Julian Petley: How do you take Christopher Tookey in the Daily Mail
describing you as 'less notorious but no less permissive' than your
predecessor James Ferman?Robin Duval: I don't particularly enjoy
being referred to as notorious and I don't particularly like being described
as permissive, but I've no special objection to liberal and I don't mind at
all being characterised as a director of the BBFC who has moved things on
into the 21st century. That inevitably involves a degree of liberalisation
because that's the way the British community as a whole has moved.
You've certainly introduced much greater transparency into the board's
operations.
Because it wasn't fashionable for much of the board's history to be
up-front about decision-making criteria, it left space for newspapers and
others to fill in their own interpretations. So transparency isn't just a
duty but is also advantageous in making sure that the starting point for any
public argument is factually accurate.
You've also speeded up the classification process, which makes it more
difficult for the press to agitate while controversial movies await
certification.
I came to the board with certain priorities, one of which was to make its
processes as efficient as I could. Another was to engage with the public in
such a way that I could be confident that the basis for the board's
decisions would reflect what the public found acceptable. But overall I
derive my policy from the same fundamentals as my predecessor, namely the
law, the concept of harm and what is likely to be acceptable to the public.
If there's a difference between us, it's that I inherited his mantle with a
background of experience at the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) and
the ITC, where the emphasis was on collecting evidence of what the public
expects.
The BBFC Annual Report 1999 states: 'Whatever the outcome of any
particular case, harm will remain the abiding and central concern of the
BBFC.' But what difference can cutting little bits of violence from films
possibly make - as in the four seconds of changes to David Fincher's 'Fight
Club' required for its video release?
I come from a film-making background so I'm sensitive to the effect small
elements of a film may have on the whole. I don't know any director who
would accept that taking 10 seconds out of a movie makes no difference; that
moment may seal the effect he or she is seeking to create. Looking back on
Fight Club, I'm not sure the cuts made as much difference as we
believed at the time. But on the other hand I'm absolutely clear that the 10
seconds we removed from Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi's recent Baise-moi
remove the erotic/ pornographic element from the rape scene.
What you're left with is still extraordinarily powerful, but the message it
conveys is slightly different. It's now entirely to do with the pain and
horror the women suffer; you no longer have the erotic element that confuses
the viewer's response - or, depending on your point of view, that adds
another important layer, but it's not a layer we felt we could accept.
Certain horror titles still seem to be presenting problems on video.
For instance, Stuart Gordon's 1985 'Re-animator', which remains cut, and
Lucio Fulci's 1990 'Nightmare Concert', which is banned.
These are works about which decisions were taken in the early months
after my arrival at the BBFC. I'm not sure that quite the same decisions
would be taken now. First, my views aren't necessarily the same as they were
at the beginning. We spent the first 18 months of my time here researching
with the public the suitability of our guidelines and there have also been
legal developments that have changed the environment in which we operate. So
these factors could mean, though I'm not saying would mean, that were
these titles to be resubmitted, we might take a different view.
Doesn't the 1984 Video Recordings Act (VRA) simply mistake
offensiveness for harmfulness? The board certainly found it extremely
difficult to 'prove' that pornography was harmful to children when it
appeared before the Video Appeals Committee in 1999 to defend its refusal of
'R18' certificates to seven videos, as it frankly admits in its Annual
Report 2000.
The elements the 2000 amendment to the VRA lists as those to which the
BBFC should have special regard, including the matter of harm, were not
novelties grasped out of the air for the purpose of amending the act. They
had featured as criteria in the way the BBFC had been operating for a long
time, and if you look at the IBA programme guidelines, which were then
superseded by the ITC code, you would find the same kind of categories.
Far be it from me to argue with you over the ITC code since you
drafted it! However, it's surely significant that Section 1 of the code is
entitled 'Family Viewing Policy, Offence to Good Taste and Decency...'
Perhaps we can come to a compromise here. Because the code has to respond
to paragraph 6:1a of the Broadcasting Act, which concerns offence to taste
and decency, I acknowledge that there is throughout a responsiveness to
that. But I think you will find if you look that a great deal of Section 1
is couched in terms of concern about harm. The entire violence code of
Section 1:7, for instance, is to do with an analysis of different kinds of
potential harm.
OK, we'll compromise. But at the Video Appeals Committee your witness
Dr Milavic had such a hard time trying to convince the other side's counsel
of the harm pornography could do to children I almost felt sorry for her.
She knew her facts and she spoke as someone who is one of the leading
experts in child harm. The problem was that she recognised, from a
lifetime's experience of dealing with children, that if material of that
kind was presented to the kinds of children who are most likely to be her
patients, then they were going to be harmed. But she had only one recent
case to which she could point a finger, and in that case the pornography to
which the child had been exposed was not an 'R18' video, which is what the
appeal was about. So you might reasonably argue that we were a little unfair
to put her up. But she was happy to appear and I thought she did bloody
well.
What's the position concerning the rerelease of videos originally on
the 'nasty' list drawn up by the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP)?
