“If we’re following this young girl’s point of view, I just felt like it really made it more universal to walk that line and make it for anyone under 13,” he said. They just aren’t.”įor Tillman, whose previous films like “Soul Food” and “Men of Honor” have been mostly rated R, reaching a general audience was paramount. “I would love kids to be living in a PG-13 world. Burnham refused to cut his film for a wider audience: “I just wanted to portray the way kids’ lives are,” he told Variety in July. slapped the junior-high dramedy with an R rating for strong language, though its curse words would hardly scandalize teenagers.
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A different, less penalized expletive wouldn’t work either: “The audience that was familiar with Tupac and his philosophy would think, ‘Oh, they’re just trying to make it mainstream,’” Tillman said.Īnother filmmaker, Bo Burnham, faced a similar dilemma this year with his movie “Eighth Grade.” The M.P.A.A. “I felt like if I didn’t say what Tupac was trying to say, it would not feel authentic,” the director said. And given that two crucial scenes in “The Hate U Give” require Shakur’s “THUG LIFE” concept to be explained in full, there were no easy write-arounds. “They watch adult films, they get things very quickly, and they’re very sophisticated.” But that posed its own problem: If Tillman tried to sanitize the language, his target audience would know. “Young kids today are very smart,” Tillman said.