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The Colosseum at Caesars Palace | Las Vegas, NV

The killers: live in las vegas - celebrating 20 years of hot fuss, freedom mortgage pavilion | camden, nj.

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Merriweather Post Pavilion | Columbia, MD

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Budweiser Stage | Toronto, ON

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Estadio GNP Seguros | Mexico City, MEXICO

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The killers on august 28, 2024.

20 Years of Hot Fuss

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The Killers tour dates 2024

The Killers is currently touring across 3 countries and has 15 upcoming concerts.

Their next tour date is at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, after that they'll be at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace again in Las Vegas.

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Upcoming concerts (15) See nearest concert

The Colosseum at Caesars Palace

Freedom Mortgage Pavilion

Merriweather Post Pavilion

Budweiser Stage

Forest Hills Stadium

Estadio 3 De Marzo

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Estadio Banorte

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Recent tour reviews

It was amazing!!! From the moment they went on stage to the very last second it was just so much positive energy coming from the band. The crowd was bad, but that isn’t The Killers’ fault! They did the absolute most and it paid off. Brandon hit those high notes despite his flu, Ronnie was legendary on the drums, Ted was amazing, the choir was amazing, et cetera et cetera. It’s a shame (especially for the people that DID know all their songs) that the crowd bothered them so much that they didn’t play Mr. Brightside, but again, the band isn’t to blame.

These Las Vegas legends know how to give a great performance!

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This was, so far, the best concert for The Killers that I've ever seen (& I've seen them 3 times already). The acoustics for the Staples Center wasn't the absolute best, but it didn't matter when the whole stadium was singing at the top of their lungs along with the band. First of all, since this was the Wonderful Wonderful Tour, I thought the band would play mostly songs from the new album, but to my surprise, they performed a great mix of songs from their entire discography. What surprised me the most was that The Killers played a ton more songs from their Hot Fuss album than they ever had before. They even dug deep to perform such notable songs like "Andy, You're A Star" & "Smile Like You Mean It". A beautifully sweet touch was when the band performed a new, sort of spur-of-the-moment, song about Los Angeles...a song they had written on the road just before their L.A. leg of the tour. One of the major highlights of the entire concert was when the band had invited a young teenage fan up onto the stage to play the drums on the song "For Reasons Unknown". Apparently this has become an ongoing tradition of the band, to invite fans up on the stage to perform with them. This was such a touching, yet totally bad-ass moment, & I hope The Killers keep on doing this at every concert tour from now on. By the end of the concert, my friends & I had lost our voices from singing & screaming so loudly, but it was one thousand percent worth it. The Killers proved with their electrifying & humorous stage presence, along with their amazing voices & talent, that they will forever hold the spot of being my all-time favorite band.

I actually saw the show at Barclays on Tuesday the 8th. Let me start by saying I see a lot of concerts every year and was only familiar with the better known of The Killers songs. Having said that - they were EXCELLENT! Flowers is a magnificent front man with a set of pipes to carry stadiums. The band is flawless and so rock and roll. I will judge a band by how much they can hook me with a song I’ve never heard before . From the opening with Wonderful Wonderful and The Man thru The Calling start to the encore I was dazzled. I downloaded everything and I’m now a confirmed fan. I will see them again ASAP. One of the best live I have seen -ever. And I’m no spring chicken.

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THE KILLERS REBEL DIAMONDS – THE ALBUM, OUT NOW!

The Killers. Credit Todd Weaver. For approved press images and artwork, click here

Listen HERE

UK Tour Dates On Sale Now, i ncluding five new extra shows

8 DECEMBER 2023 (TORONTO, ON) — Two decades into their incredible career, The Killers are thrilled to release their celebratory ‘best of’ album, Rebel Diamonds , out now.

LISTEN TO REBEL DIAMONDS

The band, who have just announced additional dates for their upcoming R ebel Diamonds Tour for 2024, now release their album of highlights featuring 20 tracks, including the modern day classics “Mr. Brightside,” “When You Were Young,” “All These Things That I’ve Done,” “Human,” “Read My Mind”, “The Man” and more, through to the band’s most recently released, critically-lauded single, “Your Side of Town,” and one brand new anthem, “Spirit”.

Rebel Diamonds is a curated dive into an impressive catalogue of songwriting and musicianship - one that has solidified the band as one of the most important voices in rock ‘n’ roll over the last two decades. The album features at least one song from each of the band’s seven studio albums. From the groundbreaking debut Hot Fuss , celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2024, to the band’s latest full length LP, 2021’s Pressure Machine , Rebel Diamonds showcases the group’s versatility and staying power across the ever-changing alternative music landscape.  The collection is made up of songs that embody who The Killers are as a band, additionally including some favourites of theirs that have resonated over the years - tracks like “Be Still,” from 2012’s album Battle Born or “Dying Breed” from 2020’s album Imploding The Mirage or “A Dustland Fairytale” from 2008’s Day & Age , which the band recently re-recorded and performed with Bruce Springsteen.    

The Rebel Diamonds Tour will celebrate the band’s 20 years of hits in a series of arena shows, now including four nights at Manchester’s Co-Op Live and five at London’s The O2 after additional dates were added following exceptional demand.

The upcoming dates are the first time The Killers have played arena shows in the UK since 2017’s Wonderful Wonderful tour, and follow the band’s most recent stadium tour, which saw them play to 400,000 fans at sold out shows including two euphoric nights at London’s Emirates Stadium in June 2022, and last year’s standout headline shows at Reading & Leeds Festivals.

The Killers will be joined by special guests Travis for the upcoming tour dates. For full routing list and tour updates, visit thekillersmusic.com . Tickets for the Rebel Diamonds Tour are on sale from www.ticketmaster.co.uk / www.gigsandtours.com .

The Killers are Brandon Flowers (vocals), Ronnie Vannucci Jr. (drums), Dave Keuning (guitar), and Mark Stoermer (bass).

Rebel Diamon ds cover art. For approved Killers art and photos, click HERE

Rebel Diamonds tracklisting:

• Jenny Was a Friend of Mine
• Mr. Brightside
• All These Things That I’ve Done
• Somebody Told Me
• When You Were Young
• Read My Mind
• A Dustland Fairytale
• My Own Soul’s Warning
• Dying Breed
• Pressure Machine
• Your Side of Town

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The Killers 2024 tour schedule

Need travel arrangements, how to buy tickets for the killers 2024 concert tour, how much are the killers tickets.

• Who is opening for The Killers' tour?

Will there be international tour dates?

How to buy the killers tickets: dates and prices compared.

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The Killers are still on the road for their 2024 tour through this fall, and tickets are selling fast to see the group celebrate their greatest hits. While the rock band is already over a month into their high-demand tour, there are still a few avenues for how to buy The Killers tickets for this year's concert series.

In promotion of their second greatest hits album of the same name, The Killers' 2024 Rebel Diamonds Tour officially kicked off on June 12. The world tour includes three legs across Europe, North America, and Japan, with The Killers currently having a total of over 40 shows scheduled before coming to a close on October 9, 2024. After The Killers' stints in Europe and Japan concluded in July, the band is taking the show on the road in North America starting on August 3.

The Rebel Diamonds Tour also overlaps with The Killers' 2024 Las Vegas residency, which includes 10 shows at The Colosseum at Caesar's Palace between August 14 and September 1. The members of The Killers performing in the 2024 Rebel Diamonds Tour include Brandon Flowers, Ronnie Vannucci Jr., and cofounder Dave Keuning, the latter of whom notably took a hiatus from touring with the band for several years.

We've got you covered if you're looking for how to get tickets to The Killers' 2024 tour. Here's our breakdown of the Rebel Diamonds Tour schedule, purchasing details, and price comparisons between resale and original tickets. You can also browse ticket and tour details at your leisure on StubHub and Vivid Seats .

• See also: Eagles tickets | Paramore tickets | Outside Lands tickets |  Stevie Nicks tickets  |  All Things Go tickets | Dead and Company tickets | Foo Fighters tickets | Maroon 5 tickets |  Phish tickets |  Rolling Stones tickets

As The Killers embark on the third and final leg of their 2024 tour, the show comes to North America for the last 23 concerts. The North American leg of the Rebel Diamonds Tour kicks off on August 3 in Chicago, and it includes 17 shows in the United States, two concerts in Canada, and four performances in Mexico. The Killers are scheduled to take their final bow on October 9, 2024, in Monterrey, Mexico.

All concert times are listed in local time zones.

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You can buy standard original tickets for The Killers' 2024 concert tour on Ticketmaster or the respective festival sites for the band's music festival appearances. However, the quantity of remaining original tickets is limited, given the high demand for The Killers' 2024 concert series.

Tickets for The Killers' Rebel Diamond Tour and 2024 Las Vegas residency dates are also available through verified resale ticket vendors such as StubHub and Vivid Seats . Given how fast original tickets sell, you may find better luck with availability and seating options on these resale sites.

