There are also ways in which, you know, I mean the ACLU is suing the Hollywood studios right now. They’re bringing a discrimination suit on behalf of female filmmakers. They have enough evidence of discrimination over the years to do that, which is really frustrating. Either market or the law will ultimately force the studios to become more diverse. You’re also seeing more consciousness about that. “Oscars So White” was the first big backlash against that, and that was last year? And the year before that was the terrible all-male year, where it was like “Birdman” versus “Boyhood”? And it’s like, all right, do we have any stories about women ever being told? There is more awareness of that in Hollywood, but it’s still a white man’s world. It’s hard to break out of that. But Trump’s election has raised awareness about the power of racism and misogyny in a way that has made people who think that these problems are solved, it’s convinced them that they’re not and that we still need to work really hard on them to make sure that we don’t slip backwards and that we in fact make more progress toward equality, because we have not achieved it. There are a lot of white liberal men in Hollywood who think, “Ah, my life is going fine.” They don’t realize the lack of equality because they don’t experience it firsthand, and I think it’s hard if you’re not in the body of the person experiencing it.

Unless you’re the one experiencing it, it’s very hard to understand that it’s happening. This cultural moment is encouraging people to pull their blinders down and really look at what’s going on. My hope is that it will change the diversity issues in Hollywood and that Hollywood will become a more diverse place, but I think it’s encouraging that we have alternative platforms of television—which is making a huge comeback because Hollywood is so boring and dull—online distribution which is even getting around cable networks and all of their balkanized interests. But we also have independent filmmaking, you know, and a film like “Moonlight” came out of independent financing, so that’s encouraging. It’s encouraging that it doesn’t take as much money and funding as it used to take to make a film, just because technology has gotten more accessible and easier to use and cheaper than it’s ever been. That will also allow access to groups that traditionally have not had as much access to filmmaking.

THC: On the opposite side of the spectrum, we have “Mulan,” which is getting a live-action remake. Only an Asian or Asian-American actress will be hired as the main character, but it’s gotten backlash because the director, who is a woman, is a white woman. What do you think of representation behind the camera?

RS: It’s incredibly important, and it’s often hard to make legible because people—unless you’re a film geek—don’t often think about the director. Everyday people who go to see a film like “Mulan” are not thinking about the producer or the casting agent or all of these people whose decision-making goes into what ends up on screen, and the identity of those people, and how their identity affects their ability to represent what’s on screen. If you have a non-Asian-American woman producing a film about Asians, there’s some pantomiming going on there. There’s some equivalence of Scarlett Johansson being cast as an Asian character… That’s why stars are the number one branding agents in the film, and only secondarily are directors branding agents. It takes a certain degree of film savvy to even care who directed a film. People go to franchise films, the next Batman film because that’s a brand. They go to the next Scarlett Johansson film because that’s a brand. But only in a tertiary role would the director’s name or gender or ethnic or racial identity factor into that.

It’s my sense that people go to films mostly on the basis of what’s in them rather than what’s produced them. It’s entirely problematic that we don’t see any diversity in those arenas either because studios don’t allow diversity in those arenas, they shut that diversity out.

THC: What do you think it will take for this momentum of awareness to keep going?

RS: I think we’ve passed a threshold where we’re not going back to complacency—I hope. There is such a thing as resistance or protest fatigue, and I think you’re seeing some of that right now, but I think that awareness is now so deep in us, the injury committed to all of us by the last election and how that corresponded with identity politics is… That cut so deep that I don’t think that injury is going to heal anytime soon. People are going to stay woke for a while. That was already in happening in Hollywood, though. I think it was what pushed Hollywood into realizing this more, and I think now you also see greater funding efforts for minorities in cinema. There’s movement for sure. The O’Reilly firing is a positive symptom of that, that people are not complacent… yet.

—Staff writer Mila Gauvin II can be reached at mila.gauvin@thecrimson.com.