Pegg updates on script

[Malaika]

it's silly. You don't write 'for women' or for men, unless you write men and women according to the stereotypes surrounding each gender. You write for people.
No one expects him to talk about periods and breast cancer. Just consider the female characters as characters who are as important for the narrative as the male ones and you are fine. But that's his problem IMO He seems to be focused on the male characters only and ignore women unless when it comes to them being eye candy. That's not a matter of not being able to 'write for women' as much as it's his own personal disposition when it comes to what is his main focus in stories (the dynamics between male characters).

and yes, not even women are always able to write good female characters. If anything, more often than not they are too hard with their own sex and hold women to double standards (in this board too - and outside of this site- , from my experience the most sexist and offensive with Uhura had been more some female users)
There are many women who write good male characters at the same time there are many men who actually seem to write better female characters than male ones.
JJ might be, to some degree, an example of it. I always found some of his female characters stronger than the male ones. Pedro Almodovar is another example, his movies celebrate women in every aspect and he seems to relate to them the most and find them the most interesting, but on the flip side he can be quite hard with men.
Personally, I always related to both male and female characters, regardless the fact that I'm a woman. Sure, he got a point because it's only natural that there might be things that as a writer you might not be 100% able to convey because you hadn't experienced them in first person. But then, writing fiction is for the most part about writing people who are not you. It's not like Pegg is a vulcan like Spock either. And even when it comes to the male characters, the way he depicts them isn't immune from his own pov and influence as a person. Not all the men are the same so in the end he will never be able to speak for them all either or 'write for men', universally, either.

 

[Khan 2.0]

pegg talks STB from roughly 46:30
http://www.empireonline.com/news/story.asp?NID=44457

 

[Mach5]

"It’s fifty-years of ‘Star Trek’ next year and this ‘Star Trek’ will be as much ‘Star Trek’ as it possibly can be… and it’s important to me that it is."

Bravo, Simon. Fuck clickbait.

 

[Jedi_Master]

it's silly. You don't write 'for women' or for men, unless you write men and women according to the stereotypes surrounding each gender. You write for people.
No one expects him to talk about periods and breast cancer. Just consider the female characters as characters who are as important for the narrative as the male ones and you are fine. But that's his problem IMO He seems to be focused on the male characters only and ignore women unless when it comes to them being eye candy. That's not a matter of not being able to 'write for women' as much as it's his own personal disposition when it comes to what is his main focus in stories (the dynamics between male characters).

and yes, not even women are always able to write good female characters. If anything, more often than not they are too hard with their own sex and hold women to double standards (in this board too - and outside of this site- , from my experience the most sexist and offensive with Uhura had been more some female users)
There are many women who write good male characters at the same time there are many men who actually seem to write better female characters than male ones.
JJ might be, to some degree, an example of it. I always found some of his female characters stronger than the male ones. Pedro Almodovar is another example, his movies celebrate women in every aspect and he seems to relate to them the most and find them the most interesting, but on the flip side he can be quite hard with men.
Personally, I always related to both male and female characters, regardless the fact that I'm a woman. Sure, he got a point because it's only natural that there might be things that as a writer you might not be 100% able to convey because you hadn't experienced them in first person. But then, writing fiction is for the most part about writing people who are not you. It's not like Pegg is a vulcan like Spock either. And even when it comes to the male characters, the way he depicts them isn't immune from his own pov and influence as a person. Not all the men are the same so in the end he will never be able to speak for them all either or 'write for men', universally, either.

That's a lot of words for a small comment.

“I find it very hard to write for women,” adds Pegg. “It’s mine and Edgar [Wright, with whom he wrote Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz]’s self-confessed weakness – whenever we’ve written scripts together, the women in our films are the weakest characters. It’s hard – you can understand the opposite sex, and yet still there’s a degree of authenticity that’s hard to achieve

I find it difficult to criticize a writer is expressing a laudable interest in creating female characters that are not stereotypes, but instead are authentic, independent, strong, and have a unique perspective on events.

 

[Ryan8bit]

it's silly. You don't write 'for women' or for men, unless you write men and women according to the stereotypes surrounding each gender. You write for people.

This ignores that sociologically men and women communicate and interact differently. They think differently. It doesn't need to be a stereotype. Yes, some can think and behave like the others, but it's a complex thing. It's the kind of thing that's heavily scrutinized too.

When I refer to men writing women poorly, it's exactly the stereotypes that are the poor writing.

But then, writing fiction is for the most part about writing people who are not you.

Well yeah, but mostly that's done through a writer's own lens. Sometimes it can be hard to break out from your own worldview or to not incorporate elements of yourself in a character. If you have to write someone who's unlike you, that's probably the biggest challenge.

