Kevin Maher : I couldn’t interview a female film director

Mate the reason they don't want to be interviewed by you is not because you're a man, it's because you're a dick.

The Times employs several obnoxious writers whose job it is to get up peoples noses and put the boot in to get a reaction, like art critic Waldemar Januszczak and this guy, who is alleged to be a film critic. Read this haughty diatribe and be appalled.

Last week, mere hours away from a sit-down interview with a female director of a Hollywood movie I was told that I had been, unfortunately, axed from the chat by the director’s team of LA-based publicists. This is, alas, nothing new for me as I have, through the decades, and sometimes proudly, become an occasionally problematic figure for entire teams of LA-based publicists. Normally, when they discover that I’ve been booked for a London interview with one of their clients and they remember that I’m the one who previously didn’t comply with their ridiculous and grovelling star-sucking interview conditions, they axe me from the chat.

This one was different. Some emails pinged back and forth across the Atlantic until finally it was revealed that the ban from this particular interview was nothing personal. It was simply because, wait for it, I was a man. Yes, I was a man about to interview a woman. And this, from the perspective of contemporary Hollywood, was a crisis situation. Yep, I’ll say it again. I was a man! Booo! Not a person who had spent the greater part of their adult life devoted to film culture, to reading about it, watching it, and travelling the world in order to better comprehend how it relates to common human expression and an understanding of our place in a brief cosmic moment. I was, instead, just genitals on legs (nice nickname) who watched movies through his sex alone and, clearly, never once engaged his brain, let alone his heart.

My gob, obviously, was smacked. Can you imagine if the gender roles were reversed? “Nah, sorry, Mr Spielberg’s Team don’t want to proceed with the interview, because they think a man would do a better job!” The world would stop turning. Woman’s Hour would go thermo-nuclear. And there’s the serious side too. This, I realise now, is why Trump won. Huge swathes of the US that aren’t necessarily Bible-belting rage-filled Maga loons ultimately chose to vote for a thin-skinned, orange-faced criminal with tyrannical tendencies rather than hand the country over to the blatant hypocrisies of the label-obsessed Hollywood crowd. Remember, Hollywood is still a lethally effective and utterly toxic patriarchy, but one that hides behind the rhetoric of feminism, inclusion and the fundamental importance of women being interviewed by women.

And so am I worried? What does the future hold? It’s actually looking pretty rosy. Because, as of now, I’m loudly agitating against the possibility that my female colleagues will ever interview a male Hollywood director again. Oh, you want to speak to Scorsese? And you’re a woman? Forget it, honey! This one’s for the boys! And my non-white colleagues interviewing white film-makers? How very dare you? And as for my gay film-journalist friends? Sorry, but straight directors aren’t really your bag. They just have this, ye know, hetero vibe that you’ll never understand.

Clipped from I couldn’t interview a female film director — because I’m a man

Date clipped: 2024.11.25 09:07