Ticket prices to see The Killers in concert in 2024 vary depending on the date, location, concert type, and demand for each show. The band's music festival appearances and Las Vegas residency dates tend to be more expensive than their other tour performances.

For instance, the least expensive standard original tickets for The Killers' 2024 tour start at $49 for the Camden, New Jersey show on September 7, while tickets for their Outside Lands Music Festival appearance on August 9 begin at $226. However, resale ticket prices are generally comparable to or cheaper than original tickets.

On StubHub , the lowest prices for tickets to The Killers' 2024 concerts range from $27 for their Toronto, Canada show on September 11 to $255 for their Outside Lands Music Festival appearance on August 9 in San Francisco. Vivid Seats offers similar prices for resale tickets, with the cheapest available tickets starting from $43 for The Killers' Toronto show on September 10 to $417 for their Outside Lands Music Festival set.

VIP tickets are also available for most of their 2024 music festival appearances. VIP prices start at $518 for their Outside Lands Music Festival date. The Killers are also offering VIP packages for certain tour dates, including the VIP Silver Package (starting at $367) and the VIP Gold Package (starting at $379) at their Camden, New Jersey show.

Who is opening for The Killers' tour?

The Killers have yet to announce an opener for the North American leg of their 2024 tour. However, the artist Travis joined the band on the European tour dates. While it doesn't look like they'll have an opening act for the rest of the Rebel Diamonds Tour, their music festival appearances will see them perform with several high-profile artists.

The Killers have already completed their tour dates in Europe and Japan, but a few international shows remain in 2024. This includes two shows in Toronto in September and four concerts in Mexico in October. Here's a breakdown of The Killers' remaining international dates in their 2024 tour:

• Toronto, ON, Canada – September 10, 2024
• Toronto, ON, Canada – September 11, 2024
• Guadalajara, Mexico – October 3, 2024
• Mexico City, Mexico – October 5, 2024
• Mexico City, Mexico – October 6, 2024
• Monterrey, Mexico – October 9, 2024

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Home Music Music News

1 December 2023 10:09 AM

The Killers announce 2024 ‘Rebel Diamonds’ UK arena tour

The gigs will celebrate the band's upcoming greatest hits album..

By Will Richards

The Killers are releasing new greatest hits album Rebel Diamonds next week, and are set to celebrate the release on a 2024 UK and Ireland arena tour.

Rebel Diamonds lands on December 8 and features 20 of their biggest hits from their first two decades as a band.

Next June, they will hit the road in the UK and Ireland to celebrate the release of the new album, beginning in Dublin and finishing with three shows at The O2 in London.

Tickets for the Rebel Diamonds tour go on sale at 9.30am GMT on Friday, December 8. You will be able to buy yours here .

See the full list of tour dates below.

JUNE 2024 14 – Dublin, 3Arena 15 – Dublin, 3Arena 18 – Manchester, Co-Op Live 19 – Manchester, Co-Op Live 21 – Manchester, Co-Op Live 25 – Glasgow, OVO Hydro 26 – Glasgow, OVO Hydro JULY 2024 4 – London, The O2 5 – London, The O2 7 – London, The O2

It's only right that we give first dibs to the land that gave us our first big shot at doing what we do! Thank you and without further ado, here we go… Tickets for our UK/Ireland tour go on general sale at 9:30am GMT Friday, 8th December. Gain access to an exclusive presale… pic.twitter.com/7k9nf3IweY — The Killers (@thekillers) December 1, 2023

Alongside new song ‘Spirit’, The Killers’ new greatest hits album celebrates tracks from across their career, from 2004 debut Hot Fuss to Battle Born (2012), Wonderful Wonderful (2017) and their most recent records, Imploding The Mirage (2020) and Pressure Machine (2021).

See the tracklist below.

1. Jenny Was a Friend of Mine 2. Mr. Brightside 3. All These Things That I’ve Done 4. Somebody Told Me 5. When You Were Young 6. Read My Mind 7. Human 8. Spaceman 9. A Dustland Fairytale 10. Runaways 11. Be Still 12. The Man 13. Caution 14. My Own Soul’s Warning 15. Dying Breed 16. Pressure Machine 17. Quiet Town 18. Boy 19. Your Side of Town 20. Spirit

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The Killers – Gig Review 28th August @ Coliseum, Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas NV

Posted on August 30, 2024 by kjdraven

The Killers – 20 Years of Hot Fuss Coliseum, Caesar’s Palace August 28, 2024

When The Killers announced they would be celebrating the twentieth anniversary of their debut album Hot Fuss with a residency at Caesar’s Palace, my wife and I started planning a trip to Las Vegas. While we waited in the general admission line we kept looking at each other and saying out loud: “We are seeing The Killers in Las Vegas” . We weren’t the only travellers in line, with fans coming from Europe, Asia and South America + all around Canada and the United States. It was eclectic and electric with people buzzing as we entered the Coliseum venue. 

The venue itself is impressive, with three tiers of seating but a relatively small GA area. The stage is so wide though that everyone has a good view. The moment the intro track (a synth version of ‘ Mr Brightside’ ) ends, the band appears in silhouette on the stage and 4,000 people erupt in joyous applause with all of the seated patrons on their feet. 

The first five tracks of Hot Fuss are among the best pop-rock songs of the millennium and seeing them in sequence live is a thrilling experience. It’s just absurd. Opener ‘ Jenny Was a Friend of Mine’ is still delivered with drama by frontman Brandon Flowers , who commands the stage. Mark Stoermer ’s bass work remains captivating, giving the song a pulsating rhythm. Part of the thrill is seeing the original four members on stage together ( Dave Keuning and Mark have largely been absent from touring for several years). There’s a warmth of the banter between them, genuinely enjoying playing together after time apart. 

Flowers paused to reflect on his move from Utah to Nevada in 2001, how he “bet on three guys [he] hardly knew” . Cue the iconic intro riff to ‘Mr Brightside’ and the first of many loud singalongs. The crowd energy is relentless as the band power through ‘Smile Like You Mean It’ and ‘Somebody Told Me’ . The original members are joined by touring musicians and backing vocalists for an incredible rendition of ‘All These Things That I’ve Done’ . There’s a lengthy audience contribution to the “I’ve got soul but I’m not a soldier” refrain, with Flowers serving as conductor. As the song finishes, the band erupts into the chorus of Elvis’ ‘ Burning Love’ , with Flowers kneeing and mimicking the Priestley arm spins. 

So the first five songs leave most bands in the dust but the crowd’s enthusiasm doesn’t wane as they groove to album tracks ‘Andy, You’re a Star’ and fan favourite ‘On Top’ . There’s a bit of a lull during ‘ Change Your Mind’ but that’s quickly forgotten when Ronnie Vannucci does a short drum solo as an intro to ‘Believe Me Natalie’ , which is accompanied by lasers. There’s a snippet of the Vegas standard ‘Luck Be a Lady’ before the band open the throttle on the high energy ‘Midnight Show’ .

There’s a reason the album’s closing tune, ‘ Everything Will Be Alright’ , hadn’t been performed for nearly two decades prior to this residency. Despite Flower’s introducing it as “the first song I wrote for my now wife” , it’s slow and plodding. It’s a wise decision to end the first set with cult bonus track, ‘Glamorous Indie Rock n Roll’ . Flower’s explained: “I wrote a scathing satirical song. Some people heard a joyful celebration of indie rock and roll. It took me 20 years to realise they were right.” It’s met with an appropriately glorious singalong. Stoermer’s bass line is again the highlight. 

The band leave the stage for five minutes with punters hardly heading to the bar in anticipation of their return. 

The second set is pretty much a validation of exactly how great the band have been since their debut. The deep cut ‘This is Your Life’ fits well among the wall-to-wall hits: ‘The Man’ , ‘ Human ’, ‘ Caution ’. These songs are FM radio staples by arguably the most consistent pop-rock band of the last two decades. Bands like The Black Keys and Kings of Leon had their share of hits, but not like The Killers . At 43, Flowers is at his performance peak, with his energetic rendition of ‘ Runaways ’ a highlight of the whole night, and the now traditional bridge singalong segueing into one of the best songs of the last twenty years: ‘Read My Mind’ from Sam’s Town . No fan is left wanting from the set’s twenty tracks, despite the fact they’ve overlooked popular songs like ‘ Spaceman ’, fan favourite ‘ A Dustland Fairytale’ and played nothing from the brilliant concept album Pressure Machine . 

It’s not entirely nostalgic though with new single ‘Bright Lights’ getting a rousing crowd roar for each chorus. Written to celebrate the residency, it’s heavy on the Vegas club vibes and suits the atmosphere perfectly. Vannucci counts in Keuning’s riff for ‘When You Were Young’ and it’s a blast of confetti, pyro and smiles all over the stage and in the audience. 

