Natural born thriller: how Oliver Stone’s gonzo style defined the 90s

No season of films from the 1990s or critical overview of that singular decade in cinema would be complete without the work of eccentric American auteur Oliver Stone. Across seven hugely ambitious, increasingly erratic directorial features, Stone delivered one of the maddest, most brilliantly gonzo sets of films in 10 years of any director’s filmography.

Having cut his teeth on low-budget exploitation films, Stone had achieved real notoriety and awards traction in the 1980s with a series of mainstream films that interrogated America’s recent ignominious past on the world stage. These were war films with a populist bent, seen through the eyes of men on the ground. Through the lens of a war photographer in Salvador (1986) and from the perspective of foot-soldiers in the first two instalments of his Vietnam trilogy, Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989), these films thunder with righteous rage over corrupt American foreign policy and the physical and psychological cost on the frontline.

Stone also achieved significant cultural impact that decade with his banking thriller Wall Street (1987), a film again focused on an everyman in a space of conflict. This time, the war zone is the floor of the stock exchange. The offices of Michael Douglas’s iconic trader and inadvertent sex symbol Gordon Gekko are the site of a Faustian battle for Charlie Sheen’s soul. The moral ambivalence and high style of that film contrast with the more straightforwardly polemical impulses governing Stone’s war pictures. But all are united by a remarkable visual flair, stirring performances and a feel for bombast and cinematic spectacle, unsubtle and unabashed.

Stone began his 90s with epic Jim Morrison biopic The Doors (1991), a period piece that’s also set in the Vietnam era. But, pointedly, it is mostly disengaged from politics and war. It’s a lavish and immersive film, plotted straightforwardly – in a manner expertly satirised years later by Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007) – to chronicle the hedonistic highs and drug-addled lows of Morrison’s short career. Starring a lavishly wigged and uncannily transformed Val Kilmer as the doomed front man, the film is a veritable who’s who of 90s American cinema, featuring roles as band members, groupies and pop icons for everyone from Kyle MacLachlan, Meg Ryan and Michael Madsen to Wes Studi, Billy Idol and Crispin Glover.

While it arguably set a rather tiresome generic template for later pop biopics, more immediately The Doors gave a clear expression of Stone’s intent, revealing his increasing interest in radical editing, plays with film stock and sonic experimentation. Apart from the more traditional use of black-and-white stock to denote flashbacks from Morrison’s youth, Stone veers away from classical visual language for many of the film’s most memorable flourishes. And in the context of evoking 60s hippie living and hedonistic rock star debauchery, the elaborate cutting, heavy use of tilted camera, close-ups, colour saturation and erratic sound mix sit somewhere visually between 60s psychedelic cinema and an MTV music video aesthetic.

Formal choices such as these make for a disorientating exprience in the context of a swinging 60s biopic, but even more so in the space of the historical drama/political thriller in Stone’s next film, JFK (1991). Here, the aesthetic bears little rememblance to any equivalent pop media from the era, or any other style of filmmaking for that matter. The visual language instead acts as a kind of attack. Again utilising an expansive and awesome cast centred around Kevin Costner’s intrepid District Attorney Jim Garrison and his quest to get to the bottom of the Kennedy assassination, JFK is a visual and sonic assault, defiantly opposed to the conservative trappings of the traditional historical film, or even the paranoid conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s it connects with in spirit.

Where the more classically-inclined 70s films of Alan J. Pakula, Arthur Penn and Sydney Pollack deploy cool, angular cinematography, subtle sound design and traditional scoring to heighten the sense of menace around their characters as they spiral deeper into intrigues and conspiracies, Stone throws every conceivable formal excess at his film. Cutting wildly within and between scenes, mixing a variety of stocks, liberally integrating archive images (including the Zapruder footage) as well as bursts of bombastic score and bizarre sound shifts, Stone creates a heady formal mix and an appropriately disorientating sense of discomfort, panic and hysteria around the unfolding narrative.

