At the March WonderCon event in San Francisco, sensitive artisan and “Terminator Salvation” director McG (née Joseph McGinty Nichol), almost started a full-scale riot when he asked the abdominous crowd, “Do you want to see Moon[Bloodgood]’s boobs in the picture?”
The mob shifted and lurched dangerously — having clearly tuned-out after the, “in the picture?” part — at the prospect of seeing real-life boobs, and for many, for the first time in their natural born adult lives, but soon they came to the sad understanding that the filmmaker meant the upcoming summer blockbuster, not… right, here and now.
Subsequently, ‘Salvation’ has earned its PG-13 stripes, but not because of the excising of said mammaries. No, the craftsman suggests he took those out of the film himself — for artistic reasons of course.
“There’s a topless scene of Moon Bloodgood that I thought was a very beautiful scene, that Moon thought was a beautiful scene, that we ultimately cut because we didn’t want to fall into any of the cliches of the genre, like “Here’s the scene where the beautiful girl takes her top off.” I thought it was a soft moment between a man and a woman that was designed to echo the Kelly McGillis/Harrison Ford moment in Witness, for God’s sake. They never touch each other; they just notice each other. But, in the end, it felt more like a gratuitous moment of a girl taking her top off in an action picture, and I didn’t want that to convolute the story or the characters.”
What a champ. The element specifically cut from the film in order to earn the coveted PG-13 rating was apparently a stabbing-a-screwdriver-through-the-shoulder moment. “We thought, ‘Well, that would be ridiculous to make it tough for kids to go see this movie.’ We were inspired by ‘The Dark Knight’ getting a PG-13 and being a film without any compromises,” McG said whilst lighting a cigar with a crisp $100 bill. [Sci-Fi Wire]