Linda Woolverton: “We need originality. We need new stories.”

The screenwriter of such Disney hits as The Lion King, Alice in Wonderland, and Maleficent speaks out.

Some interesting observations from Linda Woolverton (Beauty and the Beast The Lion King, Alice in Wonderland, Maleficent, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil). Here are a few choice quotes:

What does writing a “strong female character” mean?

“It means somebody who is proactive in their world, who affects their world, isn’t a victim, even victimized by it — or if they are victimized by it, they take action to change that for themselves. They look at the world in interesting ways, maybe another way than the culture does. That makes a strong woman if she’s vocal about it, or even goes about trying to make change without being vocal about it. There are so many interesting ways to describe women besides just strong, even this pure difficult strength. It’s strong-willed.”

“Now [that] we’ve gotten ourselves in a position of like, ‘Oh, we can actually do things now,’ let’s do it. Let’s just not repeat the past, or not just take out a male protagonist and plunk in a female protagonist and call it good. I think that the feeling now that ‘Wow, we can have women flying around, and shooting rays at things, and blowing buildings up, just like the men always did’ — that’s great, but I think it’ll get really boring really quick, unless we add something, really the truth about ourselves.”

“To me, it’s like, ‘You know what? We’ve broken the door down, good for us. We slammed the door down through a variety of reasons, and we had a lot of leaders who helped us, and a lot of movements that helped us, like the #MeToo movement and others. Now we’ve stormed the castle, and we slammed the doors, and now we’re standing on the door, kind of like huffing and puffing. Okay, now the question for me is, okay, now what are you going to do with it? What are you going to do with it?’ That’s what I want to see.”

On the current state of movies which focus so much on sequels and remakes.

“We need originality. We need new stories. We need stories from different ethnicities and different cultures, which animation’s doing really great at. We need to do that in live-action as well, I think. I’m talking about the world, not just necessarily Disney. I don’t think we need to be remaking anything else. Let’s create things. Creation, that’s what women are best at. We create, right? We bring life.”

A trailer for Maleficent: Mistress of Evil

For the rest of the Indiewire article goes here.