I don't really know how to talk about this topic to be honest, but I'm going to give it a try and...
I'm only here to start a conversation
Okay, so if you look at the directors of 1,000 popular films in the last 10 years you can understand why someone
might say that filmmakers have to be male because
96% of them have been men. Things are slightly more diverse when you include writers Producers Editors and
cinematographers in that data
But it's still a significant imbalance and of course the big question is why is this happening?
Now what initially got me thinking about this was this tweet from Jen Richards?
I rarely meet men in real life as extraordinary as ones on film and
Rarely see women on film as extraordinary as ones I know in real life
And hearing that was like yeah
I can easily rattle off tons of male characters that are extraordinary whether for saving the entire planet
sacrificing their own life for someone else
just being exceptionally intelligent or
Iconically and complexly evil. Now of course there are some female characters in mainstream films that are similarly
exceptional, similarly extraordinary, but I think it's fair to say the list is smaller
And that's kind of odd. Now if you combine that with Dr Stacy Smith's huge analysis of who has given the speaking roles in movies
Females are still
noticeably absent on screen and film
across eight hundred movies
And thirty five thousand two hundred and five speaking characters less than a third of all roles go to girls and women
It really seems like there's an imbalance in front of the camera as well as behind and you know people have been saying
for years that so often it seems like the female characters are
only there as a love interest or only there to look at while the male characters are
Three-dimensional and really well developed. But should we really be that surprised by this based on how many of the directors and writers are men?
so I asked people on Twitter for some ideas as to why film careers are so male-dominated and here are some of the responses
because women don't engage in labor-intensive careers as much as men do this is by choice and not due to discrimination.
and same reason why women tend to dominate nursing and teaching industries on average
It seems men are more interested in the biz than women. Now, there is definitely some...
logic to that rationale. Like it's- it's true that if there are more men who are interested in filmmaking it would make sense that
more men would end up being filmmakers.
So for example these videos are about filmmaking and they're completely free, so in theory
Anyone who is interested in filmmaking could watch these. And yet my analytics show
90% male viewers which suggests that maybe the average man is more interested in filmmaking than the average woman.
But then I saw Lizzie's response to my twitter question on
Filmmaking she said I've never met a girl or any friend of mine with that same interest
So I asked her whether she thought that more young women would be interested in filmmaking if there were more
More female role models in industry and she said she thought they would
We're not seeing women in leadership positions
So therefore we've not seen it in real life
one interesting example is that
We studied the occupations of all female characters in Film and TV, and on TV,
there are so many female forensic scientists, because of CSI and those shows, that
colleges are scrambling to keep up with the number of women who want to study forensic
science because they'd seen it right then they'd say hey that looks great. I could do that. Well. We're not seeing women
directing
films we're also not seeing female directors on
screen. Because the truth is I don't know how different my life would be if the tables were turned if
Directing was so female dominated that most people couldn't even name three male directors
So I imagine if Hitchcock, Kubrick, Spielberg, Tarantino imagine if they were all female surely
I'd be less likely to pursue filmmaking
I mean, I'd like to think that I would go against the grain and I would still want to be a filmmaker
But I honestly don't know what that would be like and so I don't think we can dismiss these conversations about inequality
Just by saying that women are less interested in filmmaking
Because what if it's a cycle? There are fewer female role models in filmmaking,
so that probably means that women are less likely to
Pursue a career in film which then means that in the future that will be less role models.
But of course even if that's true
there's never just one factor to things like this, that can't be the whole story
and there's actually a fair amount of data suggesting that there is an active bias against women in Hollywood
Now apparently close to 50% of students at the two major u.s.
film schools are female and yet the higher you rise on a directing food chain the fewer women can be found
As soon as I made twilight, I would have thought it would be a lot easier because I could prove that I made
four hundred million dollars for a studio on a and on a
37 million Dollar Budget, and it spawned a huge franchise and all the other franchise was similar to it
But it was not easy for me after that in fact. It was just as difficult in my next movie. I got paid less.
I did all the steps, I did the guyish movies
I did the movie that wasn't a chick flick
And I was nominated for an oscar and I had the follow up feature that won awards.
You work hard you achieve your things, you pay your dues and you go up
But when you keep hitting walls when you shouldn't be hitting walls, it all makes no sense to you anymore
And it's even more clear in front of the camera because big-budget movies generally make more money and yet the studios
Consistently provide larger budget to films that are more focused on men
It's not even rational though because if you look at similarly budgeted movies the ones that have female characters with speaking roles
Actually make more money in the u.s.
than those with less than two female characters even
internationally the films that don't exclude women bring in just as much profit for the studios and
So we have to applaud the women who have been going against the grain dealing with the doubt from people who are either
Prejudiced or simply not used to working with female collaborators
And we can be especially grateful to those who have been actively fighting for equality for decades already
And it has been working
Patty Jenkins is breaking records with her success directing Wonder Woman and although there still aren't many jobs for women in film
things have improved because in
1979 they found that only 0.5% of film jobs went to women and that number has risen over time
But there's still a long way before we can say that we have equal opportunity so for now. We have to look at ourselves
for example a couple of years ago
I directed a short film and
there was not a single woman on set for the entire duration of the shoot and that's on me.
And if I remember correctly I don't think anyone even mentioned it throughout the entire shoot either
No one.. it wasn't seen as a strange thing to happen
Now since then I have made more of an effort
to collaborate with women and not just to fill a quota and not just so I can say that I'm gender neutral no
it's about hearing different people's perspectives
And I honestly believe that it's beneficial to have different kinds of people working on a project together
Just like how a bunch of teenagers would make a very different film to a bunch of 50 year olds
It's just good to have a range of different like
Viewpoints so on my last short film we have an almost 50/50 Gender split
and then when two of the actors wrapped, for the rest of the day
they were actually more women on set and it's ridiculous to think but somehow
reflecting the global population of fifty fifty actually felt like an achievement
now at this point some people will say hang on if
filmmakers are making a conscious effort to collaborate with women
then won't there be some men who will lose a job or miss out on an opportunity
purely for the fact of their gender even if they are like more experienced and here's my response to that let's imagine that
the industry was flipped so that 95% of all
directors were women, so that there were fewer male characters,
and they rarely spoke to each other. Now like seriously imagine like firing
most of the male writers directors cinematographers
and replacing them with women. Just hypothetically if that happened tomorrow and
continued that way for about a hundred years then in total, what we'd have is
First 100 years of film world being dominated by men, and then 100 years of it being dominated by women
equality
Now it doesn't really look like that's going to happen
so when someone suggests that maybe we should just just nudge things slightly more towards
50/50 split when someone makes a suggestion like that
why are we complaining? Now of course a lot of these ideas also apply to racial inequality and
women of color are especially underrepresented in the film world, but I want to look at that properly in a future video.
So I am really curious to hear your thoughts on this whole topic. I'm very I'm going me down in the comments
This is going to be a discussion basically but first
I think it's important to acknowledge the women who have been talking about this long long before I even
realised that this was a problem
So in the description there are links to the full videos that I've used clips from as well as the research that I've quoted in
this video. And to close this video let me hand over to Jessica Chastain. I do hope that when we
include more female storytellers, we will have more of the women that I recognise in my day to day life.
Ones that are proactive have their own agencies
Don't just react to the men around them they have their own point of view.