Creed director and noted man Ryan Coogler thinks women are better filmmakers than men, which is a nice thing to say.
In an interview with Variety this week, the director of Creed and Fruitvale Station (and, most recently, Marvel’s upcoming Black Panther film) stated the obvious: that female directors don’t get the same opportunities as men. He adds, too, that he thinks women are better at directing, as we are at many things in life.
After warmly referring to Ava DuVernay as a “good friend” and “a special person, bro,” Coogler has a weird off the record moment, telling Variety:
I really feel like, you know — this is off the record — I feel like women are better filmmakers than men.
It goes on:
You really don’t want that on the record?
Yes, you can put that on the record.
I think you should put that on the record. It’s a powerful thing to say.
Put it on the record. I mean, it’s true, bro. In film school, life, whatever, they’re equipped to do this job, in many ways, better than us. They’re infinitely more complex than we are. Stronger and sharper. So, you know, we’re going to get better movies [if we have more female filmmakers]. The industry would improve. That’s the best thing I could say about that. They’ve got to be given the opportunity.
Ah, some men are good for something. He may be right, because my favorite movie Love & Basketball was directed by none other than a woman.
Transparent’s Jill Soloway made a similar poignant remark in a New Yorker profile back in December, referring to women as natural storytellers. “We all know how to do it. We fucking grew up doing it! It’s dolls,” she says. “How did men make us think we weren’t good at this? It’s dolls and feelings. And women are fighting to become directors? What the fuck happened?”
There’s also this little tidbit in Coogler’s interview about his writing of female characters who don’t rely on men for personal growth. In Creed (a wonderful movie), it’s Bianca (Tessa Thompson), the girlfriend of the main character, boxer Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan).
Coogler says, “Bianca’s interesting to me because she knows exactly who she is. She knows who she wants and that’s really what attracts Adonis to her... A man—not Adonis, not Rocky—is not going to change Bianca. The only person who’s going to change Bianca is Bianca.”
Contact the author at clover@jezebel.com.
Image via Getty
DISCUSSION
No, “women” as a whole are neither better at nor worse at anything than men are, but each of us has our own individual strengths or weaknesses (GASP I KNOW).
I could probably be a better filmmaker than Michael Bay but a worse one than Stanley Kubrick I hate this pseudo-empowering “women are better than men at X” shit. We’re not more or less complex than your average guy because we’re not a fucking monolith. Nor are we some mystical foreign species of “natural storytellers” that is more in touch with the moon and the tides. Why is that so hard to understand?