There are so many different factors
that go into how you put your money together for your movies.
It's a tremendously kind of delicate balance to strike
with the people who are financing your movie.
All of Hollywood is a giant craps table,
and you know, we're just all gambling
to figure out what's gonna hit.
When I started, the studios were very small companies.
They were generally owned
by small groups of people,
but they became parts of bigger companies.
They became behemoths.
The reason why there's such power
centered in a few companies in Hollywood,
it's because it's very expensive to do what they do.
Anyone can make a TikTok,
anyone can make an Instagram story.
Very few can make a 200-million-dollar movie
and put it out all over the world.
So, the stakes are really high.
Studios have, you know, creative executives
who meet with directors, meet with writers,
meet with actors.
Those executives are reading scripts,
and they're trying to agitate to get projects made.
There are very few women
in positions of true power within the studio system.
There are a lot of female executives, especially in television.
But in the true decision-maker spot,
the person who, buck stops with, has to say,
"Yes, we will make this 200-million-dollar movie,"
or "No, we will not," they are overwhelmingly white men.
Even when women run studios,
there hasn't been, like, a massive change
in the way the system ran,
because they then don't bring other women up behind them
because of that sort of perceived competition,
that there can only be one.
And then, they leave, and then we're sort of back to square one.
Somebody was posing the question
I think to a male executive at one of the studios,
"Why is it you think that there are less women in these positions?"
And the two words that came up,
was more like, "Well, it's a risk."
And that's the nut we need to crack.
Why are we seen as a risk?
When you are putting together a project,
the approved list at a studio is,
who is allowed to do movies that are over 100 million dollars
that are generally speaking for the summertime?
Those people are only of a certain type.
They are, at this point,
again, generally male, generally white,
with a couple of additional males of color on the list.
The list is derived from the bench,
and the bench is usually a film festival
in which one to three, usually males, are plucked out,
and then, from their $400,000 film, they are then handed
a multimillion-dollar film.
It's one thing to give a person who's less often hired
the little scrappy one that they can kill themselves making,
and how many people are gonna see it.
It's another thing to say, here's a giant piece
of intellectual property.
And similarly, in television,
I get asked to direct a lot of episodes of TV.
But I can feel when it's time to give a woman a pilot,
people are like, "Uh, I've been working on this
for five years, and this is actually the..."
And there's-- you know, we aren't used to trusting
that a lot of women can do that job spectacularly.
Men are allowed to go and make shit movies
and carry on being extremely well-paid.
Women can't really do that.
You'll-- you'll be replaced quite quickly.
"Aeon Flux" was a big complicated movie
with a steep learning curve for me
in terms of tons and tons of visual effects,
entirely designed worlds.
And ultimately, the studio went through three different regimes
while we made the movie.
I was asked to take a step back while another team
did a pass at editing the film.
I think it's fair to say that that initial pass was a disaster.
And so, I was brought back in
to essentially oversee the new version
that the studio wanted.
As a youngish female directing what was meant to become
a potential franchise for a studio, I don't think anybody
quite knew how to advocate for the moment,
because the moment hadn't arrived yet.
I wasn't supposed to be at that party.
I do think because I was female,
the notion of failure was spotlighted with a brighter light,
and served as some kind of implicit proof
that can't women can't do this job,
or can't make those kinds of movies.
The conditions would have to be quite a bit different
for me to take on a big-budget studio movie
without a sense of ironclad relationships around me
that could support me through the process.
When the movie came out and was a huge hit,
the director, Jon Chu, called me up and said,
"You know, we want to do the sequels,
"and let's just knock 'em out
and have the best time ever." And it sounded great.
And the studios thought that I should team up
with Pete Chiarelli, who was the writer
prior to me on "Crazy Rich."
And so, my thought was that I would do it,
but I wanted to be paid equally.
I can't get the exact dollar amount, but his quote
was over a million dollars,
and the initial offer they made me
was $130,000, or, $150,000, something like that.
When he said it, I broke out laughing on the phone.
I just was like, ha!
Because it was a fraction of what I would have made
writing for a CW show for the year.
The movie engendered so much warmth
and positivity with the community, and really brought us all together.
I just didn't want to detract from that.
I didn't want, um...
I didn't want there to be this bad feeling after the fact.
But at the end of the day, I thought, you know,
if this is doing so much to advance our stories,
me, you know, taking... taking a step back and accepting this,
like, that's really setting us back, if anything.
So... yeah.
The most gratifying part was hearing other writers
use my story as a negotiation tactic,
that when they were not getting parity,
they would say, "Well, Adele Lim did this,
and now the studios know that there are consequences."
The biggest impediments to equal pay
between men and women in Hollywood
has just been the silence on the subject.
If you look at the sports world, for example,
we all know exactly how much LeBron James makes.
We know how much Patrick Mahomes makes,
and their deals are reported on and obsessed over
like it's their performance on the field.
Hollywood's not like that. Why is that?
And that's because these studios capitalize on the silence.
So, they do the work, they should be able to get the access.
They do the work, they should be able to be on the bench.
If they do the work, they should be able to be on the list.
Enough.
Make the playing field even.
Once the studio's on board, you're good to go.
But the process of actually filming a movie,
being on location, having a huge cast and crew,
this is when a lot can go wrong, and often does.