SIFF Interview – William Friedkin/Emile Hirsch – Killer Joe

August 15th, 2012 | POSTED BY Spencer Fornaciari

WF: I don’t care. I honestly don’t. We all hope that every film we make is successful with the public, but there’s no guarantee of that, so you’re attracted like a magnet to certain material.

EH: Absolutely. I completely agree with Billy. As long as it’s NC-17 and not triple-X!

WF: Well, they’ve gotten rid of the X. NC-17 is the new X. It has the same effect as an X rating. It’s just a fancier nomenclature.

EH: Which is kind of strange, if you think about NC-17. Because when you’re 17, you’re still not legally an adult.

WF: But this means that no child can come in. Nobody 16, let’s say, even with a 17-year-old.

EH: But if you’re 17, you can, though!

TF: NC-17, you have to be 18. R, you can go if you’re 17.

SF: But doesn’t it say “Under 17”?

WF: “No child under 17” is what an “NC-17” literally means.

EH: So there’s a one-year window for 17-year-olds.

WF: It’s complete bullshit. It has no legal standing whatsoever. The MPAA is a self-governing body. If a 13-year-old gets into see the movie — and we’re not targeting 13-year-olds with this picture — but if they get in, nobody’s gonna get arrested or charged or anything else. Nobody knows, as I’ve said, who these people are on the ratings board. Do any of you guys have kids?

TH: No. Our friends do.

WF: Okay. I’m sure your friends know who their teachers are, who the school board members are, who the principal of the school is. You know who the mayor is, you know who the governor of this state is, so you know where the laws come from. We don’t know! I’ve been in this business 45 years. I don’t know who the hell the ratings board are. They’re an anonymous group of people sitting somewhere in a room deciding on what parents may or may not do with their kids.

TF: I think the worst part is that the theaters don’t…theaters are still nervous to play unrated movies or NC-17 movies, and I think if they all just agreed that that was okay, the stigma would go away, but they don’t.

WF: Some do. Some don’t give a damn about the rating. Others do, for other reasons, like the Regal theaters are owned by a very prominent billionare named Philip Anschutz, who is sort of a right-wing, born again Christian, and there are a number of theaters that won’t play an NC-17 for those reasons. Some don’t even play an R, if it’s like a hard R. But you can’t name a major studio film that gets an NC-17 because the MPAA is owned and operated by the major studios, and what they do is behind closed doors, they will shave out some frames of what has been shot and cut in order to pay homage or satisfy the ratings board so they get an R.

TF: And it’s like, what’s the difference between six frames and five frames?

WF: None.

SF: It’s not even that that bothers me! It’s like, violence, they’ll let you go to town as long as you don’t see people bleeding.

WF: They were bothered by the violence in Killer Joe. Seriously bothered by.

SF: But it’s like, you say “shit” twice and you go from a PG-13 to an R.

WF: They don’t have that as a written rule. There’s no book! I’ll tell you very honestly. If there was a guide, like there are laws, you know, when you get in your car and drive, you have to follow certain laws, and they’re written out. You know what they are. You know what the speed limit is, you know you have to stop at a stop sign, you know you have to signal left turn, right turn, whatever it is. These are written down. If you break those laws and get busted, you get to pay a fine. That doesn’t exist in the ratings. If such a thing existed, and I thought it applied to Killer Joe, I never would’ve made the film. Nor would the financiers have backed it, nor would anyone have distributed it. Why would you do such a thing? We never imagined it would get an NC-17, but frankly, I don’t care, because I have no respect for the ratings board. It is a draconian rating, there’s no question about that, but I don’t respect what they do. I think it’s a shuck, you know? It’s a shuck and jive, and people pay attention to it for some reason I don’t understand. At the same time, do I think that this film should be seen by a lot of 13-year-olds? To some extent, yes. There’s a lot of people 50 and over that shouldn’t see it. There’s a lot of people who will see it and think we’re all misogynists for making it. They’re just wrong. They’re just absolutely wrong.

TF: I do think it’s interesting, because they were saying at one point that when you go before the ratings board, you would be able to cite precedent, you would be able to cite another film that got a certain rating that as evidence that your film should be able to get the same rating.

WF: That’s what they always do, when you get a severe rating. It’s done with the R mostly, because there are very few NC-17 films anymore, but you do cite precedent. I didn’t go to the ratings board on the appeal, but the distributor did, and Tracy Letts did, and it didn’t help for them to say that The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo shows a long scene of anal rape, and then the violent retribution that takes place afterwards, which got an R rating.

TF: Yeah, that’s exactly my point! They said that, and it doesn’t even apply. I was thinking of a documentary, I think it was called The Hip Hop Project. It had 17 f-bombs in it, but it was “socially relevant,” so they gave it a PG-13.

WF: That’s bullshit! Socially relevant? To who? To an anonymous group of people you don’t know. If you had a son or a daughter, and their teacher told them, “You know, it would be a good idea if someone went out and killed the President,” and this child came home and said that to you, you’d be outraged! You’d be shocked, and you’d know where it came from. If someone said, your child should not be reading things like Henry Miller’s novels, or even try to read James Joyce, even though they’re considered classics, you’d know who said that to your child, and you’d make the decision whether they should read this stuff or not. But you don’t know who the ratings board is, or what they recommend that you do or don’t do. You have no idea. So why would you pay any attention to it? But people do.

TH: I was gonna say, one of the things that I loved about Killer Joe was the use, or the lack of background music during the scenes, which adds a lot of tension to it. I remember when I first saw The French Connection, during that whole chase scene, there’s really no music, it’s just tires and screeching, and you can hear the train, and I love the fact that you do that with your films. Sometimes I’ll watch a movie, and it’ll be a great scene, and all of a sudden, here comes this goofy music in the background.

WF: Well, that’s the director’s attempt to tell you how you should feel emotionally, and I don’t think it’s necessary. I think that’s done by the script or the actors. I don’t feel you need to guide people’s emotions with music, although there are many great scores in films, like Citizen Kane. It’s a fantastic score. It pretty much tells you how to think about the scene. It pretty much tells you where your emotions should be, but it works. There are exceptions, and that’s one of them. There’s another film called All About Eve, where the score is just magnificent.

(Cont.)

Pages: 1 2 3 4

Citizen Kane, Emile Hirsch, Gina Gershon, Juno Temple, Killer Joe, Matthew McConaughey, Orson Welles, The French Connection, Thomas Haden Church, Tracy Letts, William Friedkin