Julianne Moore warns women are being pushed back

“The Hours” star Julianne Moore bemoaned the drop in leading roles for women in Hollywood on Saturday, saying women were being squeezed out everywhere. The Oscar-winner said women have to band together, with the number of women and girl leads in top-grossing movies down 10 per cent in a year to 37 per cent, according to the University of Southern California Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. “It’s not endemic just to the film industry, it’s global,” she said at the Cannes Film Festival, after getting a Women In Motion award.

“There’s not representation in the media, there’s not representation in higher education. There are lots of places where we don’t have the representation we deserve,” the actor added. The fall comes after a study earlier this year by the same university found only nine of the 100 biggest US movies last year were directed by women. “How do you change that? You do it slowly, steadily, speaking up, using your privilege, hiring more, talking about alliances,” Moore said. “I feel like women are each other’s greatest allies, and that’s the secret sauce.”

Moore, 65, said progress has been made, saying “I can remember being on a set not too long ago where the only women were me and the third AC (assistant camera),” who takes care of the focus on the camera. “I said (to her), ‘Look around the room. We’re the only ones here.’” Moore, who won her Oscar for “Still Alice” in 2015, and has four other nominations, said she gives gratuitously violent or shocking films a wide berth. “When things are rough globally.... I don’t like someone being murdered. I don’t like explosions and guns. I don’t like histrionics. I don’t like things that raise the stakes without real feeling underneath... I don’t want to watch it.”

Meanwhile, South Korean maestro Bong Joon-ho — who won three Oscars and the Palme d’Or at Cannes for “Parasite” — is making his first animated film. “Ally” is the story of a clever piglet-like squid living in the depths of the Pacific Ocean, and shows how “encounters between humans and the creatures of the deep can reshape both worlds,” according to its producers.

The acclaimed director told reporters at the Cannes Film Festival that he hopes to try to match Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki and George Miller of “Babe” fame. “I’ve always wanted to create an awesome action sequence that can surpass the great ones created by George Miller or Miyazaki, and I felt this film was my chance to practice that ambition,” he told the film industry bible Variety at the Cannes Film Festival.

Bong, who won a cult following for films like the sci-fi “Snowpiercer”, has already made a creature feature, “Okja”, starring Paul Dano and Tilda Swinton in 2017.

He admitted his fans “might be surprised that it’s an animation”. “But once they actually see the film” next year “it’ll be quite familiar to them and they might be happy to see my signatures.” Bong, 56, has been working on and off on the movie for nearly seven years and released the first images of the family feature last month. It is expected to be completed in the first half of 2027 and released later in the year.

Agence France-Presse