As the band left the stage for a final time, we waited around to score a guitar pick from a security guard (there was absolutely no handing out of setlists). A road manager mentioned the band “would be down under again in December “ . We departed, both of us still grinning ear to ear and kept repeating, “We just saw The Killers in Las Vegas.”

Set 1: Hot Fuss

Jenny Was a Friend of Mine Mr Brightside Smile Like You Mean It Somebody Told Me All These Things That I’ve Done (Elvis Burning Love outro) Andy, You’re a Star On Top Change Your Mind Believe Me Natalie  Midnight Show (Luck Be a Lady intro) Everything Will Be Alright Glamorous Indie Rock n Roll

The Man Human The Is Your Life Caution Runaways Read My Mind Bright Lights When You Were Young

Review and Photos by KJ Draven ( Twitter X and Instagram ). 

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The Killers

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The Killers Bring Out Bruce Springsteen at Triumphant Madison Square Garden Show: Concert Review

By Ethan Shanfeld

Ethan Shanfeld

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Very few modern bands have a “Mr. Brightside.” Even fewer are able to whip it out in the first five minutes of a show and continue to entertain an arena for another 90 minutes. And even fewer are those who can hold their own in a three-song duet with Bruce Springsteen as he beams with excitement announcing their name to the crowd: “ THE KILLERS !”

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While it was clear large swaths of the audience were not familiar with the Las Vegas band’s vastly underrated 2020 outing “Imploding the Mirage,” the Killers made a case for why they should be, opening the show with the explosive “My Own Soul’s Warning” and devoting much-deserved space to “Fire in Bone,” “Dying Breed” and “Caution.”

Midway through the set, the band went acoustic for “Runaway Horses,” with Flowers declaring that over the pandemic, the Killers had become a country band. Before playing the “Pressure Machine” tune, Flowers earnestly told the 20,000 city folk in the audience to “go get a beer if you don’t want to hear it.”

It’s hard not to be charmed by Flowers’ unfettered optimism and enthusiasm. He sings every song with a smile, stretching out the final singalong chorus of “Runaways” and then cheekily tucking Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me” into “Read My Mind.” At one point in the show, he quoted the “indestructible” Hellen Keller.

On some level, you have to buy into the Killers because, nowadays at least, it’s hard to find music as unapologetically anthemic without even the slightest hint of irony. Even the band’s corniest, most nonsensical lyrics (“We’re burning down the highway skyline / On the back of a hurricane that started turning when you were young”; “If you could see through the banner of the sun / Into eternity’s eyes like a vision reaching down to you”), paired with desert-rippling guitar riffs, roll off Flowers’ tongue like rock ‘n’ roll manifestos.

“Me and my friends have all been sweating bullets up here all night, because the Boss is here,” Flowers announced as he walked back onstage, barely able to contain his own excitement.

Before easing into their Springsteen collaboration “Dustland,” a reinvention of the band’s 2008 track “A Dustland Fairytale,” Flowers said, “This part of the night is usually reserved for me to have people put their phones up. And I tell us to think about where your light comes from.”

Then, turning to Springsteen, Flowers gushed, “It is a very unusual circumstance for me tonight because I get a lot of my light from you.”

The Killers and The Boss closed out the show on a bright note with “Born to Run,” with Flowers insisting Springsteen deliver the euphoric final verse: “The highway’s jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive!” Then, sharing the microphone, the two of them — plus the entirety of Madison Square Garden — belted out the final chorus.

How to top that? Wisely, they didn’t try.

The Boss is here. Bruce Springsteen helped the Killers close out their show at Madison Square Garden with "Born to Run." https://t.co/gqMLYAtL0y pic.twitter.com/CrlwcZY75P — Variety (@Variety) October 2, 2022

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The Killers Concert Setlists & Tour Dates

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20 Years of Hot Fuss Tour

The killers, upcoming shows.

• Date and Venue Doors Scheduled
• Sep 07 2024 Freedom Mortgage Pavilion Camden, NJ, USA  –  Find tickets Add time Tickets Add time Add times
• Sep 08 2024 Merriweather Post Pavilion Columbia, MD, USA  –  Find tickets Add time Tickets Add time Add times
• Sep 10 2024 Budweiser Stage Toronto, ON, Canada  –  Find tickets Add time Tickets Add time Add times
• Sep 11 2024 Budweiser Stage Toronto, ON, Canada  –  Find tickets Add time Tickets Add time Add times
• Sep 14 2024 Forest Hills Stadium Queens, NY, USA  –  Find tickets Doors 5:30 PM  –  Scheduled: 6:30 PM Tickets 5:30 PM 6:30 PM
• Sep 15 2024 Forest Hills Stadium Queens, NY, USA  –  Find tickets Doors 5:30 PM  –  Scheduled: 6:30 PM Tickets 5:30 PM 6:30 PM
• Sep 28 2024 Oceans Calling 2024 Ocean City, MD, USA  –  Find tickets Add time  –  Scheduled: 9:30 PM Tickets Add time Add times 9:30 PM
• Sep 29 2024 Evolution Festival 2024 St. Louis, MO, USA Add time Add time Add times
• Oct 03 2024 Estadio 3 de Marzo Zapopan, Mexico Add time Add time Add times
• Oct 05 2024 Foro Sol Mexico City, Mexico Add time Add time Add times
• Oct 06 2024 Foro Sol Mexico City, Mexico Add time Add time Add times
• Oct 09 2024 Estadio Banorte Monterrey, Mexico Add time Add time Add times
• Oct 12 2024 Pulso GNP 2024 Santiago de Querétaro, Mexico Add time Add time Add times

The Killers at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas, NV, USA

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• (Where Do I Begin?) Love Story
• Jenny Was a Friend of Mine
• Mr. Brightside
• Smile Like You Mean It
• Somebody Told Me
• All These Things That I've Done
• Andy, You're a Star
• Change Your Mind
• Believe Me Natalie
• Midnight Show
• Everything Will Be Alright

The Killers at TAO Nightclub, Chicago, IL, USA

• When You Were Young
• Read My Mind
• Shot at the Night
• A Little Respect

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Most played songs

• Mr. Brightside ( 1036 )
• Somebody Told Me ( 989 )
• All These Things That I've Done ( 973 )
• Smile Like You Mean It ( 958 )
• When You Were Young ( 920 )

More The Killers statistics

3LAU 408 4GKZ The 502s A Few Good Men Actual Bank Robbers Against the Current AJR The Alarm Michael Aldag Alesso Alice Drive Alien Clouds All Systems Go Kris Allen American Authors American Idol Ensemble Another Day Dawns Rick Astley Over Atlantic The Atoms The Audacity Audio Drones Audiophile August Hotel Avarice Back to the 80s, 90s & 00s The Backfires The Baltics The Barons Barricades Barrioke The Baseballs Bayside Beartooth Beeba Belfast Ukulele Jam Ben Monteith Berg! Berg! Bang!!! Banda Betamax Better Oblivion Community Center Between Heaven and Earth beware of leopards Beyond the Sun Biffy Clyro Aidan Bissett Black Cat black midi, New Road Black Suit Youth Black Tie Stereo

Showing only 50 most recent

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Artists covered

[traditional] The Alarm Alphaville America Arcade Fire Iggy Azalea The Beach Boys The Beatles Irving Berlin Chuck Berry Black Blondie David Bowie Jimmy Buffett Robert Burns J.J. Cale Alex Cameron Steve Carlisle The Cars The Church Bruce Cockburn Creedence Clearwater Revival Crowded House The Cure John Denver Dire Straits Fats Domino Bob Dylan Echo & the Bunnymen Erasure Gloria Estefan Eurythmics Fleet Foxes Fleetwood Mac The Gaslight Anthem Larry Gatlin & the Gatlin Brothers Band Cyndi Grecco Leigh Harline Charles Hart Mildred J. Hill & Patty Hill Icehouse Interpol INXS Tommy James & the Shondells John Cougar Mellencamp Elton John Journey Joy Division Kaiser Chiefs John Kander

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19,978 people have seen The Killers live.

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The killers announce hometown residency to celebrate "hot fuss", tour update, marquee memories: foster the people.

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Dave Bautista’s 'The Killer’s Game' movie set to advertise major match at WWE Bash in Berlin: Reports

Dave Bautista stands among the elite few who have achieved significant success in Hollywood following a career in wrestling, alongside John Cena and The Rock . After enjoying his blockbuster movie Dune: Part Two , fans eagerly await his next project, The Killer’s Game . Having said that, the latest reports suggest that the movie will be advertised during a major match at the upcoming WWE Bash in Berlin PLE.

According to WrestleVotes , Dave Bautista ‘s next movie, The Killer’s Game , will be the presenting sponsor for a special match. That match is none other than the uniquely stipulated strap match between CM Punk and Drew McIntyre . For those unaware, The Scottish Warrior has a supporting role in this film. The movie is set to be released on September 13th.

