Wes Craven, filmmaker

"I'm very disappointed with Cursed. The contract called for us to make an R-rated film. We did. It was a very difficult process. Then it was basically taken away from us and cut to PG-13 and ruined. It was two years of very difficult work and almost 100 days of shooting of various versions. Then at the very end, it was chopped up and the studio thought they could make more with a PG-13 movie, and trashed it. We were writing while we were shooting. It wasn't ready to film. We rewrote, recast and had two major reshoots. It went on and on and on." – E-Splatter, US, circa 2005.

The studio in question is Dimension Films, a subsidiary of Miramax. This studio has a long history of mangling properties, both its own (Kill Bill) and those imported from overseas (anything by Peter Jackson or Jackie Chan). While I'm not a fan of Wes Craven's output by any means, he is one filmmaker who does speak out against censorship and studio interference. Others such as Ridley Scott and Quentin Tarantino just bend over, take the jack hammering, and say thank you. It seems that for Cursed, the studio is actually in breach of contract. Paul Verhoeven (Robocop, Total Recall, Showgirls) packed his bags and returned to Europe in disgust after getting fed up with the US studio system and its no-compromise dependance on a flawed ratings mechanism to ensure box office revenue at the expense of artistic integrity.

[Added 26/6/2005]

Larry Clark, filmmaker

"It'll keep us out of a lot of venues, sure. When we did Kids, we broke new ground. We got in the malls and the theater chains – they'd never played an unrated movie before. So you have to struggle. The MPAA says, 'You don't have to take the rating if you don't want it.' But if you don't get the rating, you can't play in most of the theaters. You can do NC-17, but no one's going to play an NC-17 movie. Unrated is better than NC-17. A movie can play in more theaters that way. I was trying to get an R, so I shot it that way. If you show male frontal nudity, you never get an R. My old girlfriends are always calling me up and complaining: 'You never have any frontal nudity. You never show 'the gun' – the penis.' I tell 'em, in my next movie, Ken Park, there'll be more penises than you guys can swallow. But in Bully, I didn't even shoot [male frontal nudity] because I was supposed to have an R rating. Fortunately, [the folks at] Lions Gate [which produced the film] are such good people that they're releasing it as is. Fuck the MPAA." – The Salon, US, 20/7/2001.

In an interview, filmmaker and vanguard photographer Larry Clark discusses the commercial minefield that he had to negotiate when releasing films theatrically in the USA. This is a very common problem that continues to affect mainstream movies today. While Bully received an R rating uncut in Australia, Ken Park was banned because it was too sexual for the R rating and too violent for the X rating. Actually, no violence or abusive language is allow at all in the X rating, which now embodies the Non-Violent Erotica (NVE) proposal but maintains the old X label. A leopard can change its spots.

Clark also indicates that if he was aiming for an unrated US release all along, there may have been full frontal male nudity in the movie. Ironically, the distributor, Lion's Gate, may not have picked up the project at all if Clark insisted on making a film that was too explicit for the R rating. He eventually did this with Ken Park.

[Added 27/7/2004]

Patrick Stewart, actor

"I don't want to be specific, but I have been involved in sequences both in the theatre and in film which, with hindsight, I realise were offensive because they were perpetuating a stereotype. It's a lazy and sensationalist approach – I condemn it entirely. Violence against women diminishes us all. If you fail to raise your hand in protest you are part of the problem. I condemn utterly films like Kill Bill which we are told are empowering women. But they are apparently empowering women to kill other women which was the message that I took from the film." – BBC News/Film, UK, 9/3/2004.

Get this man a bib, because he is talking utter drivel. Speaking at the launch of Amnesty International's Stop Violence Against Women campaign in London, Patrick Stewart (Captain Pickard in Star Trek: The Next Generation) takes cheap shots at the entertainment industry that made him rich and famous for its lack of social responsibility. Why has he not spoken out about violence against men in movies? Is this OK by him? According to the BBC report, "Stewart, 63, also revealed he witnessed his own father hitting his mother as a child".

This attitude of apportioning blame on the media is dangerous because it takes the focus away from the family crucible where mental illness, financial pressures, personality disorders, emotional baggage, unemployment stress, poor emotional intelligence, an underfunded welfare network, and rampant hormones are the real causes of the kind of domestic violence that Steward himself encountered in the past. Any violent behaviour, in fact. But to censure filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino without citing any supporting evidence trivialises a complex problem and insults the victims themselves. As with all such shallow arguments, the inane corollary is that ending the depiction of violence against women in film would slow down or stop domestic violence.

Even at a basic level, his criticism of Kill Bill – Vol 1 makes no sense. The characters in the film, which goes to great pains to declare itself as pure fantasy, act on motives that are consistent and logical within the narrative. These are all strong female characters, albeit capable of justifying acts of murder and mutilation with their own value systems. They kill both female and male antagonists. One scene that comes to mind features the The Bride (Uma Thurman) slaughtering dozens of male thugs. In two other scenes, a hopeful nerd paramour is disembowelled, while another bloke is decapitated for expressing a racial epithet. The Bride also kills a man who pimped her comatose body in hospital. How Stewart arrived at his reading of this movie boggles the mind.

[Added 9/3/2004]

Sir Anthony Hopkins, actor

"Censorship is tyranny. It is hypocrisy. No one is being forced to see Hannibal." – Bild newspaper, Germany.

In Berlin for the premier of Hannibal, Anthony Hopkins reacts to the news that his film was censored in Italy. Directed by Ridley Scott, Hannibal is based on the novel by Thomas Harris, who also wrote Silence of the Lambs. While the film is less violent than the book, which Stephen King championed in an enthusiastic review, it still contains a number of elaborately shocking set pieces.

[Added 16/10/2003]

John Dickie, Chief Censor 1984 to 1998

"Straw Dogs? I'd think we'd be a bit concerned about the messages from some of the rape scenes, and the depictions in some of the rape scenes... The difficulty in something like that is you have to look very closely at what the elements are, how well made the film was. If it's a well-made film that is being shown overseas, then you'd need to look very closely at it, because we don't want to get to the stage where we can't see things here that are being shown elsewhere." – Australian Penthouse, March 1997, page 32.

Our previous head censor makes two points here: production value is considered when making judgements about borderline material, and ideally a well-made film released overseas should not be banned.

Firstly, the production values or 'budget' (for want of a better term) of a movie should have no bearing on censorship decisions. Action ABC or concept XYZ is exactly the same regardless of whether the film is a Hollywood blockbuster or an underground feature. Over the years, a bias against low budget movies like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and Bad Taste has been mentioned by horror fans as an ongoing problem. This theory does run counter to the fact that hundreds of low budget horror films have been released uncut in Australia, although you do wonder how many of these films would be banned today. Originally rated R, I Spit on Your Grave and Mother's Day are two titles that were banned after an OFLC review. In this quote from Australian Penthouse, John Dickie himself admits that, at least during his tenure, films were treated differently depending on how well they were made.

Secondly, as we all know, every film ever made has been "shown overseas". This statement is a typical example of an Australian censor contradicting himself – being seen to say the right thing with such public statements, while doing the exact opposite in practice. The OFLC guidelines also make these false claims within its preamble. Of course, "shown overseas" is another way of saying a film has received a wide release internationally, therefore indicating a general acceptance by distributors, audiences and foreign censorship authorities.

[Added 12/10/2003]