Richardson Calls Natural Born Killers 'Too Crazy' at Karlovy Vary
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- Robert Richardson attended the Karlovy Vary world premiere of The White Devil, a documentary by Czech filmmaker Jana Hojdová that began as a 2016 cold letter from a student and became a months-long project when COVID lockdown stranded Hojdová at Richardson's home.
- Richardson called Natural Born Killers 'too crazy' and 'the edge,' noting that Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson themselves questioned what happened during production — and revealing he initially told Oliver Stone he didn't like the script but agreed to make it 'with the same level of passion.'
- Richardson said Quentin Tarantino has never watched Natural Born Killers because the script was sold before Tarantino could control it, though elements later seen in Kill Bill — animation and all — were already present in the earlier film.
- Richardson admitted to taking six tabs of LSD at once and doing cocaine in his younger years, and said he ate mushrooms while scouting The Doors' tripping sequence while Stone stayed 'completely straight' on that scout.
- Richardson, now 70 with 10 Oscar nominations and three wins, has worked with the same crew for 30 years — including the key grip and gaffer on his current shoot — and said Tarantino told him in the documentary he wouldn't have worked with him again had Richardson not 'changed his attitude.'
- Martin Scorsese once turned Richardson down for Cape Fear, telling him 'I'm thinking I need somebody that's more old school' — a rebuff that did not derail Richardson's ascent to working with Scorsese on later films.
Why it matters: Richardson's on-the-record characterization of Natural Born Killers as 'too crazy,' combined with quotes from Downey and Harrelson already captured in the documentary, gives historians the most candid insider account yet of that notoriously troubled production. The documentary itself — born from a 2016 cold letter and a forced COVID cohabitation — is a rare case of a top cinematographer becoming his own on-screen subject.