The movie centers around a top hitman, played by Bautista, who is diagnosed with a terminal illness. Saddened by this, he decides to take matters into his own hands and puts a hit out on himself. However, when the hired hitmen attempt to target his ex-girlfriend as well, he decides to fend off every enemy and win back the love of his life. Recently, McIntyre shared a post with The Animal on X, preparing for media day.

“The Killers Game,” a new @Lionsgate film starring Dave Bautista, will be the presenting sponsor of the Strap Match between CM Punk and Drew McIntyre at this weekend’s Bash at Berlin. McIntyre has a supporting role in the film, releasing on September 13th. — WrestleVotes (@WrestleVotes) August 29, 2024

The former WWE Champion has developed a bloodthirsty rivalry with CM Punk . Even after defeating him at SummerSlam, he left no opportunity to torment The Best in the World by keeping his family bracelet in his possession . On August 31, both stars will face each other again in a strap match. It will be intriguing to see who walks out as the winner at Bash in Berlin .

Dave Bautista talked about his retirement match against Triple H at WrestleMania 35

Dave Bautista wrestled his last match against his mentor, Triple H , at WrestleMania 35. The Animal turned heel after attacking Ric Flair , which enraged Hunter. The 14-time world champion then challenged him to a No Holds Barred match. Recently, Batista disclosed whether he knew he would retire after that match or not.

While speaking with Chris Van Vliet , the 55-year-old legend shared that he wanted to retire exactly the way he did. Bautista admitted that he didn’t want to give a big retirement speech and knew he was done once the match was over. The former World Heavyweight Champion was pleased with the match because he had the opportunity to choose the ending he wanted.

I just didn't tell anybody else, because I didn't want it to be a big ordeal. I didn't want to go out and do the tour and give a speech. I wanted to have my match and I wanted to call it a career... so I wanted to go out on my own terms and I did, with the guy I wanted to go out with. Dave Bautista during interview with Chris Van Vliet

The Animal admitted that he missed wrestling every day and had been tempted many times to return to the ring while listening to his theme song. However, his response made it clear to the WWE Universe that his wrestling days are far behind him.

This article first appeared on FirstSportz and was syndicated with permission.

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Natural Born Killers at 30: The Making of a Misunderstood Masterpiece

Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis, and more recall the set of Oliver Stone's explosive film.

THE FINAL SCENE

1993. A clearing in the woods near Chicago, sun shining, puffy clouds. Robert Downey Jr. , twenty-seven years old, just a few months past his Best Actor Academy Award nomination for Chaplin , has been high or drunk or asleep for much of the last two months while filming this wild serial-killer movie. Today he has dipped one of the front tails of his white button-down shirt in fake blood and pulled it through the unzipped fly of his suit pants, like a bloody phallus.

“Oh come on—that’s too much! You’re going too far, Robert.”

Oliver Stone , the director of the movie—now on its fifty-fifth of fifty-six days of filming—has won two directing Oscars. He is hollering in his gravelly, perpetually annoyed voice across the clearing at Downey, who opens his mouth to try to explain but is cut off.

“You’re ruining my movie! Forget the dumb dick idea. This isn’t…” Stone trails off, grumbling. “This isn’t some slapstick bullshit.”

Downey shrugs at his costar Woody Harrelson , who smirks. Harrelson is bald, having shaved his head two weeks ago on camera after Stone declared that his character, a serial killer, should shave his head while in prison. (It was the first time in his life Harrelson had cut off all his famous blond hair.) Stone had known Harrelson from his work on Cheers , the sitcom in which he played a corn-fed, slow-witted bartender, before casting him as a killer—but Stone did know that Harrelson’s father was a convicted hitman (he murdered a federal judge), and when he looked at Harrelson, the director claimed he could see “murder in his eyes.”

Juliette Lewis, just twenty years old, stands nearby, holding a shotgun. In this scene, Harrelson and Lewis, as Mickey and Mallory Knox—lovers who kill more than fifty people in a cross-country spree—have escaped from prison during a riot. They have a hostage, Downey, in the character of Wayne Gale, a rapacious tabloid-television journalist chasing the biggest story of his life.

Natural Born Killers would appear in theaters in the summer of 1994, just as the twenty-four-hour news cycle was tightening its stranglehold on American life. CNN came on the air June 1, 1980, and over the next decade it would create a constant and insatiable desire for instant information—a desire it would then feed, ensuring its own existence. In 1982 the network unveiled CNN2, later renamed Headline News, a circadian presentation of bite-size stories, and by 1989 “the crawl” appeared along the bottom of the screen (except during commercials), tracking stock prices and later including sports scores and mini-headlines. MTV premiered on August 1, 1981, and its manic, beat-driven, videos—essentially three-minute movies—were redefining the collective attention span.

Meanwhile, and perhaps because of all this, Americans were increasingly interested in watching crime and violence on television. Cops , the vérité-style documentary TV show in which viewers go on ride-alongs with police officers as they bust drug dealers and prostitutes, debuted in March 1989. In 1991, CBS decided to replace its straightforward nightly news program, America Tonight, with a more salacious show called CrimeTime After Primetime .

Crime and violence were everywhere in popular culture. The brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez murdered their parents in Beverly Hills in 1989, and we watched them walk in and out of courtrooms for years. In March 1991, Rodney King was savagely beaten by Los Angeles policemen—the footage captured on a nearby resident’s video camera became shock TV—and the ensuing riots in Los Angeles aired live and on repeat for weeks. In 1992, Joey Buttafuoco pleaded guilty to statutory rape after his seventeen-year-old girlfriend, Amy Fisher, shot his wife, Mary Jo Buttafuoco, in the face.

As Natural Born Killers was being edited, re-edited, sound-mixed, and eventually marketed on billboards featuring Harrelson’s shaved head, more stories made CNN Headline News: Lorena Bobbitt lopped off her husband’s penis while he was sleeping, claiming he abused her, and was found not guilty by reason of insanity. In Waco, Texas, a cult known as the Branch Davidians led by David Koresh , who thought he was Jesus, found itself in a standoff with the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and local police for fifty-one days—seemingly every minute of which was televised, with commercials—before the compound in which Koresh kept his disciples exploded in a ball of flames, killing seventy-six members of the cult, including women and children. Four ATF officers were also killed.

Tonya Harding , the crimp-haired figure skater, was banned for life by the U.S. Figure Skating Association after her ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, hired someone to club the leg of Nancy Kerrigan, a princess-like Harding competitor, disabling Kerrigan.

We wanted juicy stories, but our brains had been trained to grow bored quickly, so we watched each juicy story half-anticipating the next, and the more violent or unsavory it was, the more we (apparently) wanted to see. Then came the O.J. Simpson car chase , when the world watched on live television as a football legend/movie star/sportscaster contemplated suicide while being chased down the freeway by half the LAPD as crowds cheered him on.

It was the apotheosis.

This final scene of Natural Born Killers would represent the American media landscape stripped to its essence. “With this movie, Oliver Stone has got something that still bears reexamination,” Downey says to me in one of our conversations about the movie. Indeed, a reckoning with the movie’s climactic moment, and with the film itself now, thirty years on, seems essential. The forces then being unleashed, and depicted in the movie, have only accelerated in their power and reach in the decades since. “It’s an intelligent film—especially with all the layers that we see now in it,” Juliette Lewis says. Though the term embed typically connoted a journalist reporting with a squadron of fighters in a war, here was the tabloid news reporter embedded with his criminals as they committed their crimes. Mallory—one of the very killers he is reporting on!—is holding the camera, filming him, because his crew has all been murdered. After Gale delivers his sign-off and prepares to continue following the couple as they escape, they inform him that no, that is not the plan.

The plan is that they will kill him off.

This all started several years before when a nerdy former video-store clerk named Quentin Tarantino and his nerd-friend Roger Avary wrote a screenplay. It was a sprawling script, and from it Tarantino had carved the story that became the 1993 movie True Romance , starring Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette and Gary Oldman and Val Kilmer. He mined it further, turning a dream sequence into another stand-alone screenplay, and this one he called Natural Born Killers .

Like most screenplays, it sat moldering, and he was moving on to other projects, starting with a script called Reservoir Dogs . Tarantino didn’t even really like Natural Born Killers , and he gave the rights to his friend Rand Vossler. Vossler did not, Tarantino told friends, have the makings of an auteur, and Tarantino assumed this would be the last he would hear of NBK .

But Vossler aspired to become a director, and he actually tried to get the thing made. He optioned it to a couple of wannabe producers Tarantino knew, Jane Hamsher, who had recently graduated from USC film school, and her producing partner, another USC scrapper named Don Murphy. Hamsher was spunky and could be hotheaded, Murphy was a scatterbrained grump and, between the two of them, they had produced zero movies. But when they worked as a team, somehow each one pushed the other in the right ways.

