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How to make a film about teenagers when the more it sounds authentic, the less likely it is that young people can see it?
It was the dilemma faced by George Tillman Jr., who had directed "The Hate U Give". Based on Angie Thomas' bestselling novel for young adults, the film follows Starr Carter (Amandla Stenberg), a black student in a largely white world. preparatory school, which is galvanized into activism after witnessing the police murder of his childhood friend Khalil
"The Hate U Give" derives its title and central philosophy from a concept advocated by Tupac Shakur: For the rapper, who had tattooed "THUG LIFE" in upper case on his torso, this sentence was the acronym for A vicious circle of societal violence. . "THUG LIFE," he explained, actually means "The Hate U Give Little Infants Effs Everybody."
"Toddlers today are very smart," said Tillman. "They watch adult movies, they understand very quickly and they are very sophisticated." But that posed his own problem: if Tillman tried to disinfect the language, his target audience would know it. And since two crucial scenes from "The Hate U Give" demand that Shakur's concept of "THUG LIFE" be spelled out in its entirety, there was no simple solution.
"I had the impression that if I did not say what Tupac was trying to say, it would not feel authentic," the director said. A different, less penalized expletive would not work either: "The public who knew Tupac and his philosophy would think," Oh, they are just trying to integrate him into society, "said Tillman.
[[[[Amandla Stenberg, George Tillman Jr. and Angie Thomas remember the microagressions that they knew at school.]
Another filmmaker, Bo Burnham, had the same dilemma this year with his film "Eighth Grade." The M.P.A.A. gave the junior drama class a R rating for loud language, though his accursed words could not offend teenagers. Burnham refused to shoot his film for a wider audience: "I just wanted to describe the lives of children," he told Variety in July. "I would like children to live in a PG-13 world. They just are not. "
For Tillman, whose previous films such as "Soul Food" and "Men of Honor" were primarily rated "R", it was important to reach a general audience. "If we follow the point of view of this girl, I thought it was really more universal to follow this line and make it accessible to people under 13," he said. "As a filmmaker, you really want to be organic, but you also want people to see the film as much as possible."
For this to work, then, Tillman has developed a strategy. In one of the first scenes, Starr's father (Russell Hornsby) was supposed to use the oath; Tillman changed it to "eff", reasoning that a father might want to soften his language around his daughter. Tillman wanted to retain the unique use of the complete word for a different first-act scene, in which Starr listens to Shakur while Khalil explains the rapper's message. "If Khalil said" eff "or bounced around that word," said Tillman, "it just would not have been authentic."
Nevertheless, this scene with Khalil was to be reflected later in the film, when an updated Starr is the one who has to explain Shakur's intention to others. Since Starr had spent most of "The Hate U Give" finding her voice, how would she look to lose her at this crucial moment?
Tillman filmed the culminating scene in different ways, but when was the moment to submit his cup to Mr. PAA. for a notation, he used a hold with Stenberg saying "eff" in place of the expletive, and there remained only the previous use of the complete word by Khalil. "Historically, you only have one," Tillman explained.
As expected, M.P.A.A. "The Hate U Give" got the PG-13 rating, but what Tillman did not expect is how miserable it would be.
After reviewing his film, "I felt compromised," he said. "Why did not I just go away with my instincts from the beginning without worrying about that? I did not give them the second word F because I did not think I would have it, and I had never done it before. But something in my heart told me that it was not authentic in relation to what we were trying to say. "
And then, with the release date fast approaching, Tillman persuaded Fox to do something almost unprecedented: resubmit "The Hate U Give" to Mr. PAA. with an unencumbered version of Starr's great moment. Tillman would write a letter to the marking board in which he would plead for the added supplicant, which he considered essential to the film and the career of his main character.
Surprisingly, the M.P.A.A.A. he agreed, "The Hate U Give" would be the rare PG-13 movie that contains two occurrences of the word most punished by the board.
"Sometimes, Mr. PAA. Critics are hard to come by, but it's lucky that it really works to our advantage, "said Tillman. "They knew that language was not just used as a language, but to educate and inform."
In the end, Starr learns over the movie to prioritize keeping it real, and the language of "The Hate U Give" should follow. In other words, if the movie wanted to walk when it came to plausibility in adolescence, he also had to talk.
"I thought it would not be the truth without her," Tillman said.
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