Tim Burton’s latest film, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, comes out today. It is a rare Tim Burton film featuring an actor of color in a somewhat lead role – while Eva Green plays Miss Peregrine, the would-be heroine of the piece, Samuel L. Jackson is the villain and his role is pretty major. Burton’s films are not known for being very diverse – Bustle points out that Burton has cast Billy Dee Williams and Michael Clarke Duncan in supporting roles in previous films, but for the most part, Burton’s oeuvre is a sea of white. Bustle asked Burton why that is, and what he thinks about the move towards more racially diverse casting in Hollywood:
“Nowadays, people are talking about it more,” he says regarding film diversity. 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.”
This reminds me of the case of sads I had after reading that Coen Brothers interview about diversity. As for this… I’m sorry, what? He’s offended by the “political correctness” of inclusion? He’s offended by the very idea that the Brady Bunch kids would interact with Asian children or black children? And he doesn’t even understand that the blaxploitation movies were the way black entertainers found a way to work when all of the mainstream white writers, directors and producers weren’t telling their stories? Burton is literally using the “reverse racism” argument – like, isn’t it sort of racist that those blaxploitation films didn’t have any white leads?!? And that really is his answer: “sure, Hollywood has always been focused on telling white stories with white actors 99.9% of the time but hey we don’t make you put white people in your independent blaxploitation films!”
Photos courtesy of WENN.
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