00:00For me, there's a yin and a yang in each of us, feminine and masculine strength.
00:05And I think often in our society, in our industry, the masculine strength is being celebrated.
00:12And that's a painful way to exist, both for women and men.
00:22I want people to feel things.
00:25You know, I have had male figures in my life who are closed up, and it's painful to watch.
00:32You know, as much as what we've suffered as women in the society, we are kind of being
00:41given permission to feel more.
00:43And that's a very powerful thing.
00:53I think the female gaze is important from a female director, and also from a male.
00:59You can have a female gaze from a male director as well, you know.
01:02I think I come from, I'm from China, you know, I come from growing up in the Taoist philosophy.
01:12That's a very big part of my culture.
01:14And the principle belief of Taoism is to find harmony between the yin and the yang.
01:20So I find in my films, whether it's a young teenager on the Lakota reservation or a young
01:25cowboy or a woman who's lost everything, who is hardened up, or Superman, you know, the
01:34most powerful male figure, I always try to find a way to give them a chance to be in
01:42touch with their feminine side.
01:45And I think only that, only if we do that, we not only portray our women characters in
01:53a way that celebrates feminine strength, but also allow our male characters to access their
01:57softer side.
01:59I think that's the true female gaze, whether that come from a female director or a male
02:03director.
02:15You have a male superhero cry in this film.
02:31Can you tell me a little bit what the thought process was around that?
02:34I got asked similar questions when I had a cowboy cry in my, in my second film.
02:41And you know, Icarus is a bit of an archetype, you know, that come from the idea of the Übermensch,
02:48the strong man, the Superman.
02:51We've seen many different modern interpretations of that.
02:55And there has been a desire from the very beginning when I came to read the treatment
03:00that Marvel Studios made.
03:02This story is what they wrote, because I think there's a desire to look at some of the fundamental
03:10principles that this genre is born out of and try to challenge them.
03:16I do believe we're at the edge of a revisionist period for this genre.
03:22And that desire isn't just coming from the audiences, it's from the studios as well.
03:35I always imagined the Eternals as soldiers at the beginning.
03:38You know, they come to a place on a mission, and then they don't, they can't go home.
03:43And what happens to all 10 of them?
03:46And some of them fall in love with the natives, with a native inhabitant, and want to be a
03:52part of them, you know, and understand the beauty of their land, and others doesn't really
03:57fit in.
03:58I will say a big part of, again, coming from a Buddhist tradition, the Taoist tradition,
04:03is the idea of, I go back to the idea of harmony, you know, because to colonize, to expand is
04:13a masculine act, you know, and we, that happens, that's just a part of us as Homo sapiens,
04:19we do that to survive.
04:20But how can we, while doing that, still find a way to counter that?
04:26It's the way how we treat our planet, for example, and yes, we need to advance as a
04:31civilization, but how do we counter that?
04:33How do we look at the feminine side, the mother side of the equation, and to say, we need
04:38a balance?
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