Even in my film school class, every student was male.
That says loads right there. It would have been interesting if there had been one or two females and what they would say if you asked them why do you want to be a director. But you didn’t even have the opportunity to do that so that left you with only (what to you seemed perfectly logical) assumptions.
This got me thinking about the James Bond movie producer Barbara Broccoli. She's a female producer, but she always hires male directors to do the Bond movies. Would she feel that hiring a female director, would be taking a chance, even though she is female?
Its interesting you say that because the bias in the industry is not strictly overt in its discrimination. It’s a culture that’s in place. And it extends to women too. I’ll note the example of producer Kathleen Kennedy who so many love to bash for seemingly going out of her way to promote a feminist agenda in the recent
Star Wars movies. Well even she said something sort of dispiriting when asked whether a female director would have the chance to direct any of the
Star Wars movies (before they had released any). She said she’d love to have a female director but “We need to not go to a filmmaker who’s done one movie and expect them to come in and do something the size of
Star Wars without having an opportunity to find other movies they can do along the way.”
The irony here is that male directors frequently take the reins of a giant Hollywood blockbuster after making just one small budget film. In fact, Kennedy hired Gareth Edwards to direct
Star Wars: Rogue One after he made the microbudget indie
Monsters and the fairly unimpressive
Godzilla. Can you imagine if Kennedy had hired a woman to direct Last Jedi how much more vitriolic the reaction would have been from the anti "female agenda" folks? They would have been screaming about how hiring an "inexperienced woman" was the sign of a clear agenda even if they had made the exact same movie as Rian Johnson. But a lot less people called Johnson an unqualified hack then they called Kennedy a dictator pushing her own agenda. I wonder why that is...
Kennedy’s own husband, Frank Marshall, picked Colin Trevorrow to make the $150 million
Jurassic World after having made just one little indie film for significantly less than $1 million. So even among other women theres an assumption that women have to keep proving themselves over and over when a man can make one movie and hit the jackpot. That’s what I meant when I said women need to have pages of qualifications while men just need to have “a feel” for the material in many cases.
), but that feminist aura around it was pretty distasteful. Making an exploitation film whose main protagonist is afraid to show her boobs is pretty inane too. Look into the works of Akerman or Chytilová for some quality feminist cinema.
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