The disgraced filmmaker Emma Thompson refused to work with: “It feels very odd to me”
When the #MeToo movement swept through Hollywood at the back end of 2017, there were very few male celebrities who didn’t either reconsider their career or their past behaviour, much as most men around the world reflected (or should have done).
It was a wide-ranging social movement towards equality that has resonated ever since, and was still echoing loudly when Emma Thompson backed out of a major movie less than two years later.
The subject of the stand she took was Pixar’s John Lasseter, the former Chief Creative Officer at the California-based animation studio who had overseen some of the most successful movies in history, personally directing films including Toy Story and Toy Story 2 and Cars.
In November 2017, Lasseter was at the heart of multiple accusations from women who were employed at Pixar, resulting in his taking, at first, a six-month sabbatical and then leaving the company the following year. The allegations included groping, kissing and unwanted comments about appearance, and Lasseter wrote a memo to the staff acknowledging them as “mis-steps”, apologising for “deeply letting down” those involved.
A year after leaving Pixar, he was hired as the head of the animation division at Skydance Media, and it was that production company that had begun work on a new kids movie, Luck, with Thompson as one of the lead voices. Lasseter’s appointment didn’t come without controversy at his new company; he had to write to employees, asking to be given a chance to prove he had changed, while the female head of the partnering studio, Paramount Animation, offered female staff the chance to decline to work with him.
Double Oscar winner Thompson decided to quit the project almost as soon as Lasseter’s hiring was announced, doing so via a letter sent to Skydance upper management and made available to The Times newspaper. In it, she raised several questions about how the appointment could make sense in the climate of accountability and behaviour toward women and Lasseter’s situation in general.
She began the letter: “As you know, I have pulled out of the production of Luck, to be directed by the very wonderful Alessandro Carloni. It feels very odd to me that you and your company would consider hiring someone with Mr Lasseter’s pattern of misconduct, given the present climate in which people with the kind of power that you have can reasonably be expected to step up to the plate.”
Thompson then went on to address the rehiring specifically, in the light of the allegations made at his former company and the fact that no compensation was paid to any of the women who came forward, writing: “…given all the abuse that’s been heaped on women who have come forward to make accusations against powerful men, do we really think that no settlements means that there was no harassment or no hostile work environment?”
She also raised doubts over the truthfulness of Lasseter’s self-confessed rehabilitation, adding, “If a man has made women at his companies feel undervalued and disrespected for decades, why should the women at his new company think that any respect he shows them is anything other than an act that he’s required to perform by his coach, his therapist and his employment agreement?”
In the end, Alessandro Carloni also quit the project 12 months later, citing creative differences, and he was replaced by Peggy Holmes, a female director. On release, the movie was distributed solely by Apple TV+, meaning a successful return on the $140million budget spent was unlikely, and it received very mixed reviews from critics.
Thompson, meanwhile, decided that year to make Late Night instead, a talk show comedy that earned her a Golden Globe nomination for ‘Best Actress’, and most recently was seen in the thriller Dead of Winter, the story of a grief-stricken widow caught up in a murderous conflict in a snow-covered American town; she didn’t need luck after all, just a spine.
