Sasha Stone: “Men are Uniquely Built to Be Great Directors”

Sasha Stone’s 09.27.22 piece titled How to Fix the Oscars: Save Them or Kill Them has caught the ire of film twitter in unimaginable ways. The hate stems from this specific paragraph:

The one thing they should not be doing is blacklisting men or white men. Don’t do that. If Top Gun and Elvis have taught us anything, it’s that if you’re going to serve the hamburger, don’t forget the meat. Men are uniquely built to be great directors because they are more visual/spatial than women. This is an evolved trait over millions of years because men have built-in predatory eyes, both in hunting and in terms of sexuality/mating. That doesn’t make them predators; it just means they’re great at the visual stuff, which is why they make great movies.

I never really thought of comparing male and female filmmakers from a purely evolutionary standpoint, but if you just step back a bit, assess the arguments she’s making, then maybe you could, at the very least, understand her point of view.

Sasha is fearless. What she wrote is pure bait for the twitter hounds to take and attack. There will be no nuanced debate about the differences between male and female directors, it’s purely WAR from now on. Cancel her!

I sent Sasha’s excerpt to a friend who wrote back:

Men DO have predatory, animal-hunting eyes, and their visual sense does tend to be more aggressive and pointed than female-directed films.

Maybe that’s the case, but the importance of female filmmakers shouldn’t be dismissed either. When you watch a film via a female gaze it can offer a fresh new set of eyes to the viewer, incisive point of views that might not show up in male filmmaking.

There’s a plethora of great female filmmakers currently in the game, but maybe not enough: Jane Campion, Kathryn Bigelow, Lynne Ramsay, Kelly Reichardt, Lucrecia Martel, Andrea Arnold, Sofia Coppola, Joanna Hogg, Céline Sciamma, Maren Ade, Mia Hansen-Løve, Claire Denis.

Sadly, Hollywood is patriarchal. This goes back to the first days of the industry when only men ran the studios. It has always been about perceived power and who has it. Women never seemed to wield power like that.

Another thing I’ll point out, is that a friend of mine who runs a film school in Canada tells me that it only seems to be attracting males, even though there has been a concerted and intense effort to get more female students as well. The ratio is currently 10:2 male to female.

We should absolutely strive to get more women behind the camera, but not in forcefully strained fashion. These things tend come, if they ever do, organically.