Michael Keaton spoke about the importance of female directors during a panel discussion at this year’s Telluride film festival.
The Oscar-nominated star of Birdman was discussing the subject of women’s role in the industry in a summit on non-fiction films, alongside actors Meryl Streep and Rachel McAdams.
“I just read this script and it’s kind of fun and interesting and it falls into a type of genre,” he said “There’s a relationship in it between a man and a woman and my first question was, not to be politically correct because you hire the best person, but is there a woman out here who can direct this? I had a gut feeling that a woman would have a cooler take on this.”
Keaton is at the festival to support his turn as journalist Walter ‘Robby’ Robinson in drama Spotlight, which details the Boston Globe investigation into child abuse within the Catholic church. He spoke about his desire to avoid “doing an impression” yet also remaining true to his subject.
“I do think there’s something in the way people move and the tiny little physical things that they do as they really reflect something about them,” he said. “It’s really easy to be embarrassed by what you’ve done and be really inaccurate.”
Spotlight’s director Tom McCarthy remarked that he “grew up watching Michael”, to which Meryl Streep quipped: “Oh he loves hearing that”. Keaton responded: “Oh yeah that’s like ‘My mum’s in love with you’”.
Given her range of fact-based films (from A Cry in the Dark to The Iron Lady), Streep also stressed the responsibility that comes with the biopic territory.
“I’ve spent a lot of time in my career who really lived and I think I feel a lot more trepidation about those roles,” Streep said. “I honestly feel more license with a character that I making up out of whole cloth.”
Streep stars as political activist Emmeline Pankhurst in Suffragette, which premiered at the festival on Friday. She stars alongside Carey Mulligan in a drama about the fight for women to get the ability to vote. “Women wanted the vote so that they can change their lives and now that we have it, we waste it,” she said. “We don’t realise that we can still change our lives”
She called Suffragette “a story of a lot of women right now” and stressed the importance of films based around these issues getting made. “I feel like things are changing,” Rachel McAdams concurred. “There’s an increase in conversation and that’s what I love about film”.
Streep also referred to all of her characters as important and joked that she has tried to invest in them all, except for the dark effects-packed comedy Death Becomes Her, she she stars as a woman desperate for eternal youth. “That movie turned out to have been almost a documentary with the state of plastic surgery in Los Angeles,” she said.
