Emma Watson on Women in Film

After premiering as Belle in Beauty and the Beast, Emma’s seized the opportunity to talk about women in the film industry, and why it’s so very important to have female-centric films.

The film industry is a harsh one for women; they’re constantly criticized for everything they wear and do and are often put down before movies have even premiered.

Several examples are given by Elle UK , one being the outpouring of outrage that men expressed on the internet after Felicity Jones’s casting was announced for Rogue One. 

Elle’s 2017’s Women of the Year said in an interview with Marie Claire Australia that “It’s something they’re not used to, and they don’t like that.”

‘Anything that deviates from the norm is difficult to accept. I think if you’ve been used to watching characters that look like, sound like, think like you, and then you see someone [unexpected] up on the screen, you go, “Well, that’s a girl, she doesn’t look like me. I want it to look like me so that I can project myself onto the character,”‘ she adds.”

Watson’s completely right, we constantly seek to identify with those that we see on screen; and men just aren’t able to identify with female characters. While there have been strong women on screen, just the fact that men become outraged over a casting of a woman is problematic enough. Watson continues:

[Women] see whoever is on screen and recognise the human qualities in the man that we relate to, and there’s not such a gap. But for some reason, there’s some kind of barrier there where [men] are like, “I don’t want to relate to a girl.” I think it is inherently part of the problem’.’

If we start casting more and more women in leading roles in film and television, we’ll be taking more steps to equal representation.

As a move towards equal representation, MTV has eliminated the gendered categories for awards,  so Emma’s performance in Beauty and the Beast will be judged against Logan with Hugh Jackman.