael. “Platoon Grapples with Vietnam.” The New York Times. December 21, 1986.

Riordan, James. Stone: A Biography of Oliver Stone. Hyperion. 1995.

Willistein, Paul. “Platoon: The Vietnam Odyssey of Oliver Stone.” The Morning Call. February 1, 1987.