"Happening" Needed R Rating

M. Night Shyamalan, writer-director of the upcoming paranoid thriller The Happening, told reporters that there was no way around its R rating. In the film, an unexplained event compels people to commit suicide in often grisly ways. Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo and Ashlyn Sanchez star as a quartet of Philadelphians trying to stay one step ahead of the deadly threat, which could be man-made, a force of nature or the result of an accident.

"I got an R on two other movies, on The Sixth Sense and The Village," Shyamalan said during a press conference in New York on June 9. "I got an R initially, for the intensity of certain scenes, and I needed to pull back a sound effect. We were right on the line, and I could always just pull back a sound effect and re-submit it, and they'd go, 'Oh, it's much better.' And all I did was take out some sound effects. It's always the impact; what you emotionally feel is different than what I actually showed." But on The Happening, Shyamalan couldn't dodge the R.

"The screenplay that I wrote, there was just no way to do it any other way," he said. "One of the movies I was thinking about was Pan's Labyrinth. I was thinking about that a lot when I made the decision, because I didn't want to make it as an agenda. You want to make an organic decision about: What does the material want to do? And when I thought about Pan's Labyrinth, which had visceral moments of violence juxtaposed against the softer kind of things that are going on against the canvas; it gave it authority and some teeth."

Shyamalan added that a PG-13 version of Guillermo del Toro's Pan would not have worked as well. "It wouldn't have stayed with me the way that movie has stayed with me," he said. "And so [on The Happening] it felt like the right balance of things. It was exciting, and it was disturbingly easy to shoot all those scenes. I had such a fun time." The Happening opens June 13.