Paul Feig: ‘Male humour always devolves into homophobia and name-calling’
The director adores working with women – but did the all-female Ghostbusters furore change that? Not a bit, he says
Paul Feig has a tendency to make films that are difficult to talk about until you have seen them. The trailers for Spy, The Heat and A Simple Favour, for example, paint pictures quite different from the finished movies. Often, you leave the cinema feeling as if you have been pleasantly fooled.
It’s certainly true with Last Christmas, which the director is sitting down to talk about in early September, and which appears, based on its teaser, to be a mushy festive romcom. Naturally, it doesn’t quite go where you would expect it to, which of course means we can’t really talk about the film we are here to talk about. “Exactly,” he says, smiling. He is wearing, as is his custom, an impossibly dapper three-piece suit, and he has a sweetly nervous cough/chuckle that ripples up as he speaks. “A lot of the movies I do just happen to have something like that in it. But I like people being surprised.”