Filmmaker Shekhar Kapur believes that the #MeToo movement has brought lasting positive change to the movie industry. He says it has eliminated the idea of seduction as a love language and emphasised the importance of consent. Kapur feels that it has also been elementary in improving the treatment of women and making it a more welcoming place for child actors.
Kapur said, “There was time when we thought that the idea of sexuality is that you had to seduce the girl. Now, if I seduce a girl, I will be caught in the #MeToo movement. Now, this thought is not there, and the girl is also a decision maker as much as the boy. It is about being consensual. The idea that, ‘Haye kitna sharmati hai,’ and that the girl is supposed to be shy, and you are supposed to be there to seduce her out of her shyness, is now MeToo. And we have let it go.”
Kapur said the movement had had a lasting impact on the cinema world. “It has been a very good movement for the whole industry, and it was something which was needed. We could not have gone on in the way that we used to earlier. For instance, when I was working on Masoom, and went out to look for a child actor, everyone I spoke to didn’t want to enter the industry. Because they didn’t trust us. They didn’t trust how the women are treated here. They thought that women were not treated well. The way we looked at women was wrong. And now that has changed.”
He proudly admits, “With every project of mine, I have inevitably shown a very strong female.”