Sci-fi lacks female voices: Cameron
At the AMC Visionaries: James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction event last week, the director predicted not only that, in the next decade, we will see a sci-fi film win Best Picture at the Oscars, but the entire genre will receive a larger platform and no longer be the “red-headed stepchild when it comes to the acting, producing, directing categories.”
Part of that means more diversity behind the camera, as Cameron said the genre remains “stale, male and pale.”
Cameron said of the genre’s early years, via IndieWire, “It was white guys talking about rockets. The female authors didn’t come into it until the ’50s and ’60s and a lot of them had to operate under pseudonyms.”
But, he added, “Women are still under-represented in science-fiction as they are in Hollywood in general. When 14 per cent of all film directors in the industry are female, and they represent 50 per cent of the population, that’s a big delta there that needs to get rectified.”
One of the more recent strong female characters brought to the screen by a female director, Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman, is not quite what Cameron had in mind.
Last August, the director stepped in a little hot water when he declared to The Guardian, “All of the selfcongratulatory back-patting Hollywood’s been doing over Wonder Woman has been so misguided. She’s an objectified icon, and it’s just male Hollywood doing the same old thing! I’m not saying I didn’t like the movie but, to me, it’s a step backwards.”
Jenkins responded on Twitter, saying, “inability to understand what Wonder Woman is, or stands for, to women all over the world is unsurprising as, though he is a great filmmaker, he is not a woman … If women have to always be hard, tough, and troubled to be strong, and we aren’t free to be multidimensional or celebrate an icon of women everywhere because she is attractive and loving, then we haven’t come very far, have we?”
Cameron then doubled down to the Hollywood Reporter, saying, “(Gal Gadot) was Miss Israel, and she was wearing a kind of bustier costume that was very formfitting. She’s absolutely dropdead gorgeous. To me, that’s not breaking ground.”
He feels Terminator’s Sarah Connor broke ground because there wasn’t “anything sexual about her character.”
During his AMC talk, Cameron congratulated himself again, claiming he’s always been down for gender diversity and he works with those who inspire him, and those filmmakers “tend to be women as much as men.
“In my universe, it’s 50/50. In the general Hollywood universe, it’s not. From my films, I like to write strong female characters. it’s hard for me to imagine doing a ‘guy film.’ It’s just not interesting to me. So I’d say I was innately doing that before it was fashionable.”
Someone give James Cameron a cookie. Or a life raft.