To make a long, convoluted story only a little less long and convoluted, according to Killer Instinct , a 1997 memoir by Hamsher: Tarantino, feeling hot after the success of Reservoir Dogs , reneged on his free option to Vossler and demanded $10,000, which Murphy and Hamsher coughed up (Hamsher had to borrow from her mother); Tarantino (allegedly) tried to torpedo the project because he kind of hated it and didn’t want someone else making it; a producer named Thom Mount ( Bull Durham , Tequila Sunrise ) heard about the script because he was at the same agency as Tarantino and, according to Murphy, talked up the script to Stone at a dinner party; and Stone eventually read the script and, improbably, decided he wanted to direct it.

Tarantino’s script didn’t dig deep into Mickey and Mallory as people. Stone wanted a love story between two well-developed characters who just happened to enjoy killing people. He was shooting a film called Heaven and Earth in Thailand and didn’t have time to rewrite NBK himself, so he asked Murphy and Hamsher to find a writer to rework Tarantino’s script—another improbable and odd move by Stone, a controlling director known for keeping a tight team.

They knew just the guy—or rather they knew a guy: David Veloz, who had been a year behind them at USC, had no credits to his name, was a devout Mormon, and had recently promised his wife that he would quit writing and they would move out of Los Angeles.

The producers took Veloz to “some crappy vegan krishna restaurant in Culver City,” he says, and offered him the job of rewriting a script for Oliver Stone. Veloz was ecstatic, read the script, and had ideas. “Roger Avary”— Tarantino’s writing partner at the time, who would share the Academy Award as cowriter of Pulp Fiction —“told me later that this whole script was an inserted dream that they thought would fit into True Romance ,” Veloz says. “It was those characters from True Romance having a fever dream about seeing themselves as serial killers. It didn’t feel like a feature film with a beginning, middle, and an end. I thought, Maybe I can give it a structure and emotional poignancy—and a beginning, middle, and end.”

THE SHOOT, FIRST SCENE

The night before the day of the first shoot, Stone was rehearsing some of the main cast, including Downey and Harrelson. Around 9:00 p.m. Stone told Downey he could leave for the night but that he wanted to go over a few more things with Harrelson.

As Downey was leaving, he whispered to Harrelson, “I’ll come find you in an hour.”

This movie was a big break for Harrelson—he was leaping from a sitcom to starring in an Oliver Stone movie—and he wanted to be at his best. And now Downey, at the peak of his party era, wanted to hang out later.

“I thought: That’s. Not. Good, ” Harrelson says. “But I said, ‘Eh…okay?’”

Stone worked with Harrelson for about another hour and then Harrelson went to his hotel room. He drank water and did breathing exercises. He read over his lines for the next day. He was getting “hyper-prepared.”

Ten o’clock came and went.

Ten-thirty.

“Finally, I’m thinking, Man, thank God, I dodged a bullet, ” Harrelson says. He went to sleep.

A little after midnight, Harrelson was woken up by a pounding on his door: “Fucking here’s Downey,” Harrelson says, shaking his head and laughing. “He’s like, You ready to go? And he’s with a guy wearing military garb, who he had just met. The guy opens his coat and he’s got every kind of fucking drug. He’s just ready to rumble. Downey used to go hard. That whole movie—it was a very combustible group of personalities.”

(Downey had already perfected his Steve Dunleavyan Australian accent for the Wayne Gale character. “That night that I wouldn’t let Woody Harrelson sleep before a key scene, I don’t think I broke dialect all night,” Downey says. “And I’m not a Method guy. God bless Woody. I mean, I was an absolute savage. However, we were all young enough that our resilience factor was cubed compared to if we had been middle-aged guys.”)

The first scene shot was the first scene of the movie, and it’s one of the scenes from Tarantino’s script that survived intact: Mickey and Mallory in a diner on a dusty landscape, middle of nowhere. A few rednecks, a waitress, and a cook, most of whom end up dead. Key lime pie is involved.

Juliette Lewis had been working out with Dale Dye, an ex-Marine and sometime actor who had served as a military advisor on Stone’s films going back to Platoon (1986). Stone charged him with training Lewis, chiseling her frame to match Mallory’s tough interior with an almost superpowered physique. “I’m relatively infamous, if you will, for putting actors through a regimen that will shape them up a bit,” Dye says. “So I would go by where she was staying and run her through a regimen that would shape her up in terms of muscle tones, so that it would show on camera.”

By the first day of filming, she and Dye had a good thing going (“a Dutch-uncle relationship,” he says), and she was primed for the fight scene in which Mallory eviscerates several large men with roundhouse kicks and vicious left jabs, all while hip-swiveling to the music on the jukebox.

“Nowadays it’s commonplace for women to do fight sequences, but I do want to go on record: That might have been the first of its kind! To use the left jab,” Lewis says. “I trained extensively for that fight. It was all orchestrated, even how you land it. There’s a lot of technical stuff that goes into it—to make something look fucking wild. And that line, ‘How sexy am I now?’ is all improvised. ‘Are you flirting with me?’ Oliver signed off on all of it. He wanted everything I had to give.”

The fight choreographer was Benny Urquidez, a Zen-like stunt coordinator whom everyone called Benny the Jet. “In nature, if a woman’s baby is in danger, she can lift a car. So that state of mind, where they can draw that kind of power, is where we wanted to take Juliette: to that state of mind where she could lift, throw, and be in that kind of a craze, and it can be believable,” Urquidez says. “Juliette is a great actress, and she became stronger . She pulled it off.”

THE SHOOT, THE SITCOM

One of the movie’s most famous scenes embodies writer David Veloz’s genius: It’s a dream Mickey has of when he first met Mallory, which doubles as a flashback to Mallory’s traumatic childhood. It was written and filmed as a cheesy sitcom called I Love Mallory , with a laugh track. If it’s possible to engender sympathy for a sociopathic serial killer, this scene does it, but the scene also represents one of the movie’s central themes: that television was transforming a generation of people into catatonic, glazed-eyed consumers who were inured to violence.

Rodney Dangerfield, the legendary comedian Stone had seen in the 1986 goofball comedy Back to School , played Mallory’s abusive, filthy father. (“That’s why I cast him—I was a huge fan of Back to School ,” Stone says, smiling at how surprising he knows this sounds. “That’s when I said, He’s perfect for Natural Born Killers .”) Edie McClurg, the supremely gifted character actor, was Mallory’s giggling, enabling, pathetic mother; and Stone’s real-life son, Sean, just nine at the time, played Mallory’s brother, Kevin, made up with Gene Simmons face paint. And there is Lewis, perfectly angelic and awkward in braces, hiding pain behind her eyes. Finally, Harrelson, as Mickey the meat-delivery man, enters to loud canned applause.

It’s an American freak show.

Stone was in the middle of a divorce from his wife, Sean’s mother, and Sean traveled to the set with a babysitter and a French cousin on his mother’s side. “I remember Rodney was so concerned about some of the jokes he had to say—he was looking at my dad like, ‘You sure you want me to say this in front of your son?’” Sean says. “And my dad was like, ‘He doesn’t even know what you’re talking about.’ Which is kind of true. The sexual stuff, the incest.”

During this scene, special-effects makeup head Matthew Mungle recalls, one of the costumers noticed that Dangerfield’s scrotum was visibly hanging out of his boxer shorts. This was a delicate situation, because nobody wanted to humiliate Rodney Dangerfield. The solution they came up with was that Mungle would pretend to touch up Dangerfield’s makeup while the costumer deftly placed a towel on the actor’s lap to hide the testicles. Dangerfield never noticed.

THE SHOOT, CARAVANSERAI

The NBK cast and crew traversed the American southwest for the next few weeks. “The magic of this movie was it was like a traveling caravan. It reminded me very much of the circus,” Lewis says. “Everyone had their various rental cars or vans, and it’d be like, ‘We’re going to Winslow—when are you leaving?’ ‘Six a.m.’ ‘Okay.’”

Stone and first assistant director Herb Gains kept to a tight schedule, which was not always easy, even for a dictator like Stone. There were, according to just about everyone, drugs. “I have to say, it was a zoo in the sense the actors were all on different kind of trips,” Stone says. “I think Woody was the most sane.”

Harrelson laughs about this, knowing his marijuana use is legendary. (He recently opened a dispensary in West Hollywood.) “I will say this, and Oliver reassured me of this: I don’t want to say I was the moral center on this movie, but I was the one doing the least amount of drugs! Which is—it’s never happened in my career or my life. And no one’s ever done more drugs than me, but I was Mother Teresa on this one.”

And Downey? “The only time I was awake”—he can barely talk through his own laughter—“was between Action and Cut.”

