After 30 years, Oliver Stone knows when to admit he was wrong.
The Academy Award-winning writer and director recently reminisced about working with a 27-year-old Robert Downey Jr., who was admittedly under the influence during the majority of filming, on the 1994 crime romance Natural Born Killers.
Stone recalled directing the actor in the final scene for a recent oral history by Esquire, revealing it was Downey’s idea to dip the front tails of his white shirt in fake blood and pull it through his pants zipper. “Oh come on—that’s too much! You’re going too far, Robert,” he told Downey of the bloody innuendo.
“You’re ruining my movie! Forget the dumb dick idea. This isn’t… This isn’t some slapstick bull—,” added Stone.
Downey, who happened to be sober on this day of filming, relented and pulled his shirt back through the zipper. “Wait, wait—wait a second. Let me see the dick thing again,” Stone then told him, to which Downey quickly complied.
Woody Harrelson and Robert Downey Jr. in Natural Born Killers (1994)
“Pull it back a half inch,” Stone told him. “All right. Let’s go.” The rest is history.
Natural Born Killers stars Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis as Mickey and Mallory Knox, a homicidal couple that goes on a cross-country killing spree, becoming a media sensation along the way. The movie served as a satire of the violence-obsessed media of the ’90s.
Downey played salacious TV journalist Wayne Gale, who chases the biggest story of his life while reporting on the pair’s killings, only to become the news in the film’s twisted finale.
Although Downey admitted “the only time I was awake was between Action and Cut,” he had the utmost praise for Stone, telling Esquire, “With this movie, Oliver Stone has got something that still bears reexamination.”
The Oscar winner added: “Oliver Stone is a director who, barring [Christopher] Nolan and maybe a few others, is the highest embodiment of social commentary via cinema. Oliver Stone has never made a movie that wasn’t saying something. Never.”