Over the last two years we've tried to develop a flexible common-sense
policy in this area. If a title was on the DPP's list then we need to know
why, in particular if it received any prosecutions under Section 2 or
Section 3 of the Obscene Publications Act (OPA). Properly speaking, it
shouldn't make any difference to our view whether it was tried under Section
2 before a jury or simply forfeited by a magistrate under Section 3, because
if the police achieve a result in either respect it still marks that title
as unacceptable. But time does pass, and if we look at a film now and we're
clear that we would not ourselves have a problem with it if it didn't have
an OPA record, and if we also discover that no jury has found it obscene
for, let's say, 10 years or more, then that's the point at which we can move
towards a more liberal position, although very cautiously and carefully
because we don't want to put up a challenge to the law. In general terms,
the only way to deal with films fairly is to start from first principles in
terms of the way things are now.
According to the Annual Report 1999, 1973's 'The Exorcist' was passed
on video because 'the Board decided that the passage of time since its first
release had done much to date its special effects and generate familiarity
with the film's contents.' For 1974's 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre' it was
decided that 'the film's horrors were unlikely to be taken too seriously.'
But surely the whole point of horror films is that they are horrific and
disturbing for their viewers?
Since BBFC president Andreas Whittam Smith and I have been here, the
board has taken a fairly relaxed view on horror films because we recognise
that going to horror movies is a roller-coaster experience. However, just as
there are certain people, for instance those below a certain height, who are
not allowed on certain roller-coasters, so we say that people below certain
ages can't legally have this roller-coaster horror experience. If you start
making decisions such as passing The Exorcist or The Texas Chain
Saw Massacre, which you know will appear to parts of the outside world
as being a sea-change, you have to explain why, in their terms, they
shouldn't be anxious about this. But I don't think that now we'd use the
kind of expressions which you've just quoted, or at least I hope not.
The Annual Report 1999 also states: 'Whether or not something is
acceptable still depends ultimately upon how it is treated i.e. its
context.' Doesn't this offer ammunition to those who accuse the board of
being softer on arthouse than on commercial movies?
It was difficult to combat this argument as long as all the films that
posed a challenge to our guidelines were non-English-language movies and
therefore almost by definition arthouse - until Patrice Chéreau's Intimacy
turned up earlier this year. Of course we applied exactly the
same criteria to Intimacy as we would to anything else, and lo and
behold we passed uncut an English-speaking movie with the same kind of
content which people thought had been reserved for such arthouse work as Ai No Corrida,
Romance and The Idiots. But now we're told
that Intimacy is a British arthouse movie. You can't win - but nor do
we expect to. So we're sitting waiting for a popular movie that sets
identical challenges, and we will treat that exactly the same. If
it's a movie which within its own internal context justifies
something unprecedented, then it's possible we'd take a liberal view of
that.
Then why does the board defend 'Baise-moi' as a film with 'a serious
cultural purpose' which 'offers an important perspective'? Isn't it simply
Roger Corman in French and with real sex - and none the worse for that, of
course?
I don't think that what you've quoted is a defence of Baise-moi,
it's a defence of the position we have taken on the film. However you or I
may respond to Baise-moi, it has a serious purpose - it is about
women reacting to the violence and humiliation habitually visited on them by
men. When I first saw the film I wasn't particularly sympathetic to it, but
by the time I'd seen it three or four times I'd come not only to enjoy it
more but to begin to understand that it does seriously express a very
interesting female viewpoint, although not necessarily a feminist one.
In the matter of DVDs, the Annual Report 1999 states that the board
has 'established a policy of only permitting different versions of the same
work providing they can be accommodated in the same classification
category.' Doesn't this result in unnecessary cuts and further encourage
people to buy Region 1 DVDs?
When a distributor first issues a film on video they naturally want to
reach the largest target audience possible. So we might offer a '15' uncut,
but they might then ask us to tell them what cuts to make so it can be
issued as a '12'. Now, especially given the advent of DVD, the distributor
might come back later and say they want to issue the film again, this time
at '15' with the cuts restored. We've decided not to allow this because it
would put us in the position of endorsing a release which is immediately
going to be gobbled up by all the kids who were deprived of the cut
sequences the first time around. And how can local regulators such as the
Trading Standards Officers deal with differently rated versions of the same
film and the confusion of local shopkeepers trying to enforce the VRA?
Does the 'gentlemen's agreement' still exist whereby the DPP will not
prosecute a film passed by the BBFC?
I strongly suspect the 'gentlemen's agreement' has been as
comprehensively forgotten by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) as it had
been by me until you mentioned it. It's hardly necessary these days. The
bottom line is that if we're clear that something submitted to us could be
prosecuted successfully under Section 2 of the Obscene Publications Act,
then I'm afraid that we cannot pass it, at least not without cuts.
Are you relieved that what is permissible within an 'R18' certificate
has to some extent been clarified by the High Court and that the board has
been able to liberalise its guidelines in this area?