Producer Clayton Townsend tried to keep to a tight budget in all of this. One issue there was that Hank Corwin, the editor, was racking up bills. Stone had assembled a team that would allow him to upend the conventions of filmmaking. “I was in a mood,” Stone says. “Let’s use what we know about how fractured the modern mind is, and let’s bring it to this. Bring everything we can throw in the kitchen sink.” His longtime cinematographer, Bob Richardson, at first didn’t want to work on the film. But according to producer Don Murphy, Stone lured him by promising Richardson he could have freedom to make the film visually wild, using multiple film stocks (video, 16mm, whatever he wanted). And Corwin, who came out of the commercial world and had never edited a feature film, had the idea of projected weird images behind the actors—galloping horses, seahorses, bumblebees—an MTV-style effect that made some scenes feel like an acid trip. These projections are known as plates, and Corwin called the ones he envisioned for Mickey and Mallory “psychological plates.” For his work in TV commercials, Corwin was used to buying expensive stock film footage whenever he needed it. But this wasn’t in the NBK budget. Fortunately, when he showed Stone his first version of a scene with these—“it was the sea monsters”—Stone loved it. “But then Clayton walked up to me after,” Corwin says. “I thought he was laughing, but he was so upset he was almost crying, because I had just spent a fortune on all this footage, and this was the first time I’d shown Oliver anything.” The budget was approved.

Stone was hungry for ideas that would add to the innovative look he craved. In the story, Mickey and Mallory end up on a Native American reservation, where an old chief, played by the late Russell Means, helps them. As they listen to him, Corwin and Richardson project the words TOO MUCH TV across their bodies. In the end, Mickey kills the chief, and Mallory unloads on him. “Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad!” she shouts, in what became one of the film’s more haunting scenes.

“That’s improvised,” Lewis says. “If you look at the movie, I repeat phrases. And that was me playing with making a sentence or a word mean several different things. For instance, I say a lot in the film, ‘Do you think I’m pretty? How sexy am I?’ And then also ‘bitch.’ When I say to Rodney Dangerfield when we kill him, ‘You stupid bitch . You stupid bitch’ —it’s her working out traumatic phrases that were said to her and then I’m parroting them back to others. These were things that I came up with to do. And so when I yell, ‘Bad, bad, bad!’ to Woody, they’re like bullets to me. I’m yelling at him like a dog because that’s what was said to me.”

For the pre-climactic scene in which the law—in the form of Tom Sizemore’s cop, Jack Scagnetti, a very bad man—finally corners Mickey and Mallory, location manager Jacolyn Bucksbaum found a cavernous, abandoned big-box store near Albuquerque, New Mexico, to serve as the Drug Zone, a sickly-green pharmacy where Mickey and Mallory seek a snake-bite remedy. (The giant pharmacy bathed in green light was another invention from the mind of David Veloz.) To make the whole store glow green, production designer Victor Kempster and Richardson oversaw the replacement of hundreds of traditional fluorescent lightbulbs with green ones—the only way to create the sickening green light back then.

The screenwriter on any movie is not typically present during the shoot except for a day or two here and there when he or she is invited to the set. Veloz was there for the Drug Zone shoot. “And Oliver is up on a giant ladder, like God,” he remembers. “He’s up above everyone yelling like Napoleon, ‘Action!’ And I’m standing there looking up at him, looking at this thing that I wrote that’s happening . It’s this big, final, wide shot, and he gets down—this plays into all my daddy issues—and he puts his arm around me and says, ‘What do you think? You made this, kid!’ I’m like, Fuck .”

The last bit to film before the crew packed up and headed to Chicago for the third-act prison riot was Mickey getting arrested in front of the Drug Zone after a shootout with the police. Stone took the opportunity to motivate Harrelson by warning him that if any mistakes were made, it would take ninety minutes—an eternity, costly of time and money—to set up the scene again.

“The police come, and I have to run across from one—it’s a checkout counter, and I’m running across and they’re shooting out the windows, the cops. And I jump behind another thing and—anyway, we’re doing that. And I mean, it’s a lot . I was reloading and doing all kinds of shit—it’s all one continuous thing, all happening quickly. And right before, Oliver comes up and gives me a little pep talk. He goes [Harrelson mimics Stone in a quiet, high voice], ‘It’s an hour and a half to reset. Don’t fuck up.’ [Then yells, as Stone] ‘Rolling!’ I’m like, motherf—are you serious? I’m not feeling enough pressure already?”

THE SHOOT, PRISON

Stateville Correctional Facility in Crest Hill, Illinois, opened in 1925 with a layout that remains unique among American maximum-security prisons. At its core sits a large cylindrical building, with four stories of cells around the perimeter, like tiers in an arena. All the cells face a circular ground floor in the middle, and in the center of the floor, like a gladiator in a colosseum, stands a guard tower. They call it F-House.

For the climactic third act of Natural Born Killers , Oliver Stone had several requests for Bucksbaum. First, he needed a prison that would permit a film crew to shoot in the prison for two weeks. He needed to hire actual inmates as extras, essentially playing themselves. And he needed a structure that would allow Richardson and him to shoot from every possible angle, squeezing maximum drama from each frame. For this movie that was unlike anything anyone had ever seen, they wanted to show prison in a way no one had ever imagined.

F-House was perfect.

Bucksbaum negotiated a deal with the Illinois Department of Corrections to film a riot at the prison over a total of about fourteen days. The warden of Stateville, Salvador Godinez, warned her that the moment anything went wrong, production would be shut down immediately. Godinez showed Bucksbaum a suitcase full of all kinds of innocuous-seeming objects that prisoners had turned into shivs and other weapons. Every morning, he told her, every vehicle, cast member, and crew member would enter through a sally port, a secure, windowless, barb-wired vestibule where every piece of equipment would be searched, inventoried, and marked, a process that would be repeated on the way out each night.

Godinez was right to be worried. The third act of the script called for mayhem in the prison: Mickey is in his maximum-security cell. Wayne Gale has been allowed into the prison to conduct a live interview with Mickey. Mallory is zombielike in her cell, and Scagnetti is in the prison to oversee the Knoxes’ transfer to another facility. He is given a tour by the warden, Dwight McClusky (Tommy Lee Jones). During the live TV interview, Mickey takes Wayne as a hostage and goes to find Mallory, whom Scagnetti has been harassing to the point where she headbutts him, breaking his nose. With Mickey and Mallory on the loose and the guards panicking, unrest cascades through Stateville and the prisoners start a massive riot. McClusky is beheaded. Mickey and Mallory blast their way out of the prison with the help of a gentle guard (Arliss Howard).

By the time the prison scenes were filmed, Lewis, who, like Harrelson, appears in nearly every frame of Natural Born Killers , was exhausted. And yet she and Harrelson had reached a transcendent rhythm between them as actors. After grinding through the early killing spree in the first few weeks of shooting, they had achieved a perfect equilibrium, moving almost as one person.

Lewis had taken to going barefoot much of the time. Even in character she was barely wearing makeup, evidence of Mallory’s evolution from awkward teenage misfit to androgynous killing machine who cuts her own hair. She had walking pneumonia and had lost weight. On top of all that, shortly before the movie started Lewis had broken up with Brad Pitt. (“I felt bad for her,” Harrelson says. “I could tell that whole thing really hurt her, and yet here she is. She’s going to work the next day.”)

“When we first did the orientation in the prison, it was me, Sizemore, Downey, Harrelson, Oliver Stone,” Lewis says. “So there is the deep knowledge of, if someone’s going to take a hostage and try to escape, who are they going to take? I know this. There was a very rabid fear in my heart. A pitter-patter. They have gun towers, and you’re walking on the plank right next to open cells, like, ‘Hi, rapist.’”

Bucksbaum, too, felt it. As the location manager, she was there every day. “It was very uncomfortable as a woman working in the prison,” she says. “I wore sunglasses because the guys were not nice, and they would ‘Hoot, hoot!’ and do whatever they do.”

Even Dye, as tough a military man as they come, felt it. “There’s something about a prison. It smells. And you noticed it immediately when you got there,” he says. “Prisoners have a way of communicating with each other. I could hear them singing in this chant-and-response sort of thing. It would travel all around the cell block, and there was something weird and scary about it. You felt, God, I could be attacked from any direction here.”

Stone was determined to use dozens of inmates as paid extras. Stone understood that this would be fun and different for these inmates serving life sentences, to be a part of a movie for a couple of weeks—but that it was not just any movie. It was this movie, a story about the deification of criminals and killers, about a system that profits from glorifying crime, then crams the people convicted of those crimes into dirty cells for the rest of their lives while viewers wait for the next show trial.

“Those are real people in the film,” Stone says. “I recognized several faces of homicidal killers in there, but in our movie they’re having a ball. Look at them having a ball! They’re letting it all out. There was one fellow, an older man who had killed his wife with a pipe, and he had a grin on his face. I used him in a scene with a Black inmate, and they were fighting, and the looks they give each other—all those guys—they really are the real fucking faces! So when you hear Mickey’s interview on the TV, hear him talking about the real life, the urge to purify, to get rid of the cant, the hypocrisy—he’s talking to them . And I think a lot of those guys recognized a bond.”

