Using The F-Word In Movies

I don't know why, but I think this is funny.

How Movies Get "R" Ratings

I rented the movie Annapolis. Watched it yesterday. (It's not that good.)

While I was spending about 6 hours in the kitchen trying my hand at some new recipes today, I decided to replay that and another movie (Breach... really good movie) -- only this time with the director's commentary "on".

So I was really just listening while I was cooking, rather than actually re-watching the movies. (You can usually learn some fairly interesting stuff about movie making this way.)

Anyway... the only interesting thing I took away from the Annapolis director's cut was this:

If you want to keep your movie PG-13, you can only have one (1) F-bomb in it. Any more than that, and they bump you up to an R rating. BUT... if you precede your F-bomb with the word "mother", then you automatically get an R rating!

In the end, Annapolis had NO F words in it. But not by their (the writer and director's) choice.

It went something like this...

From the start the director (Justin Lin) and the writer (Dave Collard) knew they wanted their movie to be rated PG-13. They also knew they wanted to take advantage of their one opportunity to use the F-word at the most pertinent point in the movie (...about a third of the way into the movie).

They spent several months filming. And the actors were even vying to be "the one" who got to use the F-bomb in this movie. After filming, and then after editing, they run the movie by the big wigs in the movie industry and it comes back with an R-rating.

...But they didn't want an R-rating!

Justin's take on the day they filmed the F-bomb:

This was a big day for us. Cuz he [Wilmer] was going to drop it. And it was a mother F-bomb. And I thought... this is good... we earned it... we appropriately put it in the movie. You know, it's motivating. Then we edit the movie. It goes to the MPA and comes back Rated R. They said, 'You can't F your mother.' So, we lost. In the final cut, you just hear ...Mother!"

I guess at this point it was too late in the process to do a re-shoot. So, as a result, they have this one really tough guy shouting "mother!" in the midst of a fight and no F-bombs to be found anywhere in the movie.

Boy were they bummed...