Across outrageous, often scatological comedies like “Bridesmaids,” “Spy” and “A Simple Favor,” the director Paul Feig, 62, has cemented his unlikely cinematic reputation as a girl’s guy.
“I hate to say ‘strong female characters,’ because I don’t like that term,” he said in a video call from Los Angeles. “I just love seeing men and women as equals on the screen, so that’s what I’m always trying to do.”
Feig, a Royal Oak, Mich., native whose latest film, “Another Simple Favor,” is streaming on Amazon Prime Video, reflected on some of his favorite moments in movie parity.
‘Bringing Up Baby’ (1938)
Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in “Bringing Up Baby.”Credit…John Springer Collection/Corbis, via Getty Images
In Howard Hawks’s classic screwball comedy, Cary Grant plays a fussy paleontologist and Katharine Hepburn a madcap heiress with a pet leopard (the titular “Baby”) and a penchant for trouble. (Rent or buy it on major platforms.)
“Honestly, I didn’t really discover these movies until I went to film school at USC. But over the years of watching comedy I had seen it become completely male-dominated, where women were just sort of props around the men to make fun of or to get in their way.
