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Was 'Breaking Dawn - Part 2' Almost Rated R?

Ratings board 'said to pull back a little on the sound' to get a PG-13, director Bill Condon tells MTV News of one brutal scene.

For all the complaining from "real vampire fans" about the "Twilight" movies not having enough bite to them in the form of sex and violence, "Breaking Dawn - Part 2", the final film in the franchise, certainly delivers on both elements in unexpected ways.

(Spoilers ahead if you haven't seen "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2"!)

Those of you who have seen the final film know that, instead of following Stephenie Meyer's source material to the letter, director Bill Condon and screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg deviated from the book's climax and inserted their own shocking twist. The uneventful showdown in the book, between the Cullens, the wolf pack and their various witnesses vs. the Volturi, is replaced with an actual battle royale between the clashing clans that includes a lot more gruesome character deaths than we ever anticipated. It's an action sequence that ventures closer to R-rated territory than the sauciest of Edward and Bella's sex scenes.

When MTV News caught up with Condon recently, we asked him if the blood and gore involved in Alice's traumatic battle vision received any pushback from the notoriously strict MPAA ratings board and whether "Breaking Dawn - Part 2" almost received an R rating for violence.

"It was a close call, because they did say it was very, very intense," Condon said.

"I wrote a letter [to the MPAA ratings board] and said that this is the only way we could do it, and they were cool [with it]," he added. "They said to pull back a little on the sound, the crunchy [head-smashing/decapitating] sound, and we did, and that got us our [PG-13] rating. There was one [effect] where we rip a head and you kind of see it come apart [that] I was sure we would have more trouble with, but we didn't."

Check out everything we've got on "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2."

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