How Bully Stood Its Ground Against the MPAA

The film “Bully”, tackles the controversial issue of bullying in schools, but it has been making more headlines because of a fierce battle with the MPAA over the film’s rating.  The filmmakers believe it’ s important for teenagers to be able to see this film but the MPAA assigned it an R rating and refused to budge. Ultimately the filmmakers decided to put the film out without a rating.   Filmmakers Lee Hirsch and Cynthia Lowen came by the SiriusXM studios to talk with Ron Bennington about their film, and their battle over its rating.  Below are excerpts from that interview.

Ron Bennington: I don’t remember the last time… I guess Michael Moore gets this kind of press that you guys have gotten for this film. But it’s very very unusual for a documentary film to get this.

Lee Hirsch: Well thanks for having us. And it’s good to be with you.

Ron Bennington: Has it been surprising to see this kind of controversy attached to the film?

Lee Hirsch: Yeah. Controversy we certainly didn’t expect and we hoped that the film would reach out and touch people and be received as a movie and as a call to action. The rating was a dead shock to us. Getting this R rating. And losing the appeal. And of course, I think what really made this so compelling to people was sort of this grassroots movement that rose up that we had nothing to do with. A 17-year-old student as you may know, started a petition on Change.org that now is must be at 520,000 signatures. I think it’s tapped into a couple things. I think on one level you have I think the larger narrative of bullying which people haven’t maybe felt they had a voice in until now. And you also have the frustration with this sort of hypocrisy and double standards that people have been aware of their whole lives from the MPAA. So I think it’s can of fired on multiple levels.

Ron Bennington: I don’t think that we’re ever going to get to any place where everyone’s feelings are going to be safe. Physically, to me I think it’s a safer world than when I grew up and certainly from the way that my parents taught me, their world must have even been tougher. Because I come from a place where my parents said to me as a kid, you have to fight.

Lee Hirsch: Same as me. My father, I mean my father’s going to be 93 years old. He was a good 20, 30 years older than the other kids’ parents when I was growing up. And he fought in World War II. Had no time for me being bullied or that sort of, no capacity to kind of engaged with that other than fight back or toughen up.

Ron Bennington: Right. You had to fight at that time. Now by the time my kids came along that was already off the table. We were already, because society had changed.

Lee Hirsch: For some. I think that what we’re hearing across the country, I mean we get almost hundreds if not thousands now of emails and messages on our Facebook wall of families and kids that are locked in this battle. Battle of cruelty. Battle of violence. Parents that are trying to get justice for their kids that are treated like whistleblowers. You know this is actually, it’s very real. This isn’t about kids versus schools or administrators versus right. This is just about the fact that there are some schools that have said bullying is not okay in our building and it’s top down and the kids know it and it lands and it’s solid and it’s meaningful. And there are others that have not yet taken that step. And so I think that there’s, the national conversation, the larger conversation beyond this film is do we have a right to really examine what that looks like in these schools? And to compel and demand that the schools become safe and secure for all the kids in the building, not just the kids that are naturally doing well.

Ron Bennington: Right, but there’s always going to be outsiders, don’t you think?

Lee Hirsch: Of course. And let’s hope so because outsiders change the world.

Ron Bennington: Exactly. And I was thinking that watching some of the kids. And I guess that I’m thinking right away of Kelby who I thought to myself I think she’s going to be fine. I could see it in her that she’s not going to live in a small town her whole life. And this city that I live in too is really a history of people who didn’t fit in their small towns and finding a place to come to. So there is a lot to be said for being the weird kid. There’s a lot to be said for that.

Lee Hirsch: Here’s to the weird kids. I mean this is who we made the film for in many ways.

Ron Bennington: Now Alex is a different kind of kid. You’re not going to get around that. But when his parents found out that he’d been bullied and seen some of the stuff, I thought that they were a little rough on him. I thought that they looked at him and they were embarrassed. And they felt like they had been smacked. They wanted him to change. And I thought that to me was the saddest point of the whole film.