 

[Malaika]

But it also is the most fun for a writer, I think. Just like it's great for actors to play characters who are their opposites rather than their fictional clones.

 

[Mudd]

Everybody is like you.

 

[fireproof78]

it's silly. You don't write 'for women' or for men, unless you write men and women according to the stereotypes surrounding each gender. You write for people.
No one expects him to talk about periods and breast cancer. Just consider the female characters as characters who are as important for the narrative as the male ones and you are fine. But that's his problem IMO He seems to be focused on the male characters only and ignore women unless when it comes to them being eye candy. That's not a matter of not being able to 'write for women' as much as it's his own personal disposition when it comes to what is his main focus in stories (the dynamics between male characters).

and yes, not even women are always able to write good female characters. If anything, more often than not they are too hard with their own sex and hold women to double standards (in this board too - and outside of this site- , from my experience the most sexist and offensive with Uhura had been more some female users)
There are many women who write good male characters at the same time there are many men who actually seem to write better female characters than male ones.
JJ might be, to some degree, an example of it. I always found some of his female characters stronger than the male ones. Pedro Almodovar is another example, his movies celebrate women in every aspect and he seems to relate to them the most and find them the most interesting, but on the flip side he can be quite hard with men.
Personally, I always related to both male and female characters, regardless the fact that I'm a woman. Sure, he got a point because it's only natural that there might be things that as a writer you might not be 100% able to convey because you hadn't experienced them in first person. But then, writing fiction is for the most part about writing people who are not you. It's not like Pegg is a vulcan like Spock either. And even when it comes to the male characters, the way he depicts them isn't immune from his own pov and influence as a person. Not all the men are the same so in the end he will never be able to speak for them all either or 'write for men', universally, either.

I can understand your point of view, but I have to disagree, at least regarding Pegg. I applaud his courage to admit, "Hey, this is not easy for me," about any aspect of this process.

I know there are aspects of writing fiction that I struggle with in the process. One, is writing female characters. No, I don't treat that as just "women" or have them talk about periods, or what not. I just want to make sure that I get the motivation and the head space right when I write that character, so I ask my wife for her point of view, or the situation and figure it out.

Same thing for her. She is an avid fan fiction writer, but she will ask me, as a guy, how would I respond to a certain situation, or what my thought process would be when she is struggling to write male characters.

I think Pegg is being self-aware of his limitations and trying to work it out. I don't have an easy time writing female characters either.

 

[Malaika]

I guess the problem for me is that he said 'write FOR women' rather than just say he has a hard time writing female characters who are autenthic.
It feels like he is dividing the male and female audience into two separate groups that each need their own movie and scenes. It seems he doesn't care about the female characters and sees them as an extra that should be sorely developed for the female audience only (insert politically correctness vibes here). If that is his mindset he's doomed to fail.
You write first foremost people for people. Writing an Uhura, for example, shouldn't be harder than him writing a half-vulcan man like Spock..or any other male human character who is not like him. So his issue, if anything, would be a generic one then. He cannot believe that he is truly writing 'for men' either just because he is a man himself because I'm pretty sure there will always be guys who can't relate to his male characters ir his perspective. You cannot write 'for men' either, that's my point.
The whole 'writing for men or women' stuff makes me think about those people with the 'girls only like romance while boys only like videogames' ideology. The best writers don't care about that stuff, they just write for people.

(I have to specify that it's not just this interview that gives me that vibe about Pegg. When I read it I was like 'well duh that was obvious' at least to me, from his writing and interviews that he is being partial to the male characters and he doesn't seem to think about the female characters as entities that can be as important for the narrative)

 

[Samurai8472]

Simon Pegg Says 'Star Trek 3' Starts Shooting In 4 Weeks & The First Draft Of The Script Has Only Just Been Finished

http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2015-05-29/simon-pegg-on-rewriting-star-trek-3-geekdom-and-playing-a-romantic-lead

By 6pm today – when Los Angeles wakes up – he has to have cut 180 pages of the script down to 135.

 

[Franklin]

“I find it very hard to write for women,” adds Pegg. “It’s mine and Edgar [Wright, with whom he wrote Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz]’s self-confessed weakness – whenever we’ve written scripts together, the women in our films are the weakest characters. It’s hard – you can understand the opposite sex, and yet still there’s a degree of authenticity that’s hard to achieve

I find it difficult to criticize a writer is expressing a laudable interest in creating female characters that are not stereotypes, but instead are authentic, independent, strong, and have a unique perspective on events.

For what it's worth, what Pegg is saying is almost exactly what Jerry Seinfeld said about writing for the character of Elaine. Even the crew of Monty Python said they had a tough time writing for women.

