The Ghostbusters Cast And Hillary Clinton Have a Lot in Common

This year saw more than its fair share of misogyny, and it seems as if just about every woman in the limelight has had to fend off trolls and critics. Ghostbusters director Paul Feig is the first to admit that his all-female cast saw a great deal of sexism throughout the film’s production and release, and in a recent interview with The Daily Beast, he compared their struggles to Hillary Clinton’s uphill battle with misogyny during the election.

“If anybody chooses to remember the two together, our movie and this whole [Hillary Clinton] campaign, I think it’s very hard to say there’s not a relationship between the angst that it caused in a certain part of the population,” Feig said, bringing up the video of Trump lamenting the Ghostbusters cast. “I think they are definitely tied. I think they will forever be tied. Whether people will remember a silly movie about ghosts in the same breath that they’re remembering a president of the United States, I don’t know. But I think there is a very interesting thesis that some future student could write about this that I’d love to read, because I think there’s a very interesting simpatico going on between the two.”

He added that the film’s critics also tended to be open about their political affiliations. “I would get angry at horrendous tweets and I would go back and see who said it, and a good amount of the time there would be some pro-Trump thing on there,” he said. “I don’t know how to say it, but things always get crazy before they get better. Everybody screams the loudest before the new normal happens, so if this is the death throes of that old way of thinking, then that’s great.”

But Feig notes that the way the cast handled their critics — like Leslie Jones making her Twitter trolls into a funny SNL moment – made it worthwhile. “These are strong, smart women who aren’t taking sh*t, who are standing up for themselves, who are being empowered and not being victims, and who are using their comedy to make statements and give their world its due. It makes me want to cry sometimes because you realize how it hasn’t been that way for so long because these voices weren’t allowed to say these things. These women have always been there, but they didn’t have the forum.”

Read the full interview at TheDailyBeast.com