I need to pick my words carefully here, but let me just say that the
'R18' issue had long been a running sore for the BBFC and was probably the
biggest difficulty my predecessor had to deal with. I may not have liked the
outcome of the judicial review which brought the matter to a close, but
there was a clarity to it, particularly in the acceptance of the fresh
guidelines that followed. One of the main things still to be achieved was to
get agreement, although not consensus, between all the affected parties such
as the Home Office, the CPS, the police, customs and so on which all had to
agree that the guidelines we were proposing would not create any difficulty
for them, or rather that they were content to make any necessary amendments
to their own policies. Having said that, we still cut more 'R18' submissions
than any other category, because there's still a lot of material coming in
which is probably in breach of the CPS' OPA guidelines and is certainly in
breach of our own 'R18' guidelines.
Scenes of urolagnia, otherwise known as 'golden showers', still seem
highly likely to be cut at 'R18'. Since these are now a staple of so much
hardcore pornography, what's the problem?
The local police, or rather the local police on CPS advice, are still
from time to time looking for convictions under Section 2 of the OPA for
urolagnia, and they're getting them. And as long as juries take that view,
that has to be our benchmark.
Similarly though the board tries for parity between the representation
of homosexual and heterosexual acts, there are legal problems regarding the
representation of homosexual acts involving more than two people.
Yes, if the films were shot in Britain, because the acts themselves are
illegal here. Similarly the common-law offence of indecency in public places
can pose problems for videos featuring sex in public - again, if they were
made in the UK.
The board has told the distributors of 'Baise-moi' that it will
consider the film's video release only after it has been able to judge the
public reaction to its cinema release. Why is this?
The decision to classify the film for cinema release with just one cut
was a difficult one. So it seems sensible to acquaint ourselves with public
reaction to this benchmark decision. We've moved the goalposts and we need
to know if people feel we've moved them too far. We may undertake formal
public-opinion research or we may rely on the evidence we'll cull from the
debate in the media and the responses we receive from people who contact the
office. But the key consideration is public, not journalistic,
reaction. The days when the BBFC was influenced by the personal, perhaps too
personal, views of a single journalist or critic are - I hope - long gone.
What factors led recently to Ray Brady's 1994 'Boy Meets Girl' being
passed on video?
The video was rejected by the board in 1995 because it found its
depictions of torture sadistic and unrelenting. Interestingly, the film had
previously been given an '18' certificate, uncut, for cinema release. Six
years later, after a thoroughgoing review of public opinion from which it
emerged that the public is rather more robust than we had thought, we felt
able to take a more relaxed view. It was not in breach of our new, publicly
tested guidelines.
Since the board has passed Uli Edel's 1981 'Christiane F' uncut on
video, will it now allow the reinstatement of the cuts in Abel Ferrara's
1992 'The Bad Lieutenant'?
The Bad Lieutenant hasn't as yet been submitted for
reclassification, and until it has been, my mind remains open. I would say
only that sexual violence and instructive detail of drug use are still
issues for us even today at '18'. On the other hand, you are probably aware
that the board passed the film uncut in 1992 for the cinema.
How do you see the future?
My personal ambition is that we move progressively towards a
better-informed public. And at the end of that very long road, which we
certainly won't reach while I'm still at the BBFC, the mandatory ratings
system will give way to something more advisory. I think the industry as
well as the board has a fundamental duty to provide more information about
why a film has a particular classification. Cinemagoers and video/DVD
viewers will not take uncritically our ratings for ever - they need to know
enough about the ingredients in the package to make their own judgements. Is
it '12' for bad language, or for sex, or for violence? It makes a difference
as to whether people expect to enjoy the film or not. We are already testing
this proposition in Norwich with an experimental advisory 'PG-12' that
offers the public an opportunity to decide for themselves whether a
particular '12'-rated film is right for their 10- or 11-year-old child. But
the crucial ingredient is the consumer advice provided to assist them to
make that decision. I think it may well work at '12' because there are no
real harm-related issues. An advisory '12' (or thereabouts) is pretty much
the norm in continental Europe and North America. I would be much less
confident about making '15' or '18' advisory - I think there are serious
difficulties there. But whatever happens, the decision will be a public one
- not the BBFC's, and certainly not mine.
Robin Duval was appointed director of the BBFC in January 1999 following
a seven-year stint as deputy director of programmes at the Independent
Television Commission (ITC). One early problem he had to face was the
board's apparent inability to relax the guidelines for 'R18' videos due to
intransigence from the Home Office and Customs and Excise. This resulted in
two distributors going before the Video Appeals Committee (VAC) in July 1999
to contest the board's refusal to grant 'R18' certificates, without cuts, to
seven videos including Horny Catbabe and Nympho Nurse Nancy.
The following month the VAC ruled on the side of the distributors. The Home
Office thundered, and the BBFC sought leave for a judicial review of the
VAC's decision. But in May 2000 the High Court upheld the VAC's ruling and
the BBFC decided not to appeal any further.
