## Why Natural Born Killers Was the Right Film at the Right Moment
When Oliver Stone began casting Natural Born Killers in the early 1990s, the film was already a project with a specific history: it had originated as a Quentin Tarantino script, acquired by Stone, who substantially rewrote it and transformed it into something quite different from what Tarantino had written. The result was a film that used the aesthetics of mass media — television graphics, different film stocks, advertising language, talk show formats — to make an argument about the relationship between media coverage and the creation of criminal celebrity.
Mickey Knox, the character Harrelson plays, is a killer who becomes a celebrity because of the media’s coverage of his killing spree. He is charismatic and violent and self-aware in a way that the media finds irresistible, and the film is interested in the specific mechanics by which audiences are made to find him irresistible too. It is a reflexive film: it wants you to find Mickey compelling, and it also wants you to notice that you find him compelling, and it frames both the finding-compelling and the noticing-that-you-find-him-compelling as consequences of the same media machinery it is satirizing.
Harrelson’s performance is the film’s essential element. Without a Mickey Knox who is genuinely compelling — who the camera finds interesting and who audiences find interesting for real rather than for the sake of argument — the film’s mechanism doesn’t work. You can’t make a film about charismatic celebrity violence with an unconvincing charismatic celebrity violent person at its center. Harrelson provided what Stone required: the actual thing, not a simulation of it.