Many of the inmates at Stateville were, as Harrelson put it, “hardcore.” “It wasn’t like a, you know, held-up-the-grocery-store prison,” he says. By the time Stone had the idea that Mickey should shave his head in prison, Harrelson had a good head of hair and sometimes wore it in a ponytail as Mickey. To see how he would look bald, Matthew Mungle created a skullcap for Harrelson as a test, and they all thought it gave Mickey the appropriate combination of menace and sexual charge. So Harrelson shaved his head on camera—obviously, they had only one take to get it—and after that he felt a bond almost too close. “Every time I’d come in, these guys were yelling down to me from the windows, ‘Fucking skinhead!’ And I started yelling all this shit back, ‘Fuck you, motherfucker!’ I was just in the mindset of Mickey Knox by that point, so I wasn’t probably doing smart stuff. Otherwise, I probably would have just ignored it. But it’s not really in my disposition to ignore being called skinhead and shit. Aryan.”

Arliss Howard, thirty-eight at the time, had recently become a parent. He had worked with Stanley Kubrick on Full Metal Jacket and with Robert Towne on Tequila Sunrise and was always asking Stone a lot of questions. (Kubrick had once told Howard that he should direct movies, which Howard took as a compliment until Kubrick added, “Because then you’ll understand what a pain in the ass you are.”) Stone liked setting up what Howard interpreted as spontaneous improvisational scenes off-camera, and one day early on at Stateville the director pointed to a small man sitting alone at a table and told Howard to go talk to him. “He killed his whole family,” Stone said—he had a way of saying shocking things in an offhand way. The man was balding and had a friendly face and thick glasses. Howard went over and sat next to the man and said hello. Right away Howard could smell the stale, warm scent of prison homebrew on the man’s breath.

Howard fidgeted and stammered out a few small-talk questions before saying, “Oliver says you’re here because you killed your family.” Immediately, the man smiled and said, “Oh no, no. I love my family. I had a wife and two beautiful little girls. Everything I did was for them. I worked a couple of jobs. And one night I fell asleep and another man got up and he walked down the hall, and I watched him.”

“That was all he said about it, man,” Howard says. “The guy had developed a language for living with what he had done.”

On the set, Stone achieved a purposeful chaos, somehow knowing just how wild to let things get while exercising what had become his signature gruff authority. “It was like a precision-executed three-ring circus ballet,” Downey says.

Tommy Lee Jones: “It was certainly under control, and apparently chaotic. But what are the elements of control in cinema? Well, the lens—and it was never in danger, never at sea, and never improvisatory.”

Jones’s performance as Dwight McClusky, the prison warden, was quickly evolving into a piece of performance art. (“I mean, Tommy Lee Jones, dude,” Downey says, shaking his head. He holds his hands in a prayer position in front of his mouth, looking up while he thinks of the perfect words: “He was putting on a clinic in off-the-chain acting.”) The warden was the scariest kind of person: a narcissistic fool with a cruel streak. He is intoxicated by Jack Scagnetti’s fame, and craves for Gale to get him on TV. He cares not a lick about the incarcerated humans in his charge. He dresses as a 70s-era dandy, hair in a bouffant and the thinnest of mustaches.

The look was Jones’s vision, and it started with his instructions to his longtime hairdresser, Cydney Cornell. “At the very beginning of Natural Born Killers , she said, ‘Okay, Tommy Lee, what do you want to look like?’ Referring to the hair. And I said, ‘I think I would like to look like a 1955 Studebaker.’ And she instantly knew what I meant. And off we went to create that hair, the sideburns, the mustache—which wasn’t real, by the way. That pencil-thin, toothbrush mustache is much easier to manufacture and glue on than it is to grow.”

(When Dale Dye, an old friend of Jones’s, first saw his hair, he said, “Oh God, you’re going to go on camera like that?”)

Jones had experienced a maximum-security prison once before—Utah State Prison in Draper—when he played Gary Gilmore in The Executioner’s Song in 1982. He felt comfortable at Stateville—“we’re supposed to be able to do our work no matter what’s going on around us”—and rather than interviewing inmates, he listened and watched. He heard and saw snatches of prison life. As they prepared to film the riot, Jones was walking through a crowd of inmates and passed a skinny Black guy who was talking to a tall white man who wore a white shirt and a necktie. Jones heard only this, from the white man: “No, no, no, man. You threaten me, you’re going to the hole. I’ll see you in one year.”

“It was just one of those conversations,” Jones says. “Neither one of them knew I was listening. It was a small insight, I think, into how life works.”

The riot scene begins when Mickey takes Wayne hostage while hundreds of inmates are watching the interview live on TV throughout the prison. They witness the kidnapping, and then, as Dye put it, “the defecation hit the oscillation.” Dye, in costume as a guard, was in the middle of the prison with stunt coordinator Phil Neilson, dressed as an inmate, the only two non-guards among the “rioting” inmates. They were pumping shotguns and discharging blank shells while inmates threw chairs and fought. Jones and Sizemore walked amidst the riot, doing their dialogue, when a carton of milk flew down from one of the tiers of cells and hit Jones in the face. This was not in the script, but Jones did not break character. When Stone called “Cut,” Jones wasted no time cleaning the milk off his face.

After every take, the prison had to be scoured for blank shells. Stone would call “Cut!” and Dye would oversee the collection of shells. In one section of F-House, for example, Dye had loaded fifteen blanks into modified shotguns. A sweep of the floor yielded only fourteen shells, and Stone couldn’t begin another take until the fifteenth was found. It was a pain in the ass and there were splinters of breakaway chairs and spilled milk and shit everywhere, but this was one of Warden Godinez’s nonnegotiables.

One prison scene that was not filmed at Stateville: The final confrontation between Scagnetti and Mallory in her cell. Mallory was supposed to be sleeping when he arrives, then wake up in a sort of catatonic haze, then violently lunge at the cop. The problem was, when the camera was rolling and Sizemore yelled into the cell, “Rise and shine, Knox!” Lewis didn’t wake up. Stone was told that she was asleep, and he said, “She’s supposed to be asleep!”

No, Oliver, Sizemore said. She’s asleep .

Eventually she came to, and on the next take, she ran at Sizemore and head-butted him in the nose hard. Sizemore bent over and grabbed his nose, which was bleeding a ton—through the prosthetic nose he was already wearing to make his nose look broken. Matthew Mungle: “I push on the foam-latex broken nose and blood just starts seeping out of it. I said, Okay, I think she busted your nose. So I had to peel the latex broken-nose piece off. And we already had a real broken nose there! So we went on shooting. Oliver said, Oh, great, let’s use it!”

It was time for the prison break.

The prelude was Wayne Gale’s live interview with Mickey Knox, a brilliant scene executed by Downey and Harrelson—even though Downey had been out just hours before. “The day that we did the prison interview, I had been out on the town, nine sheets to the wind. And then everything on the schedule got moved up, and suddenly I needed to be there in two hours. To this day, it was one of the most mortifying notifications I’ve ever received, because it was a seven-page scene. I got to set and I was absolutely useless. I was then given a therapeutic injection of ‘B12 vitamins’—I’m just going to put that in quotes, italics, underlined, and question marks on either side. And I have never in my life experienced a more delightful nine hours. But! I looked at the pages left to right, spread out on the floor—only twice —and was off-book. And—it’s the only time this happened during that shoot: You know how sometimes there’s applause from the crew after takes when people are doing movies and really nail it? When I finally got through that day—and Woody nailed it, nailed it, nailed it—then they had to turn around on me. The entire crew applauded because I think intuitively they know that I should not have even been anywhere but an emergency room that morning.”

Mungle had crafted a perfect replica of Jones’s Studebaker-styled head, which was placed on a stake and held aloft by the inmates like the Olympic torch. Arliss Howard, as a kind of guardian angel in the form of a prison guard, was leading Harrelson and Lewis through the riot, his affect calm and his word gentle. Harrelson held Downey as a hostage. This is the climax of Tarantino’s satire, the moment when the maniacs take charge, looking saner than anyone in sight.

THE FINAL SCENE, PART 2

After the riot, in the small clearing under the puffy clouds, Downey, as Gale, is begging the couple not to murder him. (“This is not about you , you egomaniac,” Mickey says in response, almost apologizing, patting Gale on the cheek. “I kinda like you.”) But this is Stone’s warning. In its bloodthirsty pursuit of the story, the media has literally freed the jailed killers. The story has superseded the rule of law, the United States of America has become an asylum run by the inmates, and the culpability lies with a bewildered media represented brilliantly by Downey.

Downey is sober today, a first for him on this shoot. He has been pretty well bombed out of his mind for most of the filming, but today he is clear-eyed and rested. This is the last scene of the movie, his execution, and he is ready. He pulls the bloody shirttail back through his fly and zips up his pants.

“Wait, wait—wait a second,” Stone is saying now. “Let me see the dick thing again.”

