What a Girl Wants

“If we tell little girls not to want what they want, are we limiting them?”                                                                          

Lindsay Doran, Prodcuer

Lindsay Doran, the producer of “Sense and Sensibilty”, “This is Spinal Tap” and “The Firm”, just to name a few gave an amazing panel at the Austin Film Festival called, “The Quagmire of the Female Character. Below are a few fragments of wisdom for her incredible talk.

Once upon a time there were movies about men who saved the world and women who stood on the sideline and shouted, “Way to go!” And there were romantic dramas and romantic comedies about women who cared about love and almost nothing else. And there were animated movies about princesses who waited around until a man came along to kiss them.

Then one day everyone woke up and decided it wasn’t a good idea for our female characters to be so passive, so the women turned into action stars and the animated princesses turned into warrior princesses or sometimes into just warriors. Whatever the men were doing in a movie, the women had to do it too, only better. Love stories and romantic comedies were deemed a thing of the past that sent the wrong message (i.e., that love matters more than anything else).

But – What if women really like love stories? And what if girls really like princesses? Is that so wrong? And what if love really does matter more than anything else? Is it OK for our female characters to cry once in a while? Is it OK for them to wear sexy outfits? And is it a better message if the female characters are just as good at fighting and killing as the guys?

Lindsay finisher her talk by saying, “Someone suggested a warning before rom coms that says, ‘This movie may not resemble reality’. Would  we do that before Die Hard? If not, is it because only men can distinguish fantasy from reality”