Lee Hirsch: Families are families. They’re complicated. And they’re interwoven, they’re complicated. This is a family with love. If you sort of painted what do you think is the perfect family. I would say there’s no such thing. This is a family that has 5 kids, working multiple jobs, struggling to just get food on the table at the end of each week. This film is about real kids and real families and what happens out there. We don’t make judgments. We love these families and you say Alex is a real different kid, you can’t get around that. I cannot tell you…that if you meet Alex today, you’re absolutely never going to recognize this shell of a kid that you see in this film. And that’s because he’s had love, he’s had support. He went and sat next to, right next to Harvey Weinstein and argued against this rating before the MPAA appeals board. His voice solid and strong. Now that’s an arc in a journey that you can’t take away.

Ron Bennington: Absolutely, but that also isn’t going to be around forever. One of the things about the film is that we never really heard from any of the bullies. And why their behavior was like that and personally I think most of it is fear based.

Lee Hirsch: Hmmm.

Ron Bennington: And I’ve always felt that about school and to me what you try to teach kids is a lot of different strategies. There’s never one strategy. What you and I heard from our parents is just go back and fight, that was the only strategy. I mean that’s why it didn’t work.

Lee Hirsch: I think that’s genius. I totally agree with you a 100%. But let’s also like give, you know if we’re going to teach strategies to kids, let’s teach strategies to the sort of 80% of kids that stand in the middle that are confronted with these situations that have the power to act that choose to act if they have the tools and the courage and they felt like it was the right thing to do and there was a way to do it. I think that’s as much about what this conversation is about.

Ron Bennington: Absolutely.

Lee Hirsch: Let’s stop putting the requirement on the victims to sort their own problem out and let’s help empower the kids that have the capacity to intervene to do that and believe me when given the choice and with tools, they will do that.

Ron Bennington: Yeah. I think the reason why they don’t intervene is because they’re being left alone. It’s almost like the antelopes down at the water hole. If that lion is eating one antelope, I’m free for the rest of the day. The parents can be bullies, the older brothers can be bullies. I mean this is a really massive massive thing where it’s a rough world for the sensitive kid I think.

Cynthia Lowen: I think one of the reasons why, when we look at preventing bullying and we look at how can you start to change on this issue, I think it’s hard because one of the things that you bring up is that is that it does involve family dynamics. For parents whose children are bullying, I think it’s very hard to hear that and not feel defensive and not feel that it’s somehow reflects on you. So I think there’s often denial when parents of children who they are bullying seek help from the parents of the kids who are bullying.

Ron Bennington: Absolutely.

Cynthia Lowen: Because I think that it gets back to very complicated family dynamics. I think the same is true for parents of kids who are being targeted. I think there’s that question of have I done a good enough job teaching my child to advocate for themselves? I think parents also often in communities, it’s very difficult for them to come to school the first time, if it doesn’t change, to come back again and again. I think they often end up feeling marginalized and bullied themselves as the children do. And then I think it also gets into the dynamics in a school among teachers. Teachers aren’t immune from wanting to be popular with the kids who are popular and powerful. And I think so it’s hard to unravel all those things and that’s why I think it takes, what we really want this film to say to people and speak to people is that every single person whether you’re a parent, whether you’re a teacher, whether you’re an administrator, whether you’re a 7th grader, in their own way has the potential and the capacity individually to find a way to stand up.

Ron Bennington: One of the things that you show in the film is that it starts with a couple of kids that killed themselves. And I was really, to me the most shocking part was the age 11. Because at 11, I don’t even think I knew that you could commit suicide. That maybe by 14, I’m like okay this comes around, but 11 stunned me.

Cynthia Lowen: We started this film, when we started production it was right around the time that two other 11 year olds, Carl Walker Hoover in Springfield and Jaheem Herrera in Atlanta, Georgia had also taken their own lives and I think a part of, I think the groundswell was beginning to happen in our country. You know prior to this, but I think the awareness that the experiences that these kids are going through, the severity of the bullying, the severity of the torment that they’re enduring everyday is something that…they can’t see the day that it’s going to get better. When you’re 11 years old school seems interminable. Like you’re gonna be in this place forever.

Lee Hirsch: Stuck forever. I have to tell you that story was so heartbreaking to be with that family. The child you’re talking about, you meet them in the film at the funeral. And you cannot even put words to how raw and emotional and just even as a filmmaker to enter that world and navigate that grief and tell that. It’s something. We filmed 5 families in our year that lost kids. And the youngest one was actually a 9-year-old named Montana Lance from North Texas. Hung himself in the nurse’s bathroom at his school. 9 years old. Bullied.

