A couple of weeks ago The Hollywood Reporter held two roundtable conversations that forgot to include any women. Whoops. One was with cinematographers and the other was with writers.
The good news is that in their most recent roundtable with directors they included a woman, Kathryn Bigelow. The woman has so much momentum that they actually would have looked like idiots had they not included her.
The discussion is interesting in the fact that gender is not part of the conversation at all.
Here’s one of most interesting things that Kathryn Bigelow said:
I always want to make films. I think of it as a great opportunity to comment on the world in which we live. Perhaps just because I just came off the “Hurt Locker” and I’m thinking of the war and I think it’s a deplorable situation. It’s a great medium in which to speak about that. This is a war that cannot be won, why are we sending troops over there? Well, the only medium I have, the only opportunity I have, is to use film. There will always be issues I care about.
Awards Watch: Director Roundtable (Hollywood Reporter)
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Just ONE woman…? for f–k’s sake.
Well, at least they left the baseball caps at home…
Are you sure that photo is not photoshopped? I kid, but it does seem like “minorities on this side” “white guys on this side”
And I was intrigued by Kathryn Bigelow’s response to the first roundtable question: “Do you guys consider yourselves outsiders or insiders?”
“I think of it as a community that’s very porous. I don’t think of it in a bifurcated way. There’s a ton of mobility and it’s really all based on the content, the idea. If your idea is strong enough, you’re embraced. Otherwise you’re marginalized. I think it’s really a merit-based, very porous, elastic community.”
It’s interesting that the main topic of the conversation was on being an ‘outsider’ or ‘insider’. Yet the conversation revealed a lot more by what was NOT said.
For example, I couldn’t help but notice that Katherine Bigelow and Lee Daniels, the two ‘social outsiders’ by virtue of being a woman and an African American respectively, were far and away the least verbal of all the speakers. On the few occasions they did speak, it was mainly a one- or two-line statement to echo what someone else said or to ask a question.
Also, Peter Jackson spoke at length about his ‘outsider’ status as a New Zealander, probably because it was safe ground. However, Bigelow and Daniels refused to go there. While Daniels did refer to himself as an outsider, he was careful to frame it in a cinematic context, while Bigelow skirted the outsider issue altogether.
I guess it’s the Catch-22 of women and minorities. To talk about women and blacks as outsiders is to subtly reinforce their marginality. To NOT talk about it is to ignore the subject and thus squander a chance to raise awareness about it.
Lee Daniels is also gay, which makes him even more of an outsider.
Lee has been in the business for over two decades and his former partner is a major casting director.
I don’t think of him as an outsider.
If you them to hand you a gold statue, you keep your mouth shut. Just like Obama couldn’t have a conversation about race a week before the election. They should play it safe…for now at least.
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