Oscar-winning actor criticises lack of female directors as she picks up lifetime achievement award at Czech film festival
Helen Mirren has added her voice to a chorus of calls for more female film-makers to rise to prominence in the industry. Speaking at the Karlovy Vary international film festival in the Czech Republic, where she picked up a lifetime achievement award, Mirren said she hoped to see at least 50% of films made by women the next time she visited the event.
"I don't know how many female directors are presenting their films in this festival. I very much doubt that it's 50%. Not too many, I'm sure," she said during a speech in which she paid tribute to the film-maker Nora Ephron, who died last week. "When I was making films [early in my career] there were very, very few female directors, and there were certainly no women on set, which made taking one's clothes off all the more difficult," she observed, before remarking that directors such as Julie Taymor and Kathryn Bigelow had helped to shift the gender balance. "Things have moved on, but as far as I'm concerned, they haven't moved on enough," she added.
Mirren's comments echo those of fellow Oscar-winner Meryl Streep, who said last month that Hollywood was not paying enough attention to the box-office clout which female-oriented films can muster.
Speaking at the 2012 Women in Film Crystal + Lucy awards in Los Angeles, where she presented a prize to The Help's Viola Davis, Streep suggested that the US film industry's failure to recruit female visionaries was one of the reasons for the huge losses racked up by movies such as Disney space fantasy John Carter in the past year.
"In this room, we are very familiar with these dreadful statistics that detail the shocking under-representation of women in our business," she said. "[Women make up] 7-10% of directors, producers, writers, and cinematographers in any given year. This in spite of the fact that in the last five years, five little movies aimed at women have earned over $1.6bn: The Help, The Iron Lady (believe it or not), Bridesmaids, Mamma Mia! and The Devil Wears Prada.
"As you can see, their problems were significant because they cost a fraction of what the big tent-pole failures cost … Let's talk about The Iron Lady. It cost $14m to make it and brought in $114m. Pure profit! So why? Why? Don't they want the money?"
The lack of female representation in film also came up at the Cannes film festival in May after the French feminist group La Barbe took organisers to task for excluding women with a petition published in the Le Monde and the Guardian. All 22 films competing for this year's Palme d'Or were directed by men.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jul/02/helen-mirren-female-film-makers
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