Ron Bennington: And there was no other mental illness that played into this? There was no other, no sexual abuse, nothing else that we know about? It’s simply by bullying?

Lee Hirsch: Well you know, I certainly, I can’t answer that question in this particular individual that I just spoke of. I think we’re learning at an alarming rate the link between bullying and suicide. And I don’t think anyone’s saying that this is the only factor. But what’s happened is I think 20 years ago, we didn’t talk about suicide as much. Many families if their child committed suicide, it would be at their choice whether it was even disclosed that it was a suicide to begin with. Now you have a suicide, the unexplainable happens and suddenly kids are on Facebook the next day and they’re saying “God, if we hadn’t been so mean to him and what the hell were we doing?” And then they’re writing and going but so and so did this and they threw him into the lockers. And God, it’s actually been happening for years and suddenly a narrative emerges that paints a picture that we wouldn’t have known about or talked about a generation before. The alarming rate by which, certainly I’m aware of these tragic suicides almost weekly is just, it’s dumbfounding. I received an email last night from somebody who said you got to come to our school. We’ve had 3 suicides in our high school in the past 2 years. There’s a district in Anoka-Hennepin in Mississippi, how many suicides Cynthia is a few years? Nine?

Cynthia Lowen: In the Anoka-Hennepin, I believe it’s six to nine. Yeah.

Lee Hirsch: Many are attributed to harassment and bullying of those students. So I think it’s no longer just boys will be boys because I think partly because we’re understanding how this is actually causing really tragic death, but also long-term impact and damage.

Cynthia Lowen: There’s no question in research that bullying is associated with depression. Suicide is associated with depression. They have found that kids who are bullied become depressed as a result of the bullying which of course is understandable. And what the research is also showing is that kids who are depressed are more likely to be targeted for bullying. So it really becomes a vicious circle.

Ron Bennington: I don’t want to give away the fact that the success of this film means that this is the beginning of conversation. And I know that you’re doing some speaking after it and Harvey Weinstein has been kind of a bully for the good cause, really champions this film. And now AMC is even saying that they are changing some attitude.

Lee Hirsch: Yeah. And AMC, so we open in theaters, New York and Los Angeles this Friday. We open nationally, about 30 some odd cities more on April 13th. And each theater owner is going to have to make the choice now as to how they’re gonna approach this film. Are they gonna show it? How will they let kids in? AMC is taking the lead and saying we’re gonna let youth in. We are going to require that they have a note of permission. It can be handwritten on a piece of paper, while I can tell you I would have figured out how to do that when I was 13.

Ron Bennington: Yeah.

Lee Hirsch: So I think that kids will be able to get in, teenagers. We still think guidance for this film of 13 plus is appropriate so for parents listening, commonsensemedia.org gave great guidance for families to understand. The MPAA has just been on the wrong side on this one. I mean the double standard of violence. It’s not even just that violent films are consistently given PG and PG-13 ratings, it’s combined with sexiness. It’s like the two together land to say this is alright. But something that has a few curse words in it, and I think there’s 500,000 voices, these American voices that the MPAA is supposedly protecting, voices from the left and the right including Governor Mike Huckabee who spoke out for this film in a very powerful way are saying the MPAA, you’re not actually representing what the parents of America, you’re not giving the guidance that we’re looking for. Please, can you actually guide us?

Ron Bennington: And again this goes back to Harvey Weinstein and the fact that he thinks something is wrong or wants to do the right thing, have at them.

Lee Hirsch: We couldn’t have a stronger advocate than Harvey Weinstein.

Ron Bennington: It’s phenomenal to see it happen. Comes out in select theaters tomorrow March 30th. And we’re bringing up about kids need to see it, but parents really need to remind themselves what that whole thing is. Thanks so much. We’ll see you guys the next time through.

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You can hear this interview in its entirety exclusively on SiriusXM satellite radio . Don’t have a subscription yet?  Click here for a free trial sub.  And find out more about Ron Bennington Interviews here.

You can get more information about the film at TheBullyProject.com or on twitter @bullymovie.