Tomorrowland Scribes Talk Writing Female Characters; George Clooney Addresses Moderation Vs. Censorship

In a recent interview with Vulture, Tomorrowland co-writer Damon Lindelof, director Brad Bird, and star George Clooney managed to make me more hype for the film than Clooney’s flying bathtub ever could.

When asked by the interviewer about Tomorrowland‘s main female characters, Bird explained that the character of Casey (played by Britt Robertson) was originally intended to be a dude, but that the script worked much better with the part written for a woman. Lindelof explained,

There is a completely false perception of, “Well, our main character is interested in space travel, so it’s gotta be a boy,” but the first time I said, “Well, what if it was a young girl …

It just felt like it was exactly right for us. I also think that if you have a female lead, people suddenly go, “Oh, there has to be a romantic entanglement.” Like, if you’re doing Hunger Games, it’s not enough that you’re dropped into an arena and everyone’s trying to kill you — there has to be not one, but two romantic entanglements! So Brad and I thought, What if she doesn’t get distracted by romantic entanglements? What if her “romance” is with the future?

It’ll be nice in 10 or 15 years for this not to be a thing anymore. I think we’re now in this post–Hunger Games, post-Twilight, post-Insurgent era where these movies make tons of money, you don’t even think twice about it, and they’re great characters. But for us, it was always more interesting — particularly the energy for Frank to be pulled along, kicking and screaming, by these two young women.

Lindelof also addressed online critics, kneejerk cynicism surrounding new creative properties, and skeptical fanboys:

There’s this great thing in all of us where we want to hope, we want to believe. But then what happens? We saw that hope with Obama’s first election … and then, with the second election, the cynicism sets in. We all want to be activated, but…it’s so easy to default back to cynicism. Which isn’t to say that you have to love everything — obviously, we have to open ourselves up to some level of criticism. But when we all took this on, people were saying, ‘You can’t make an original movie anymore, and you certainly can’t make an interesting Disney movie. If you make a Disney movie named Tomorrowland, it’s gotta have Space Mountain, and you basically have to sell tickets to the amusement park.

[…] Now, I don’t want to start a war, but as a self-identified fanboy, I think that with this movie, it’s gonna be really hard for fanboys to say, ‘I really enjoyed this movie. It made me feel good.’ God forbid you tweeted something like that! What would happen to you? You’d lose your readership! ‘You sold out!’

In response to Vulture’s assertion that “Twitter can be a rough place,” Clooney remarked

Listen, we’re at sort of a cynical time in society. Don’t ever read comments on anything! People can live anonymously, and I honestly think that when they were talking about freedom of speech in 1787, the theory was that you had to own your speech. It had to belong to you, and you actually had to take some responsibility for it. Now you can just sit alone and say horrible things, and it becomes fashionable to be shitty to people.

What do you think of their comments, gang?

(via Indiewire)

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