Director Paul Feig on his ‘Ghostbusters’ cast: ‘These are strong, smart women’

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 2 (UPI) — Paul Feig spoke about the backlash that came along with the casting in this summer’s Ghostbusters reboot and its relation to an Instagram post by Donald Trump.

Weeks before he announced his decision to run for president, Trump posted a video to Instagram where he lamented about the all-female cast of the yet-unreleased Ghostbusters film.

“And now they’re making Ghostbusters with only women,” he said. “What’s going on?!”

“Oh, I’ve seen it. Oh, I’ve seen it,” said Feig, the film’s director. “I think it’s very hard to say there’s not a relationship between the angst that it caused in a certain part of the population.”

Feig and the cast, which included Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones, became the targets of internet hate from those who were against the movie’s female leads.

“I would never be so bold as to say they were all Trump supporters, but it falls in line with the beliefs of some of them,” Feig said. “I would get angry at horrendous tweets and I would go back and see who said it, and a good amount of the time there would be some pro-Trump thing on there.”

Feig, who is still unsure if the studio will order a second Ghostbuters film, is hopeful that this experience will change some of the misogynistic landscape in Hollywood.

“I don’t know how to say it, but things always get crazy before they get better. Everybody screams the loudest before the new normal happens, so if this is the death throes of that old way of thinking, then that’s great,” he said.

Feig spoke highly of his cast and how they — especially Jones — handled the hate.

“These are strong, smart women who aren’t taking [expletive], who are standing up for themselves, who are being empowered and not being victims, and who are using their comedy to make statements and give their world its due,” he said. “It makes me want to cry sometimes because you realize how it hasn’t been that way for so long because these voices weren’t allowed to say these things. These women have always been there, but they didn’t have the forum.”