When Freaks and Geeks director Paul Feig signed on to helm the new Ghostbusters remake, it was on the condition that it have an all-female lead cast.
Feig is the man behind fellow female-driven comedies Bridesmaids, Spy and The Heat, and tells Marc Fennell he's passionate about promoting funny women in film because he felt they were being shut out of comedic roles.
“Watching years of comedy movies made by guys and seeing portrayals of women being not that great, and then the funny women I knew suddenly they were playing the girlfriend who wasn’t funny or the wife who was bitchy,” he says.
“It was like, I know all these funny women and they’re not being allowed to be funny.”
But it wasn’t simply a matter of giving funny women a platform, as Feig says he actually prefers female humour and telling female-led stories.
“I relate to them so much more and I like their stories more and I feel better writing for them that it just became a natural thing to start doing this,” he explains.
“Guys’ humour I find very aggressive a lot of times, there’s a lot of name calling, a lot of punching, a lot of homophobic remarks and I didn’t like any of that.”
What the director wasn’t prepared for however, was the vitriolic abuse he would go on to receive after announcing the Ghostbusters remake would be filmed with four women in the primary roles that were originally held by four men.
While Feig says he could live with the concerns of fans of the original series who didn’t want to see the films tampered with, it was the concerted misogynistic campaign, the likes of which he had yet to encounter in his career, that proved problematic.
For more of Feig's thoughts on funny women and how he coped with the end of Freaks and Geeks, watch the video.
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