Worth fighting for Eva-lasting change
IT’S been a tough few years for the Cannes Film Festival after it was exposed as a playground for sexual predators, including shamed Harvey Weinstein.
Some even wondered if Cannes could survive with such shocking stories hanging over its head.
But this year, it seems the festivities have turned a corner. And one of Time’s Up’s founders, Eva Longoria, 44, admits a group of powerful women are working to expose unequal pay in Hollywood.
The Desperate Housewives star recently found she was getting underpaid and says she now regularly calls pals including Reese Witherspoon, 43, and Natalie Portman, 37, to question their fees.
She says: “The great thing that has come out of MeToo and Time’s Up is that women are talking to each other. We have this wonderful sisterhood of community. I am able to call Reese and say: ‘What happened to this studio?’ I’m able to call on Natalie Portman and she will call me. We go ‘you got what?’”
When she was confronted with unequal pay she said it was hard as “you want to do the work and they hold the work to ransom”.
Now director Eva plans to have mainly women working on productions.
Speaking at Kering’s Women In Motion talk, she adds: “I have a wonderful producer and she will make sure the camera crew hires women. You need to lock up your man as we will fill those positions first with women and then people of colour because we have to start building a pipeline of talent.”
She says: “The way women shoot a sex scene is definitely a different perspective to the way a man would. I’m not saying we are better but it is different to what you normally see.” Despite making progress, she says Hollywood is still “a patriarchal society... most studios are still run by men. “We need to educate gatekeepers. But I’m not only going to educate you, I’m going to take your job. That’s what we need to do.” Maybe Eva could be a full-time motivational speaker...