Quentin Tarantino is a filmmaker who has always stuck to his guns, creating films almost for his own amusement, without a second thought to how mainstream audiences will react. It is no surprise, then, that the few moments in which he didn't have complete control over his work form some major regrets for the filmmaker.

Tarantino had to make some tough calls to get his first feature, Reservoir Dogs, off the ground in the early '90s. Working with a shoestring budget and little backing as a then-unknown director, he ended up funding much of it himself - selling off anything he could, including the screenplays for True Romance and Natural Born Killers.

Initially, Don Murphy and Jane Hamsher, who bought the Natural Born Killers script, planned to recruit Tarantino to direct the film, but that never quite worked out. Instead, veteran director Oliver Stone approached the pair with a desire to direct the film, but that decision changed the dynamic of the project entirely. After all, Tarantino's original script was, as you would expect, subversive, ambiguous, and graphically violent, whereas Stone was chasing a greater degree of mass appeal.

Of course, Natural Born Killers remained an incredibly violent film - controversially so, in fact - but the extensive rewrites done by Stone and the production team removed a lot of the nuance and interpretability of Tarantino's original. Inevitably, the director was outraged at the bastardisation of his original work, and promptly disowned the film entirely, going so far as to delay the release of his 1994 masterpiece Pulp Fiction to avoid having a similar release time to Natural Born Killers.

"I didn't want to go head to head with Natural Born Killers, "because I didn't want the two films compared," Tarantino shared in a 1994 interview with The LA Times. Seemingly, Tarantino's main quandary with Stone's approach to the film was his lack of subtlety. "Oliver basically took my script very seriously, which, as dark as it was, was also pretty playful," he continued.

"I like audiences to make up their own minds, but Oliver Stone has to get the big idea across, and if one person doesn't get it, he thinks he's failed."

Tarantino concluded, "I would rather the film never got made and that my script remained pure".

Years later, the director attempted to publish his own, original script for the film, although it was met with a lawsuit from the rights owners, claiming that he had forfeited all publishing rights when he sold the project off. Still, it sounds as if Natural Born Killers is among Tarantino's most hated films, even though he has routinely claimed never to have seen it all the way through.

Although the film remains a deep regret for the director, it is worth noting that his directorial masterpiece Reservoir Dogs might never have come to fruition if it weren't for the sacrifice of Natural Born Killers. Sure, it would have been interesting to see how the film would differ if Tarantino had been in the directing chair, but, in the end, it's a small price to pay for a film as iconic and beloved as that 1992 classic.