 

[JWPlatt]

...It feels like he is dividing the male and female audience into two separate groups that each need their own movie and scenes...

Well, yeah, more or less. Why are some movies called "chick flicks" or "date movies?" Their existence admits that there are differences in people. You can argue we're all the same all you want, but the empirical evidence does not support the hypothesis. Different markets exist because there are different markets to bear. Boys and girls and men and women and moms and dads are different, think differently, and like different things - taken as major subsets of a population. Writing for "people" is an idealistic target that doesn't exist; it's just that there are markets and ideas in common among different kinds of people. And the people in the United States are not going to enjoy the same things as the people in Saudi Arabia or Beijing. "People" is too generalized and, in fact, seems too unrealistically homogeneous and wouldn't seem to celebrate in our differences. It's like traveling to another country to see the sites and all you see are the same culturally homogeneous McDonalds and gas stations wherever you go with nothing unique remaining to experience.

 

[fireproof78]

I guess the problem for me is that he said 'write FOR women' rather than just say he has a hard time writing female characters who are autenthic.
It feels like he is dividing the male and female audience into two separate groups that each need their own movie and scenes. It seems he doesn't care about the female characters and sees them as an extra that should be sorely developed for the female audience only (insert politically correctness vibes here). If that is his mindset he's doomed to fail.
You write first foremost people for people. Writing an Uhura, for example, shouldn't be harder than him writing a half-vulcan man like Spock..or any other male human character who is not like him. So his issue, if anything, would be a generic one then. He cannot believe that he is truly writing 'for men' either just because he is a man himself because I'm pretty sure there will always be guys who can't relate to his male characters ir his perspective. You cannot write 'for men' either, that's my point.
The whole 'writing for men or women' stuff makes me think about those people with the 'girls only like romance while boys only like videogames' ideology. The best writers don't care about that stuff, they just write for people.

(I have to specify that it's not just this interview that gives me that vibe about Pegg. When I read it I was like 'well duh that was obvious' at least to me, from his writing and interviews that he is being partial to the male characters and he doesn't seem to think about the female characters as entities that can be as important for the narrative)

Possibly because he isn't sure how to write them, so they are not always included in his narrative.

The best writers may not care about this stuff, but were they always that way? Or was it something they learned?

Regardless, it is something that I applaud is Pegg's willingness to acknowledge a weakness. It may not make sense to the rest of us, and that's fine by me.

 

[Malaika]

I think we are making it more complicate than it really is and he really just has a simple preference for the dude-bro stuff. Now he 'admits' he cannot write women as a way to excuse himself from any criticism he already knows he will probably get for once again dismissing the female characters. I'd appreciate him more if he had made the actual honest admission he is not willing to make here..
All this talk is just derailing it all. Writing the female characters as equally important for the narrative as the male ones (including aliens, or human male characters of another race and/or from another culture. e.g, scotty himself, chekov and sulu) can be hard for a man but it really isn't the mission impossible that some people here make it seems that it is. In the end it's a matter of giving to women the same agency you give to the male characters and not hold them to double standards.
Like seriously, how hard it really is to write women who have qualities but are also allowed to have flaws like the men and not get called names because of that? Women who can, just like the average male 'hero', be great at their job but still be humans who can care about others and are being cared about and don't have to be nuns to make a point of how 'strong' and 'independent' they are? Like how hard is it to have a female character who can be brave just like the male ones. How hard it is to show that if men can be weak, then so does women and they aren't considered 'less' just because of that?


I hope that I shouldn't interpret this as him basically admitting that the female characters in his trek are written badly and so he's already trying to justify himself for the 'failure'. Let's hope JJ, the new director, the other writer - perhaps even Saldana herself! - can help him, if that is the case..

 

[Franklin]

I think we are making it more complicate than it really is and he really just has a simple preference for the dude-bro stuff. Now he 'admits' he cannot write women as a way to excuse himself from any criticism he already knows he will probably get for once again dismissing the female characters. I'd appreciate him more if he had made the actual honest admission he is not willing to make here..
All this talk is just derailing it all. Writing the female characters as equally important for the narrative as the male ones (including aliens, or human male characters of another race and/or from another culture. e.g, scotty himself, chekov and sulu) can be hard for a man but it really isn't the mission impossible that some people here make it seems that it is. In the end it's a matter of giving to women the same agency you give to the male characters and not hold them to double standards.
Like seriously, how hard it really is to write women who have qualities but are also allowed to have flaws like the men and not get called names because of that? Women who can, just like the average male 'hero', be great at their job but still be humans who can care about others and are being cared about and don't have to be nuns to make a point of how 'strong' and 'independent' they are? Like how hard is it to have a female character who can be brave just like the male ones. How hard it is to show that if men can be weak, then so does women and they aren't considered 'less' just because of that?


