Sue Clark. You’re the Head of Communications for the BBFC. What does your daily job involve?
My job is to look after all aspects of communications for the board. My daily job is looking after communications – I deal with media calls, all matters to do with the presentation and publicity of the BBFC, content for the website, that sort of thing.
How have attitudes changed towards film censorship these days? Has public attitude shaped how censors react to movies?
Well…public attitudes don’t shift as quickly as people think they do. The BBFC does regular research (we started doing this in 1999), and we go every four years and we ask the public what they think, what the classification issues are, and how we should tackle them. What is very clear is, public attitudes don’t shift very quickly, and they don’t always go in the direction people assume they’re going to go. They don’t necessarily become more relaxed as time goes on, and concerns change. Twenty years ago people didn’t think that drugs were the sort of issue they do now. They’re very concerned about the portrayal of drugs in films, and particularly in the junior catagories.
Attitudes to sex have changed. Certainly since I joined the Board, which is about ten years ago, we’ve seen a shift in attitudes towards what adults can watch, and what we can allow through at [certificate] 15, for instance…
So attitudes towards sex are more liberal, do you think?
Yes they are, as long they’re not at the junior catagories, we’re still very concerned with children seeing sexual material, but we used to be much more restrictive at [certificate] 15 than we are now, because parents have told us their children at 15 years old will know about these things. The sort of thing ten years ago we would have bumped up to an 18 we now allow through at a 15.
Films like Brown Bunny and 9 Songs have explicit sexual acts in them…
Yes that’s another issue that has become clear through public consultation, which is at an adult level, the BBFC should not really be intervening, unless there are issues connected with harm, or sexual violence. That is one area the public are still very concerned about – they’re not in favour of sexually violent material in 18 films. We will still intervene at that sort of level and very extreme violence we might still intervene at. We tend to take the view that at the adult catagories, adults should be free to make their own choices, which is why we allow through films like 9 Songs.
If sex is shown as a loving act then, it would go through…?
As long as it’s there for a particular reason. If it’s there to purely and gratuitously arouse the viewer, then it falls into what we would consider pornography. If the sex is there as part of the storyline, like in 9 Songs, where the sex was how the relationship developed, and collapsed, we didn’t intervene.
Is there a blurring of the line between porn, and mainstream viewing these days?
No there isn’t, because the point about pornography is very clear. The BBFC is very clear about what the purpose of pornography is, and with sex, if it’s there purely to titillate the viewer, then it’s pornography. We’re not saying that some of this material does not sexually titillate some of the viewers, but it’s about the intent. What’s the intent? Why’s it in the film? And if it’s in the film to be part of the exploration of a relationship, then it’s not there to titillate – we can allow it through at 18.
You mentioned sexual violence, which I assume is why a film like Straw Dogs was banned for so long…
Well Straw Dogs is a very interesting case. When it first came into the BBFC [having] been pre-cut by the Americans (the film was first edited by the Motion Picture Association of America) and they had oddly taken out the material which actually balanced the whole issue of rape. What we were left with was the rape where it looked as if Susan George’s character was coming to enjoy being raped.
The second rape very clearly said that this was something she wasn’t enjoying, but that wasn’t in the original version, so the BBFC did cut the version without it, pre-cut from America. The version on release now has both rape scenes in, and the message is this is not something approved of by the film, so we were able to pass it uncut. How it’s presented is important. What is the message the sexual violence is sending out? If the message is it’s ok to beat up women, women like violence attached to sex, we have a problem with it…
…almost a public duty to perform.
Yes, it’s about protecting people from harm, and what messages the film is sending out and how it’s perceived by certain sectors of society.
Why did it take so long for Straw Dogs, or anything else from the ‘Video Nasties’ list to be released?
Because you have to get a distributor to put it in for classification. We only classify what is sent in to us to be classified, we don’t nip down to the basement every so often and have a rummage and say “Oh we haven’t looked at this for a while”. We have to wait for a distributor to pick it up and want to release it. Fact is a lot of the movies from the ‘Video Nasty’ era probably won’t see the light of day simply because they’re just not financially viable propositions for a distributor.
Some titles from the ‘Video Nasty’ list have been released, like Evil Dead and The Exorcist. Is that a change in public attitudes?
There was a lot of fuss at the time of the ‘Video Nasties’ list and a lot of titles got swept up with other material…
…a knee jerk reaction?
Yes. And when material was seized by police they were just lumped together with material that was being caught by the legislation at the time (the Video Recordings Act 1985) and what happened was things that shouldn’t have been included in the banned list because they weren’t dangerous were included. What’s happened now is things have been slowly sent for classification that have been passed, and probably would have been passed even then I suspect if they hadn’t had a policition standing against them.
