A woman’s man
> Director Paul Feig returns to what he knows best by presenting his latest female-led film, titled A Simple Favour
Adisappearance. And down the rabbit hole of her secretive life we go. Stephanie and Emily sit comfortably within the pantheon of female characters which have come to dominate Feig’s films: women who are all charismatic, but not always aspirationally so. Take, for example, Lindsay Weir, played by Linda Cardellini, in Feig’s first TV series, Freaks and Geeks (cancelled after one season but now a cult favourite). She’s smart, but also a self-conflicted burnout. Then there’s Kristen Wiig’s Annie from Bridesmaids, whose own personal crisis culminates into a public meltdown and a punch-up with a giant cookie. “I got tired of seeing how women were being portrayed in movies. It just got so bad, especially in comedies. They’re props basically,” Feig says. A Simple Favour marks a small excursion from the norm for Feig. He’s a director best known for out-and-out comedy, frequently collaborating with Melissa McCarthy to showcase her trademark slapstick, yet here the thriller elements share an equal stage with Feig’s sense of humour. The mix makes perfect sense, as Feig explains: “It’s such an inherently absurd genre, because everything’s so heightened, and there’s so many twists and turns. But, I like people to laugh. I always want the audience to feel like they can have a good time.” The idea of Feig simply wanting the world “to have a good time” seems like a fairly good summation of his character. There’s a sense of generosity to him. It’s well-known that Feig wears a suit for every occasion, even on set. His sartorial formality seems almost like an attempt to reassure those he meets that, yes, they are worth dressing up for.
In that light, it’s tempting to see Feig, a self-confessed geek, as the antithesis of the Ghostbusters trolls who hounded him.
The director admits he hadn’t realised he’d stepped on “the hornet’s nest” of fanboy venom when, in 2016, he took on Sony’s reboot of the Ghostbusters franchise and cast four women in the lead: McCarthy, Wiig, plus Saturday Night Live’s Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones.
To him, he’d simply chosen the four funniest people he knew.
But awaken the patriarchal beast it did; the film’s trailer became the most disliked in YouTube history, as misogynistic comments crawled in from every nook and cranny of the internet.
Ghostbusters had ceased to be a film. It was now a political battleground. And it’s a transformation that still frustrates Feig to this day.
“It became a political thing,” he says. “I think that’s why we didn’t do as well at the box office as we should have, because it’s a fun, summer movie.
“Some people were, like, we should make it every woman’s duty to go out and support this movie, but nobody wants that. I don’t want to go see a movie that’s, like, you have to make a statement by going to see this movie. I just want to go for fun.”
He admits, however, that the experience proved to be an eyeopener. To him, this wasn’t the normal reaction of the geek community of “spirited conversations” – but of something sinister, what he labels a “Trumpian” approach of “destroy them at all costs, ruin them”, a world entirely alien to him.
“I didn’t grow up in a family that did that. Or even a community that did that,” he says.
The world Feig grew up in (Michigan, to set the scene) was rich with female mentors and friends. An only child, he was close to his mother, while also living next door to a family with eight children, six of them girls.
“I think the key to a healthy male is for them to be friends with girls when they’re younger,” he adds. “I would always steer clear of the bullies and the jocks. Anything that had more toxic masculinity.”
He also credits his father, who would regularly lecture him on the moral codes of relationships and marriage.
“So, I always just lived my life terrified of doing anything that would be the wrong thing to do around women,” he says. “Even to the point that, I trained myself as a kid to always put the toilet seat down.” – The Independent