A baffled Matthew Vaughn wonders why shooting someone in the head gives you an R rating
The Argylle director was "annoyed" by some of the cuts he had to make for the PG-13 rating
Aux News Matthew Vaughn
The world is going wild with big Argylle theories, with people questioning whether or not the author of the book is secretly Taylor Swift, whether or not the real Agent Argylle will be Taylor Swift, or whether or not Taylor Swift even exists, but director Matthew Vaughn just shared a little spoiler with Total Film when discussing the film’s PG-13 rating: Nobody gets shot in the head in Argylle. Not Henry Cavill, not Bryce Dallas Howard, not the real Agent Argylle, and not even Taylor Swift (because she’s probably not in the movie, unless she is).
The reason that everyone’s heads are safe is that you apparently can’t shoot someone in the head in a PG-13 movie, which Vaughn was so surprised by that it “sort of” made him laugh. He told Total Film that he had to make “a few little cuts” to make the movie PG-13 instead of R and he added that, “two of them annoyed the hell out of me.” He explained that someone getting shot in the chest won’t get you an R rating, saying that it’s “acceptable,” but then he doesn’t understand why getting shot in the head is so much worse. “If you’re gonna get shot,” he figures, “you’re gonna get shot.”
But that seems like a weird stance for Vaughn to take, since he has so much experience making violent action movies with the Kingsman series and Kick-Ass. He should know better than anyone that, in the language of action movies, a shot to the chest is completely different from a shot to the head. Shoot someone in the chest and they could just fall down, shoot someone in the head and you need VFX or makeup or something. It just seems weird for a guy who has made movies based around stylized violence to not realize that there’s a difference here!
In Vaughn’s defense, the reason he had a problem with this is that he didn’t want the movie to have the kind of tone that an R rating would bring, saying the rating should be “a reflection of what the film is” rather than making a movie just to get a specific rating. He wasn’t going for a R-rated vibe in Argylle, so he had to make these headshot cuts in order to not betray the tone of his movie.
49 Comments
Or hey, make the movie you want and don’t trim it down.
Yeah I just never understood the trying NOT to get an R rating. I mean it’s shown to hurt the box office, though I can understand why. So many theaters you just buy your ticket from a kiosk and not from a person, even with I was under 17 in the 90’s I can’t think of a single time I was ever asked to show id. Is that like a thing now to get into an R movie. I remember it happening on the once in a blue moon when an NC-17 movie actually made it to theaters. Besides the line between R and PG-13 is barely even there anymore, something a small as one f bomb to many pushes you just over the limit.
“Barton Fink! Barton Fink!”
I don’t think this R rating was because Travolta wasn’t wearing a seat belt.
“Oh man, I just jizzed Marvin…in the face!”
If that’s true, then why don’t I have an R rating?
Jizz doesn’t count.
Depends on how hard you jizz.
What’s a nubian?
It’s an autonomous unit for mid-mall snacking.
All you need is the rizz.
What has the popular musical genre from the Star Wars Universe to do with this?
Max Rebo is very self-conscious about his blue head and trunk and prefers that the camera focuses elsewhere.
yeah right, and he’s changing his name to
But I love cantina music.
I get his complaint, sort of, but he’s also talking about the MPAA, which as a determining body has never been particularly consistent or reasonable with their standards. Have fun pissing in the wind, Matty!
The Dark Knight got a PG-13 and The Joker killed a guy by putting a pencil through his eye. But, ya know, they cut away for the actual second when it happened, so that’s okay, I guess.
The fact that Nolan edited that scene is such a way that it still has the impact of making you think you see it is simply incredible.
If a man in a sex scene thrusts once? Okay. Twice? Getting naughty. Three times? (A lady) THAT’S NC-17, BUDDY!
Guy has an o-face? Totally fine. Woman has an o-face? NC-17.
because you can imitate it. You can’t plead ignorance when you’ve been making films for over 25 years, but you have to dumb it down when they act out like this.
Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a while.
Are we talking a graphic John Wick-style shot to the head, or a creative camera angle implied shot to the head? Because I could really understand being frustrated with the latter.
