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. --Ian Spelling