Tim Burton‘s ill advised comments about diversity on Thursday meant he was trending on Twitter for all the wrong reasons. The veteran movie maker, and premier Johnny Depp employer, was doing the rounds promoting his latest cinematic offering Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, based on the 2011 bestseller by Ransom Riggs. Rachel Simon from online magazine Bustle asked the director why there was little diversity in the movie, and his comments didn’t exactly win him any fans…
“Nowadays, people are talking about it more, but things either call for things, or they don’t. I remember back when I was a child watching TheBrady Bunch and they started to get all politically correct. Like, OK, let’s have an Asian child and a black. I used to get more offended by that than just… I grew up watching blaxploitation movies, right? And I said, that’s great. I didn’t go like, OK, there should be more white people in these movies.”
Many people took to social media to air their grievances about the Edward Scissorhands director’s comments, especially after the article noted that his movies rarely feature any non-white characters:
To be honest, the film in question is set in Wales during WWII, so it probably wasn’t the most pertinent film to consider a diverse cast, but the question highlights a bigger problem in Hollywood: if a character carries no specific skin colour in the source material, why is it always assumed the character is white? For example, in the film Big Eyes, Walter and Margaret Keene are real people who were white, so it makes sense to cast white actors in those roles, however in ensemble films like Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Mars Attacks, any of the characters could have been non-white, so the idea of it being an ‘issue’ to cast a non-white actor is a bit of a flimsy excuse. Like, would casting a black actor as Mike Teavee or Harvey Dent really have made a difference to the narrative?
Billy Dee Williams who played Harvey Dent in Burton’s 1989 Batman movie has not commented on the scandal
Joking aside, Burton is clearly not as diverse as he could (should?) be, but he is by no means a white supremacist. As well as Williams‘ turn in Batman, he has also featured Jim Brown, Pam Grier, Michael Clarke Duncan, Evan Parke, Robert Guilaume, Ada and Arlene Tai, Deep Roy, James Hiroyuki Liao, James Saito and Samuel L Jackson in his work. I think the issue is less about what he has done in the past and more about what he has said. His comments come across insensitive and defensive, rather than reasoned. Seeing a diverse cast shouldn’t be a ‘thing’, it should be the norm. Maybe Burton can recover from this by becoming one of the directors that makes it less peculiar?
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children was released in cinemas on 30th September 2016
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Tim Burton’s Twitter Nightmare
Tim Burton‘s ill advised comments about diversity on Thursday meant he was trending on Twitter for all the wrong reasons. The veteran movie maker, and premier Johnny Depp employer, was doing the rounds promoting his latest cinematic offering Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, based on the 2011 bestseller by Ransom Riggs. Rachel Simon from online magazine Bustle asked the director why there was little diversity in the movie, and his comments didn’t exactly win him any fans…
“Nowadays, people are talking about it more, but things either call for things, or they don’t. I remember back when I was a child watching The Brady Bunch and they started to get all politically correct. Like, OK, let’s have an Asian child and a black. I used to get more offended by that than just… I grew up watching blaxploitation movies, right? And I said, that’s great. I didn’t go like, OK, there should be more white people in these movies.”
Many people took to social media to air their grievances about the Edward Scissorhands director’s comments, especially after the article noted that his movies rarely feature any non-white characters:
https://twitter.com/vincentvanngoth/status/781713597093154816
To be honest, the film in question is set in Wales during WWII, so it probably wasn’t the most pertinent film to consider a diverse cast, but the question highlights a bigger problem in Hollywood: if a character carries no specific skin colour in the source material, why is it always assumed the character is white? For example, in the film Big Eyes, Walter and Margaret Keene are real people who were white, so it makes sense to cast white actors in those roles, however in ensemble films like Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Mars Attacks, any of the characters could have been non-white, so the idea of it being an ‘issue’ to cast a non-white actor is a bit of a flimsy excuse. Like, would casting a black actor as Mike Teavee or Harvey Dent really have made a difference to the narrative?
Billy Dee Williams who played Harvey Dent in Burton’s 1989 Batman movie has not commented on the scandal
Joking aside, Burton is clearly not as diverse as he could (should?) be, but he is by no means a white supremacist. As well as Williams‘ turn in Batman, he has also featured Jim Brown, Pam Grier, Michael Clarke Duncan, Evan Parke, Robert Guilaume, Ada and Arlene Tai, Deep Roy, James Hiroyuki Liao, James Saito and Samuel L Jackson in his work. I think the issue is less about what he has done in the past and more about what he has said. His comments come across insensitive and defensive, rather than reasoned. Seeing a diverse cast shouldn’t be a ‘thing’, it should be the norm. Maybe Burton can recover from this by becoming one of the directors that makes it less peculiar?
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children was released in cinemas on 30th September 2016
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