LucasFilm says they’d love a female director for ‘Star Wars.’ We’d love that, too.
Official countdown until Star Wars: The Force Awakens sits at 63 days. It’ll be here before we all know it, so why not start looking to the future of the Star Wars saga? The folks at LucasFilm are certainly doing that, and have already lined up sequels and spin-off stories for the next few years. They’re also looking at doing something different for these next movies, and it’s something that we support 1,000,000%. LucasFilm would love to try and hire a female director.
You know, as Yoda once said, “Do or do not. There is no try.”
Kathleen Kennedy, the current president of LucasFilm — and who’s has been working in the film industry since the ’80s, alongside directors like George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg — recently spoke at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit. She is clearly a pretty powerful lady, and is actively looking to do more for women in Hollywood. She explained to The Guardian that six out of eight key players in developing the new Star Wars were women, and that’s not counting half of her executive team, which is all female.
Those numbers are pretty good, but this is just one movie at one studio. There’s still more to be done. Like, hiring a female director to helm one of the biggest movies of the next decade. On that, Kennedy told The Guardian, “There’s nothing [LucasFilm would] like more than to find a female director for Star Wars.”
“It’s a lot to do with opportunity and there has to be a concerted effort to create the opportunity,” she explained. “Part of our job is to nurture talent. We need to not go to a filmmaker who’s done one movie and expect them to come in and do something the size of Star Wars without having an opportunity to find other movies they can do along the way.”
Continuing, she added that, “There is an assumption made that the people involved should predominantly be men. There are women who are Star Wars fans. That’s what’s so insane…if things aren’t going to change my feeling is that you’ve got to do something to shake up the system in order to see if it’s going to work.”
Well, it’s time to shake it up. Episodes VIII and IX have directors, both male, but don’t think Star Wars is going to stop at the end of this next trilogy. The Star Wars stories (aka, the spin-offs) still need directors. Time to give one deserving, smart and awesome lady director the keys to the Millennium Falcon. From here on out, we’ll be watching Star Wars and its potential FEMALE directors with great interest.
Image via LucasFilm