Moreover, the fact that the source material – two controversial memoirs of the investigation – and the screenplay’s thesis veer early on into tin-foil-hat territory only adds to the unnerving effect. Divorced from any sort of historical verisimilitude and instead fully committed to historical sensationalism and viewer sensation, the film is an astonishing experience that’s quite unique in big-budget American cinema of the period, which broadly appeared more interested in high concepts, eschewing socio-political commentary and thematic specificity.

Having completed his Vietnam trilogy with the turgid and perfunctory Heaven and Earth (1993), a far more classical film centred on the true-life story of a Vietnamese woman, the wife of a traumatised veteran, and her construction of a business empire over in the US, Stone returned to formal excess with his hugely controversial and exciting 1994 film Natural Born Killers.

Based on a story and script by Quentin Tarantino, the film has historically been approached superficially as a moralistic and grandstanding piece about the detrimental, desensitising impact of TV entertainment, pop culture and violent movies. Indeed, it developed into something of a self-fulfilling prophecy when the film became the centre of controversy and fierce debate around the ethics of screen violence and the potentially harmful impact on viewers in the 1990s. The UK went so far as to halt its home entertainment distribution for some years.

If the idea of violent art – and, in particular, violent art engaged in its own playful discourse around violence in art – falling foul of a climate of narrow-minded censoriousness and priggish moralising seems very familiar right about now, then it speaks as much to Stone’s prescience as a filmmaker and the enduring resonance of his work as it does to history repeating itself.

Natural Born Killers also endures because of its sense of freshness and experimentation with regard to viewer sensation. With the film’s visual and sonic language – an onslaught of mixed media, animation, frenetic cutting, bizarre abstraction and in-camera effects, coupled with a thunderously loud sound design and rock score – so clearly intended to approximate its central characters’ fractured, damaged subjectivity and warped behaviour, Stone’s control of form is undeniable, in spite, or rather because of the mania of the film style. It is also a remarkably funny and entertaining film, showcasing thrillingly excessive performances from the likes of Robert Downey Jr and Tommy Lee Jones in supporting roles, and of course the superb coupling of Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis as the young killers Mickey and Mallory.

In line with Stone’s penchant for thematic series, echoing and pairing across features, both JFK and Natural Born Killers found their doubles next in the films that followed. JFK connects up spiritually and literally with his next film, the sprawling biopic Nixon (1995), which functions as a kind of expansion of the ‘60s paranoia universe’, and NBK with pulp thriller U-Turn, another film about amoral and violent killers played out in the desert, shot and edited in frenzied, colour-popping style. That both feel like slightly paler afterbirths of their precursors says less about their quality as films than it does about the protean, primal nature of both JFK and NBK as cinematic exercises that would have an enormous impact both on Stone’s emerging style and that of the countless imitators that followed him.

Towards the end of the 90s, while American blockbusters shifted towards high concept and exponentially high-tech scale at the expense of the ‘reality’ and specificity more familiar to Stone’s big budget work, the indie space wrestled with the postmodern pastiche and increased stylisation and abstraction that Stone himself had helped to create with NBK. Stone, meanwhile, took the opposite direction as he looked backwards towards a style more familiar from the likes of Robert Altman: the sprawling, multi-storied drama that makes a virtue out of chaos.

Swapping the battlefield for the football field, Any Given Sunday (1999) allows Stone to let his bombastic style loose without having to worry about his over-the-top inclinations jarring with the seriousness of the topic. Here, bombast is already an inherent part of a game that’s as concerned with hyper-masculine ideals as it is with fame. But while the film features the same stylistic mash-ups and formal frenzies as Stone’s previous features, it’s also relatively straightforward in charting the journey of a football club in crisis. The world of American football, high in testosterone, is an ideal ground for Stone to combine his penchant for kinetic filmmaking with his interest in groups of men working out complex problems together.

It’s a remarkable end to a decade defined by Stone’s fierce formal experimentation on both a studio and independent budget scale – a time when he worked consistently with high profile talent and was fully committed to a brash and challenging aesthetic. These kinds of wild and excessive films, made at these scales, are sadly almost unimaginable today, when studios are reluctant to invest millions of dollars in projects not involving toys or superheroes. As such, revisiting Stone’s 90s provides a great reminder of the formal possibilities for big-budget filmmaking.