Brie Larson’s directorial debut Unicorn Store premiered at the Toronto Film Festival this week. She also starred in it. Did you know this woman is Captain Marvel too?
BuzzFeed News interviewed Larson in honor of her first feature-length film, and she had a lot to say about being a woman while also being a director, basically that everyone should stop focusing on what a woman director still has to “prove” in Hollywood:
“I get asked a lot in interviews, ‘As a female filmmaker do you feel like you need to prove blah blah blah?’ And although I think that’s a valid question, I think that’s perpetuating a narrative that’s unhelpful,” Larson said.
“I think that women have been, and minorities have been, proving that they’re capable and have been showing up for a really long time. And it’s not about us proving it, it’s about being accepted into the club,” she continued.
Unicorn Store is about a woman who flunks out of art school, takes a job at a temp agency, and then gets led on a magical journey to find a real unicorn, Blue’s Clues-style. Um, why has no one contacted me about selling the rights to my life story?
The description may sound unbearably twee to some bitter bloggers, but it seems like Larson deliberately focused on the colorful, magical, extremely Instagrammable world that BuzzFeed keeps referring to as “feminine,” a word Larson finds apt:
“I’m going to make my unicorn movie that’s about being a woman!” she laughed. “And I’m going to expect men to step into my world instead of me always stepping into theirs. And it’s a challenge, and it scares me a little, but I feel like it’s a step that we need to take.”
“I don’t have a problem with these extremely masculine movies — we have a lot of them! But can’t we swing the pendulum in a different way, and can a film like this — innocent, child-like, and feminine — exist [and] still be respected?”
Can it? If it’s good! And it probably will be, because Brie Larson is only 27 years old and has already checked off everything on my childhood bucket list, taken a glittery poop inside the bucket and chucked the whole thing off a cliff. You can read the rest of her interview here.