7 Quentin Tarantino Movie Plots That Really Happened

4. Natural Born Killers Is Based On True Events (Sort Of)

Reservoir Dogs was the first time Quentin Tarantino got to direct one of his own scripts, but he didn't just appear on the scene out of nowhere. No matter how good a screenplay you write, you're unlikely to get Harvey Keitel to star in a film that you're also gonna helm. Along with some on-and-off work punching up existing scripts and doing uncredited rewrites, Tarantino got his foot in the Hollywood door by selling his screenplays to other directors to make. These included Tony Scott's True Romance from 1993 and, the next year, Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers. Whilst Tarantino's original script was heavily revised by Stone with writer Dave Veloz and associate producer Richard Rutowski during production, the basic shell of the story and the characters - Mickey Knox (Woody Harrelson) and his wife Mallory (Juliette Lewis) go on a killing spree across America and become media darlings - all comes from our favourite foot fetishist-cum-film obsessive, and was remarkably prescient. Because everything in the film began to happen in real life as Natural Born Killers was being made, necessitating Stone and his associates to pull from the headlines to add credibility to their controversial, political flick. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slwpt4gtCNg Originally Tarantino had hoped to direct the film, but when it got into the hands of producers Jane Hamsher and Don Murphy they had other ideas - and they wanted to turn it into a dumb, Arnie-style action movie. Luckily Stone thought otherwise, noticing parallels between the characters' actions in the film and the recent OJ Simpson case and Rodney King incident. The media had played a big part in how all these crimes took place, how they were documented, and how they ended - what must've seemed like a future satire and warning in Tarantino's script had become reality by the time it was filmed.