Paul Feig Corrects Quote Regarding Assholes in Geek Culture

On Friday, we shared a story about Paul Feig’s comments about the current state of geek culture. In those comments, he said, “Geek culture is home to some of the biggest assholes I’ve ever met in my life.” According to the New York Daily News’ original article, those comments came as a response to the backlash around his upcoming Ghostbusters movie. Last night, however, Feig took to Twitter to correct the article, saying that the comments were not from a recent interview, but rather an interview from back in February of 2015. That older interview was for a book on geek culture that was “then sold to the New York Daily News, misrepresenting them as being my response to recent Ghostbusters reporting.”

In short: his comments weren’t directed at the fan backlash. He even went on to explain, “I very much regret saying in my answer that I had actually ‘met’ any ‘assholes’ from the geek community.” He seems to very much mean “met” in the “physically met” sense as he clarified that his initial comments were directed towards online geek culture. “The ‘assholes’ of which I speak are the ones who live online, who write those hateful tweets and posts and comments,” he wrote. “I’m not talking about the people who have true concerns and worries about the rebooting of a franchise they love, nor am I talking about people who have watched the trailer for our movie and didn’t like it.”

In his clarification tweet, Feig wanted to celebrate the good things and people within geek culture. He denounces the bullies that make geek culture terrible and tries to raise up the “true geeks of the world.” You can read his entire statement above.

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Jessica Lachenal

Jessica Lachenal is a writer who doesn’t talk about herself a lot, so she isn’t quite sure how biographical info panels should work. But here we go anyway. She's the Weekend Editor for The Mary Sue, a Contributing Writer for The Bold Italic (thebolditalic.com), and a Staff Writer for Spinning Platters (spinningplatters.com). She's also been featured in Model View Culture and Frontiers LA magazine, and on Autostraddle. She hopes this has been as awkward for you as it has been for her.

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