‘”Are we talking a graphic John Wick-style shot to the head, or a creative camera angle implied shot to the head? Because I could really understand being frustrated with the latter.”’So, what? They just zoom in on the forehead? Then cut completely away from it with a squib of blood exploding off camera to imply the impact? Then there’s the inevitable aftershot where you actually see the head…
Exactly. Replace all of the John Wick headshots with torso shots and then tell me it’s equally effective.
There are absolutely no shots of anybody’s head in this movie.
Is the cameraman my uncle? Back in the days before digital cameras and their screens, he’d manage to frame the shots consistently wrong with most people’s heads out of the frame.
Just replace it with a football to the groin. They fall down, say “Argh, my groin!” in a cartoonishly strained voice, maybe add a slide whistle or gong effect, the audiences are happy, the critics are ecstatic, everybody wins.
Well, it would be in the finest British tradition.
“Shoot someone in the chest and they could just fall down, shoot someone in the head and” they could just fall down.
There, fixed for you.
You don’t watch a lot of movies, do you?
This is utterly unsurprisng, since I can’t think of any mainstream director who’s so appallingly desensitized to violence than Vaughn. The casual attitude he has to people in his movies constantly getting murdered en masse without a flinch in his films, and without any real narrative justification, is frankly nauseating. Kick Ass, and much of the Kingsman series have this jarring tonal dischord between their lighter thermese and boom, person dies. Any basic screenwriting course will tell you that death is a cheap short cut to drama, and should be used sparingly, unless there’s a concerted reason. Otherwise you remove the stakes from your story and eliminate morality as a character trait entirely. I’m sure there’s a reasonable conversation to be had about whehter a headshot is R or PG-13, but Vaughn is literally the last director that should have that conversation. If pressed he’d be happy to show kids getting murdered in a cartoon.
I would disagree, Kingsman is about a secret spy agency fighting “bad guys” people getting shot is to be expected and a reason why they are being shot. It’s not some guy just randomly shooting some dude on a street. Heads exploding in colorful smoke, maybe not so much.
They’re movies, you fucking weirdo.
Ah yes, the classic brain-dead response to any content that might be legitimately objectionable: it’s fiction!
“Any basic screenwriting course will tell you that death is a cheap short cut to drama, and should be used sparingly, unless there’s a concerted reason.”To me this reads as an unnecessarily absolutist take. There are all sorts of reasons to show violence and death in fiction; sometimes the pointlessness is the point, as it illustrates how random and unfair violence can be. Is it gratuitous in some instances? Sure. But there are films that wouldn’t be able to say what they need to without a high death count.
While this is true, you need to be a better filmmaker than Vaughn to pull it off. He rarely has a concerted reason to use it.
Because if you give someone head, you get an XXX rating.
And if there’s butt stuff, you get a XXX: State of the Union rating.
mmm, don’t tempt me.
I saw this piece of garbage last night… it felt like a slow motion train wreck. 2 hours 10 minutes of pain.If he wants to talk CGI, they should have cut 30 minutes of runtime and done something about the shitty greenscreens and maybe hired someone who understood modeling fluid dynamics! (Oil isn’t water and doesn’t move like it!)
I kind of assumed this was the case. However, Jeff Bridges blasted that dude in the face in True Grit, and that was PG-13. That scene shocked me (because I knew the rating going in).
That was the well known “Jeff Bridges Gets Whatever the Fuck He Wants” exclusion.
Are people collectively this unwell where a bullet to the brain is treated with such apathy? This timeline is really fucked up, thanks a lot, CERN!!
This movie is about to kill his career, and thank god. what a hack fraud!
Good thing the movie doesn’t include any nudity, because then it would be an instant R in this insane puritanical nation of ours!
There is something uniquely haunting about depicting a bullet to the head, especially if we see the viscera. We identify someone by their face; it’s a cliche but there’s a reason the eyes are called the “window to the soul.” To see someone’s head blown apart lays bare the thin divide between life and oblivion.But should we decree that the most disturbing and upsetting depiction of violence is most inappropriate for minors? Isn’t the cleaner violence more damaging and desensitizing in a way? It has the potential to violence without anyone having to confront the visceral horror of it.
Genuinely curious what others think.
Matthew Vaughn is the Zack Snyder of Mark Millars.