Niki Caro comments on ‘Mulan’ music, gender gap in Hollywood
Disney has set a live-action Mulan is in development, but very little is known at the moment. That said, director Niki Caro previously stated the film will not include any songs, disappointing many, many fans and now Caro corrects her remarks.
“No, not at all. I mean, I haven’t even started on the movie yet,” Caro said in a new interview with Moviefone (via Heroic Hollywood),
“I haven’t seen a single casting yet, and these are conversations that are all ongoing. The live-action is based on that inspirational Chinese ballad and on the animated Disney classic. We’re still exploring the role that music’s going to play in it, but for sure there will be music.”
Translation: the studio didn’t like my remarks and if I want to keep the job I’ll be adding music to keep the fans happy.
Caro mentioned casting which has been a controversial topic as the fans are calling for an ethnic cast to reflect the original film.
The Caro is making herself a lightning rod for attention, calling out Hollywood’s gender gap.
Her most recent film, The Zookeeper’s Wife, is a war-era drama adapted from Diane Ackerman’s novel of the same name. It tells the true story of Antonina Żabińska (Jessica Chastain) who hid over 300 Jews in her Polish zoo during the Holocaust.
The film inspired Caro to speak out, telling The Huffington Post: “My gender should have absolutely nothing to do with it, at least in discussing the quality of my work, in which case I’m very proud to be working in a feminine way. But now that [The Zookeeper’s Wife] is out, I look at the statistics on female directors, and now it’s time for me to speak up. I’ve been silent for personal reasons, but now I’m very happy to say publicly that it’s a shameful statistic. Just the sheer ignoring of 50 percent of the available skill and talent and vision and tenacity and ambition appalls me.”
Caro alluded to gender biases during a Q&A at the end of an interview for AOL‘s Build series. One audience member stated: “It seems to me that this film had to have been directed by a woman, surely?”, to which she responded: “I recognised that femininity and strength are not mutually exclusive, and I think that femininity has often been equated with weakness, but we know it’s not.
“We know, from our mothers, our sisters, our daughters, our friends, that our strength comes – female strength – comes in all kinds of forms. So I was thrilled to – well, firstly to partner with Jessica, who’s all those things and more brilliant – to put a hero up there and tell a war story from a female point of view, because as we know, war didn’t just happen to men. It also happened to women and children and animals, and this also speaks for them.”
Mulan is scheduled for November 2nd, 2018.
That release date is too ambitious unless a ton of work on the cast/production have been done in secret. Keep an eye out for updates.