Last year MP Julian Brazier tried to pass a law to tighten BBFC guidelines. What would that have meant for the industry if the bill went through? (Editors note – it failed).
Yes the Bill was “talked out” is the technical expression. What would have happened was…chaos to be perfectly honest. What he was proposing was any member of the public who decided they didn’t like the sound of a film the BBFC had classified, could complain to their MP who would then put a block on the film. A committee of MP’s would then sit down and review the decision which would have been a complete fiasco.
So you’d have a film shown in one area fine, and banned in another?
No it would have been a national situation, but you’d have had individual members of the public who feel strongly about a particular film, and there are always people out there who think we shouldn’t be passing films, simply going to their MP, and saying “I’m very worried about this film, I haven’t seen it, but I don’t like the sound of it from what I’ve read in the papers, the BBFC shouldn’t have passed it…” and it would literally be hauled in and looked at by a committee of MP’s. By this time it may well have been seen in certain parts of the country, and then banned from being shown for weeks until the MP’s got around to looking at it, and deciding or not if we’d (BBFC) made a mistake.
In July a Japanese horror movie, Grostesque, was refused a certification, can you comment on that?
Yes, that was because of the sexual violence and we were also very worried about the attitude towards women in the film, and that the victims got younger and younger until eventually they were children. We did look at wether there was a viable work left after we cut out the problematic material, and we felt there wasn’t, so we rejected it. We do it very rarely, we try not to do it, simply because it’s not our job to just go around banning things. I know some people think ‘What’s the point of the BBFC if you don’t ban things?’ but that’s not what we consider our role to be now. We label material so people can make informed decisions. We do have a role to play in protecting society from material which could be potentially harmful, and the tone of [Grotesque] was too extreme to be passed, and too much to be cut for it to be released.
You’d rather go back to a producer and say “If you cut this scene we’ll pass it”?
Yes we do, we try very hard to say to a distributor if you remove this, this and this, it becomes a viable proposition but literally there was so much to be taken out of that film that it just wasn’t viable.
Would a movie like Saw been considered for a release 15 years ago?
The Video Nasties were 1979/1980 so that’s thirty years ago…I suspect there would have been cuts made to the film but if you look at Reservoir Dogs, there was a lot of outcry at the time. The BBFC actually passed it 18, uncut. What we do now with films like Saw is we know they fall into a particular genre, we know people watching those films are very well aware of the conceit behind the film, and we don’t feel there is a need to intervene. Again, because we don’t consider the violence in those films to be potentially harmful…we would not intervene at the adult category unless necessary.
It’s interesting you mention Reservoir Dogs. One of the infamous scenes in that is the scene where the cop has his ear sliced off but it’s all done out of shot. If the scene was actually on camera, would the BBFC have had a problem with that?
It’s difficult for me to say yes or no, I don’t think we would now…because on what basis would we have a problem…it’s not necessarily problematic…people argue some might copy this film but I don’t think they would. [If it was cut] I don’t think it would be as good a film to be honest, and I think the whole subtly that you don’t actually see it is like another film, American History X, where there is an attack on a man, you think the character is stamping on his head….
He bites the kerb…
Yes and you don’t actually see it, but your brain fills in the gaps, and it’s quite horrific, but actually if you actually saw it, it would be so unpleasant it would spoil the movie.
As it is it’s a very powerful scene.
It’s an extremely powerful scene because of what you don’t see.
What about the new trend for downloading movies, from places like iTunes and Sony’s new Playstation Network movie downloads. Is it going to get harder to control the content of films online?
Downloads aren’t covered by any law. The Video Recordings Act and the Licensing Act don’t cover downloads in any shape or form, so we don’t have a role where that’s concerned. What we are doing is working with the industry on a scheme called ‘BBFC Online’. It’s a voluntary scheme and pretty much everyone has signed up to be a member of it, which means when you go to download a film it will have a BBFC Online classification on it. You know it’s a legitimate site to start with, and it will help parents in particular, because when you download a film it will have embedded in it a BBFC ‘black card’ like at the cinema. This will help in a world where you don’t know what you’re seeing until you’ve downloaded it.
It wouldn’t stop a younger child downloading an 18 movie though?
It would if you as a parent can put in place a code system, so a child can’t access a certain site without the code.
What about a movie that was only released online? You mentioned it’s a voluntary scheme at the moment, would that then be exempt from classification?
It is exempt, simply because there is no law covering it. With big distributors, releasing films through all available formats, we would expect them to do it via our scheme, so they still have a BBFC classification on them. I think what will happen is people will come to chose films they know have a BBFC stamp on them, therefore they know what they’re buying.
It’s not going to stop teenagers, but in years gone by all you did was take a trip to another country and bought the stuff abroad. There has always been a way around the system in some shape or form, but we’ve never said we provide a water tight scheme, and for most of the time, for most people, it works.
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