These parents seem so oblivious, yet I suspect that when they hear politicians saying stuff like "Hollywood needs to clean up its act or we'll clean it up for them," they're probably all for it.

Yeah, you're right. Don Murphy, the producer who did "Natural Born Killers," first told me about the book. He had some good studio money to do the film with; then Columbine happened, and everyone dropped out and said, "No, no, no -- we can't make this film." I would think it would have been very topical then. But I guess the studios took the position: "We can't make this movie because it's about kids killing kids. Columbine just happened. We're afraid [Joe] Lieberman and these people will attack us. If we put it out there, and some more kids get killed, we're gonna take the heat. And Congress is going to pass laws against us. And blah-blah-blah." So they backed off, and when I decided to do the film, it was almost impossible to raise the money. Nobody wanted this film made because of the social climate. I would think it would be the opposite. Certainly, the issue is topical. Since I made the film, there has been a rash of high school shootings where it was all about being bullied. It's on the tip of everybody's tongue.

There's a lot of denial out there. People don't want reality; they want the sanitized version of your film, without the sex and drugs -- where everything's wrapped up in a neat little package with a moral at the end.

Exactly. Those are the films they're so proud of themselves for making. Take a movie like "American History X," which was like an after-school special. There's plenty of that stuff out there. So why can't I make my little movie? It's really difficult to do these films and not do this Hollywood take where everybody gets off the hook.

So what's the argument for being true to this story, and damn the consequences?

Maybe it'll open some fucking dialogue about what's really going on. Maybe all the subtext in the film will make you start thinking and hit you on a different level -- not dropping an anvil on your head and giving you such an easy way out. Film's an amazing form for that. It's almost limitless. I'm just trying to make a good film.

Why is "Bully" being released unrated?

We couldn't get an R. The MPAA [Motion Picture Association of America] shot us down. We asked them, "What do we have to do? What's your advice?" They sent back this fax (I've still got it), which says, "Our advice to America is: Hide your children." Can you believe that?

Maybe I'm a marked man because of "Kids," but it's a studio system rating, it's not the government's. If you have a big-studio movie with big-name actors, you can get away with murder, you can buy any rating you want. It's only the small, indie films like this that they pick on. It's ridiculous, it's corrupt and it's bullshit, but that's what we have to deal with.

Will the fact that it's unrated hurt the film?

It'll keep us out of a lot of venues, sure. When we did "Kids," we broke new ground. We got in the malls and the theater chains -- they'd never played an unrated movie before. So you have to struggle. The MPAA says, "You don't have to take the rating if you don't want it." But if you don't get the rating, you can't play in most of the theaters.

What about NC-17?

You can do NC-17, but no one's going to play an NC-17 movie. Unrated is better than NC-17. A movie can play in more theaters that way.

There's a lot of nudity in the film, but you shy away from male frontal nudity. Why not just go for broke if you have to release it unrated anyway?

I was trying to get an R, so I shot it that way. If you show male frontal nudity, you never get an R. My old girlfriends are always calling me up and complaining: "You never have any frontal nudity. You never show 'the gun' -- the penis." I tell 'em, in my next movie, "Ken Park," there'll be more penises than you guys can swallow. But in "Bully," I didn't even shoot [male frontal nudity] because I was supposed to have an R rating. Fortunately, [the folks at] Lions Gate [which produced the film] are such good people that they're releasing it as is. Fuck the MPAA.

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