Joel Silver Quotes

The whole 'R' rating depends on a strange sort of fantasy land where all adults are responsible people, and children only ever go to the cinema with their parents.

Well, they had to have me in the G-string because this is PG-13, right?

In movies you can shoot a guy 3,000 times and get a 'PG-13', but if you say the 'F' word twice it's automatically an 'R'. I'll let that be its own comment.

I kind of grew up watching R-rated movies and more adult content because that's where all the best performances are.

As anyone who has recently seen PG-13 movies knows, the level of violence in them has increased to the point of making the Motion Picture Association of America's voluntary rating system meaningless.

If a film is suitable for family viewing, it should remain so, and if a film has some adult content, it should remain so, and these genres should never be mixed and spoil the vision of the story teller.

As a parent myself, I can appreciate the MPAA and what they're supposed to do, but what happens with NC-17 is that the MPAA is basically taking away the rights of parents. They're basically telling me that I can't show my kids this movie if I decide they can see it.

I don't like PG-13 horror movies. I think they're a contradiction in terms.

I've seen little pieces of 'Interview with a Vampire' when it was on TV, but I kind of always go yuck! I don't watch R-rated movies, so that really cuts down on a lot of the horror.

Kids end up seeing my movies anyway but some of the mothers get mad at me so I figured I'd make one that I can't get yelled at for.

You go to a theater now and you literally see parents watching the movie and they suddenly cover their kid's ears. I figured I'd make one movie where they didn't have to do this.

My children can't see many of the films that I've been in because I'm always either dying or taking my clothes off.

A 12-year-old can watch 'Spiderman.' A 12-year-old cannot watch 'Watchmen.'

We have this sort of tacit censorship, which is the ratings system, and it's directly tied to box office, so it is censorship. Like, if you make an R-rated movie, you know that only a certain amount of people are going to go see it under any circumstance.

My problem is I can't show any of my movies to my daughters. It's tough. 'Beauty and the Beast'... they liked it. But that's the only one, really. Otherwise, they've always been dark or violent.

Should a story be readily told in a PG-13 fashion, it should be for creative, not business, reasons.

There are some people who cannot watch every film because of age. They might watch only three films in a year.

I didn't realize how limiting an R rating is. I made 'Disco' as a cautionary tale for 14- and 15-year-old girls, and those girls were not allowed to see the film by their parents.

I'm not sure I like making movies that my kids can't go to, but that's just how it is.

I was such a fan of Quentin's growing up. I remembered I wanted to see 'Pulp Fiction' so badly, but my mom had seen it, and even though she loved it, she just thought it wasn't appropriate for a 13-year-old.

I'm not fighting for the right to do whatever we want without any restriction. We need to be careful of the fact that we also make games for kids and teenagers.

It's censorship, really. I don't see why it's not okay for somebody under the age of 17 watch someone smoking when they can watch someone have their brains blown out? My son and I were watching an ad on the television the other day. And it said, "Rated R." He said, "What does 'rated R' mean?" I said, "God, I don't know. You can't watch it unless you're over a certain age."

It was a tough experience with Alan Horn, who didn't like anything that was R-rated. So you can imagine he hated some of my films.

Sometimes I just want to write a really intense love scene. But I can't do that in my books for teens, or parents will complain - believe me, I've tried.

'Y Tu Mama Tambien' is one of the first unrated movies to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. But many video stores won't take a movie that's not rated, so I had to make the movie an R.