Downey’s famous elastic eyebrows go up, his eyes wide. Okay, his face says. He yanks the bloody shirt-tail through his fly again. Stone stares, hand on his chin. Everyone’s looking at him—Harrelson, Lewis, Downey, Richardson. At forty-seven, Stone had already directed half a dozen films that would establish him as one of the great filmmakers of the twentieth century: Platoon. Wall Street. Born on the Fourth of July. The Doors. Salvador. JFK . Highly original movies whose brilliance could be found around their edges, in the jolts of electricity that Stone brought to his storytelling. He had found a way to make blockbuster hits for major studios with movies that somehow felt personal, even scrappy.

Finally, Stone says: “Pull it back a half inch.”

Downey obeys, reaching into his pants and tugging the front tail back in a bit. Stone nods.

“All right. Let’s go.”

And for a brief second in the final scene of Natural Born Killers (filmed the same month as the Lorena Bobbitt news), you can see Downey’s joke in the form of a twisted, bloody root sticking out of Wayne Gale’s fly.

Filmed, as the entire movie was, in the kinetic, jump-cut style pioneered by thousands of music videos on MTV, the scene was also reflective of the increasing prevalence of handheld video footage captured by civilians, a fascination that showed itself in Stone’s masterful use of the Abraham Zapruder film in JFK and that is magnified at the end of NBK by clips of the Rodney King beating. In this final scene, of Gale’s execution, we watch much of the action through Gale’s own camera, first as Mallory shoulders it like a bazooka aimed at Gale, and later through its viewfinder as it sits on the ground, tossed off by the killers, still recording as they fill Gale’s body with bullets and walk out of the frame.

It’s as if Stone, one of the defining directors of his time, is saying, “Fuck it,” dropping his camera in the dirt.

THE AFTERMATH

Bob Daly and Terry Semel, the co-chairmen of Warner Bros., the studio financing the film, were, according to Stone, “kind of steamed” after they saw the first screening of the film, before it was released. Stone was represented by Mike Ovitz, the head agent at CAA, and the Warner guys complained to Ovitz that they were promised the film would have an R rating, not NC-17, and that there was no way the movie in its current incarnation would get an R. This pitted Stone against the Motion Picture Association of America, which confers movie ratings.

“It broke my heart because they were cutting so much, and at one point we reached this level where I couldn’t go on. I was just cutting it, trying to make them happy,” Stone says. “But really what upset them was the chaos. I said, You’re not objecting to anything physically that’s so grotesque. It’s about the chaos, and the idea of chaos—that’s what you’re objecting to.”

Warner Bros. got its R rating and Natural Born Killers was released on August 26, 1994. It was the largest opening of Stone’s career and it grossed $110 million on a budget of $34 million—a huge amount of money at that time.

The outcry over Natural Born Killers was immediate and loud, and controversy would surround it for years. For example:

Dear Friend,

I just watched all I could stand of “Natural Born Killers.”

It’s about two young people becoming celebrities by committing a series of murders.

I kept thinking, with our streets under siege and our values decaying, why would anyone make a movie in which the heroes are twisted lovers on a killing binge?

Do you agree?

Are you tired of movies and songs “glamorizing” rape, murder and drug abuse?

As I campaign for President, violence and sex in entertainment is what parents and grandparents talk of most. They are tired of movies and music oozing blood and sex.

But, too many of those who profit from these movies and songs claim their products are not part of the problem—that they are not influential to our young.

That is conveniently self-serving and horribly wrong.

That’s a campaign fundraising letter sent by Bob Dole to his supporters in 1996 . Dole would later confirm that he never watched the whole movie (presumably contributing to his missing the point spectacularly).

In March 1995, seven months after its release, a couple from Oklahoma, nineteen-year-old Sarah Edmondson and her eighteen-year-old boyfriend, Benjamin Darras, dropped acid, watched the movie, and shot a convenience-store clerk, paralyzing her, and a cotton-gin manager, killing him. Edmondson told police, “It was as if [Darras] was fantasizing from the movie.” (But a year later, she told Vanity Fair , “It is not as great as I would like to make it be. I wish I could point the finger at Hollywood completely.”)

The cotton-gin manager turned out be a friend of John Grisham’s, and Grisham—the prolific and wealthy author of legal thrillers—lambasted the movie in an essay in The Oxford American , the literary journal he financially backed. “Think of a movie as a product, something created and brought to market, not too dissimilar from…Ford Pintos,” Grisham wrote. “If something goes wrong with the product, whether by design or defect, and injury ensues, its makers are held responsible.” In a subsequent lawsuit brought against Warner Bros. and Stone by the convenience-store clerk, Stone was deposed twice. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case and it was ultimately dismissed.

“It was a joke,” Stone tells me. “If they had allowed this suit to go through, it would mean, frankly, that all film, all television, is subject to the same violation that damages are provisions of any commercial product. It’s like if a vacuum cleaner blows up in your face—it’s the same thing. You’re saying a movie is a product with commercial liability. Can you say that? I don’t think so. Because what if you say, ‘This Beethoven sonata drove me nuts and I had to kill my wife’?”

There is an argument to be made that Natural Born Killers is the most misunderstood mainstream movie ever released. “Oliver Stone is a director who, barring Nolan and maybe a few others, is the highest embodiment of social commentary via cinema,” Downey says. “Oliver Stone has never made a movie that wasn’t saying something. Never.” Its violence is not stylized to be seductive, rather it is a grotesque and cartoonish rendering of the banal mayhem we were devouring on cable television. It was an incendiary critique of a culture in which the media had glorified violence and violent criminals—yet the film itself was wrongly vilified for doing the same thing. One of the reasons Natural Born Killers exists is to caution us. To caution the media against “being so simple-minded,” as Stone says, trafficking more and more in violence and crime. And to caution ourselves against giving in to our rankest obsessions, temptations, and fascinations.

It is also very funny, full of humor so dark it’s easy to miss that the joke is on us.

“I don’t know why it gets such grief,” Woody Harrelson says to me. “It’s a fucking comedy! It’s a romantic comedy, to be specific.”

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James Bay shares new single ‘Easy Distraction’, co-written by The Killers’ Brandon Flowers

"It was an unbelievable experience and insight into writing with one of my heroes"

James Bay has shared a new single co-written by The Killers frontman Brandon Flowers – listen to ‘Easy Distraction’ below.

The collaborative, upbeat guitar anthem serves as the second preview of Bay’s fourth studio album ‘Changes All The Time’ , which is out on September 20 via Mercury/EMI ( pre-order here ).

• READ MORE:  James Bay – ‘Leap’ review: self-assured songs about satisfaction 

“ For every mistake, I’ll give you my hand/ Just promise to hold it wherever we land ,” the musician sings in the soaring track’s breakdown before it builds up to a reverb-drenched solo.

“The song is about realising too late that someone means so much to you, but you still want to show them and let them know,” Bay explained. “It’s exploring how, in the face of adversity we can still reach out, we can still connect.”

As for working with Flowers, the artist said: “I found out from a mutual friend that Brandon was interested in writing with newer artists, so I jumped at the chance and went to work with him in Park City, Utah over in America.

“It was an unbelievable experience and insight into writing with one of my heroes. I hope we get to do more!”

Watch the official lyric video here:

Recommended

Bay has called The Killers “one of his biggest inspirations”, with ‘Easy Distraction’ marking his first collaboration with Flowers.

The new team-up appears to have been in the works for some time. Speaking to NME in 2020 , Bay explained: “[Flowers] invited me into the studio and we wrote and demoed a song.”

He added: “The insight I got from working with him was incredible, and to be in his presence watching him work and write music the way he does is something I’ll never forget. He is a consummate pro and deserves the legendary status he already has.

“I brought a melody to our session and he said, ‘Fuck, it’s like a straight-up Beatles melody right there’. I was like ‘OK, so Brandon Flowers is comparing a melody I wrote to The Beatles’ – it was surreal! It was a very cool moment.”

The lead single from the forthcoming ‘Changes All The Time’ arrived last month in the form of ‘Up All Night’ , featuring Noah Kahan  and  The Lumineers . Bay’s previous album, ‘Leap’ , was released in 2022.

The singer-songwriter is due to embark on a UK and Ireland headline tour next February. See the full list of dates below, and find any remaining tickets here .

James Bay’s 2025 UK and Ireland tour dates are:

FEBRUARY 01 – O2 Academy, Glasgow 04 – O2 City Hall, Newcastle 05 – O2 Academy, Leeds 07 – O2 Apollo, Manchester 08 – O2 Academy, Birmingham 10 – 3Olympia, Dublin 13 – OVO Arena Wembley, London

In other news, The Killers are currently in Las Vegas for their ‘Hot Fuss’ 20th anniversary residency . The band released a euphoric new single called ‘Bright Lights’ earlier this month.

• Related Topics
• Brandon Flowers
• The Killers

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