I hope that I shouldn't interpret this as him basically admitting that the female characters in his trek are written badly and so he's already trying to justify himself for the 'failure'. Let's hope JJ, the new director, the other writer - perhaps even Saldana herself! - can help him, if that is the case..

I think he's really just admitting he's out of his comfort zone writing for women characters. It doesn't mean he can't write a good role for a woman character, just that he's not as sure of its authenticity as he is writing for male characters. As others upthread have said, it's not sexist or even necessarily a weakness, just a realization that sociological and psychological differences can exist between men and women (from wiring and experience) that make it difficult for a man to be sure he's writing from a "woman's point of view."

Seinfeld solved his problem writing for women characters by saying he just wrote Elaine as a guy (or at least like he would write George and Kramer, in other words, without much regard to her being a female character). The Pythons solved their problem by mostly excluding women from prominent roles in their skits and writing themselves as women if the skit featured women. Loretta Swit said her favorite M*A*S*H episodes featuring her character were mostly the ones written by women because she felt they "got" her character better.

 

[fireproof78]

I think we are making it more complicate than it really is and he really just has a simple preference for the dude-bro stuff. Now he 'admits' he cannot write women as a way to excuse himself from any criticism he already knows he will probably get for once again dismissing the female characters. I'd appreciate him more if he had made the actual honest admission he is not willing to make here..
All this talk is just derailing it all. Writing the female characters as equally important for the narrative as the male ones (including aliens, or human male characters of another race and/or from another culture. e.g, scotty himself, chekov and sulu) can be hard for a man but it really isn't the mission impossible that some people here make it seems that it is. In the end it's a matter of giving to women the same agency you give to the male characters and not hold them to double standards.
Like seriously, how hard it really is to write women who have qualities but are also allowed to have flaws like the men and not get called names because of that? Women who can, just like the average male 'hero', be great at their job but still be humans who can care about others and are being cared about and don't have to be nuns to make a point of how 'strong' and 'independent' they are? Like how hard is it to have a female character who can be brave just like the male ones. How hard it is to show that if men can be weak, then so does women and they aren't considered 'less' just because of that?


I hope that I shouldn't interpret this as him basically admitting that the female characters in his trek are written badly and so he's already trying to justify himself for the 'failure'. Let's hope JJ, the new director, the other writer - perhaps even Saldana herself! - can help him, if that is the case..

I think he's really just admitting he's out of his comfort zone writing for women characters. It doesn't mean he can't write a good role for a woman character, just that he's not as sure of its authenticity as he is writing for male characters. As others upthread have said, it's not sexist or even necessarily a weakness, just a realization that sociological and psychological differences can exist between men and women (from wiring and experience) that make it difficult for a man to be sure he's writing from a "woman's point of view."

Seinfeld solved his problem writing for women characters by saying he just wrote Elaine as a guy (or at least like he would write George and Kramer, in other words, without much regard to her being a female character). The Pythons solved their problem by mostly excluding women from prominent roles in their skits and writing themselves as women if the skit featured women. Loretta Swit said her favorite M*A*S*H episodes featuring her character were mostly the ones written by women because she felt they "got" her character better.

Thank you for stating it.

To me, the simple fact is that it is uncomfortable for Pegg, and I applaud his honesty. How that will end up on screen, who knows, because of all the other influences that will occur through this process.

This may be a matter of perspective. For me, trying to write women is not a simple matter of "write a character" because those characters do not come out as well rounded a my male characters. So, I do research and I ask my wife and other female friends their reactions to things.

It's a struggle he has, but that doesn't mean he can't overcome it. Jut that it is there.

 

[Trekkin]

I can remember Stephen King mentioning that when he wrote Carrie, he had to give it to his wife to for feedback. It wasn't so much that he couldn't write female characters, but that Carrie/Sue etc were the protagonists, and he just didn't know the ins and outs of being a teenage girl. This is in spite of Carrie and her mother being based on some real people.

Male writers struggling to get in women's heads isn't really a concern. It's only when they give up trying that it's a problem. Peggs managed to get past it before.

 

[eyeresist]

I guess the problem for me is that he said 'write FOR women' rather than just say he has a hard time writing female characters who are autenthic.

I'm pretty sure he means writing for female characters or actors, not a female audience. Pegg's films have tended to play pretty well with both sexes.

Pegg's first movie, Sean of the Dead, actually has some very good female characters (as did his series Spaced). But in later movies he has had mostly male characters, perhaps because they are easier to write in the sense that he is less anxious about getting them wrong. (In my own writing I notice I tend to avoid areas where I lack confidence, even though I know from past experience that I can do them okay.)