Christopher Nolan Talks About Changes He Made To 'The Dark Knight' To Keep Its PG-13 Rating
Interview with Christopher Nolan
Transcript
00:00 How did you decide, okay, we're going to go R on this one?
00:03 What, what, what, what the decision came to that?
00:05 - I mean, the decision, I suppose the key thing to answer
00:09 in that question is that the decision was made
00:11 at script stage.
00:12 - Interesting.
00:13 - And when we approached Universal about making the film,
00:17 it was very clear.
00:18 We said, okay, it's going to be an R-rated film.
00:22 Very often with different genres, you know,
00:24 when we were making the Dark Knight, for example.
00:26 - Which feels like an R-rated movie.
00:28 - It does, and you know, there was a certain amount
00:31 of negotiation and editing that had to happen
00:35 to secure the PG-13 rating, as is often the case
00:38 with films that are edgy PG-13 films.
00:42 And that's an area that I've been working in for years.
00:46 But those are films that you go into with the studio
00:48 knowing full well that that's the rating you're aiming for.
00:51 You're aiming for that audience, that breadth of audience.
00:53 And so you have to change things to make it work.
00:58 And you have to get clever about how you do things
01:00 and, you know, how you present violence
01:03 in the action scenes.
01:04 - Like the pencil, you just like see it, yeah, yeah.
01:07 - Yeah, exactly.
01:09 Things by implication, not red blood squibs,
01:12 just gray dust squibs, things like that.
01:14 There are all kinds of things that you're doing all along.
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