But I cinematically wanted to move slowly towards this house, to really show that, while everyone is having a good time playing, there’s important business being done with the Carter family. What I love about this scene is, outside, you see a normal neighborhood, with a lot of playing. “My name is George Tillman Jr., and I am the director of “The Hate U Give.” We always called this scene “the talk.” The scene was actually in the middle of the book, but we decided very early on to move it at the top of the film.
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narrates a sequence from his film where Maverick, played by Russell Hornsby, teaches his children how to behave around the police. Transcript ‘The Hate U Give’ | Anatomy of a Scene George Tillman Jr. Since Starr had spent the bulk of “The Hate U Give” finding her voice, how would it look for her to lose it at this pivotal moment? Still, that scene with Khalil was meant to be mirrored later in the film, when a newly self-actualized Starr is the one who must explain Shakur’s intent to others. “If Khalil was saying ‘eff’ or bouncing around that word,” Tillman said, “it just wouldn’t have been authentic.” Tillman wanted to save his single usage of the full-blown word for a different first-act scene, in which Starr listens to Shakur as Khalil explains the rapper’s message. In one early scene, Starr’s father (Russell Hornsby) was supposed to use the expletive Tillman changed it to “eff,” reasoning that a father might want to soften his language around his daughter. To make it work, then, Tillman strategized. “As a filmmaker, you really want to be organic, but you also want people to see the film as much as possible.” “If we’re following this young girl’s point of view, I just felt like it really made it more universal to walk that line and make it for anyone under 13,” he said. They just aren’t.”įor Tillman, whose previous films like “Soul Food” and “Men of Honor” have been mostly rated R, reaching a general audience was paramount. “I would love kids to be living in a PG-13 world. Burnham refused to cut his film for a wider audience: “I just wanted to portray the way kids’ lives are,” he told Variety in July. slapped the junior-high dramedy with an R rating for strong language, though its curse words would hardly scandalize teenagers.