Ghostbusters Director Paul Feig Clarifies Geek Community Comments

For quite some time, a psychomagnotheric slime-flow of immense proportions has been building up beneath Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters reboot. Psycho-what? In layman’s terms, negative human emotions like hate, anger and envy have been forming into a vicious ectoplasm with explosive super-normal potential!

And last week, Feig appeared to add to that pile of slime. He was quoted in a New York Daily News article, coming off as though he was bashing geek culture as a whole; however, the comments are over a year old, right after he announced his four female leads, and were actually meant for a hateful sub-group of geek culture.

The New York Daily News has corrected that story, and now Feig has issued a statement clarifying his geek culture remarks.

“The quotes from me in a New York Daily News article on Monday, May 2nd, 2016, were not from a recent interview but from an interview I did for a book on geek culture a year and a half ago that the author then sold to the Daily News, misrepresenting them as being my response to recent Ghostbusters reporting. The Daily News ran a correction yesterday, May 7th, for which I am grateful. To clarify, the interview actually took place on February 9th, 2015, one and a half weeks after I had first announced my Ghostbusters cast via Twitter, a week and a half that saw my actors and I inundated with some of the most hateful tweets, posts and comments I had ever seen. My quote was in answer to the question, ‘Has the paradigm shifted to a point where (because geek culture is currently so popular) the geek is the a–hole now?’ I very much regret saying in my answer that I had actually met any a–holes from the geek community. I have never met anyone from the geek world face-to-face who wasn’t a warm, kind person.The ‘a–holes’ of which I speak are the ones who live online, who write those hateful tweets and posts and comments. I’m not talking about the people who have true concerns and worries about the rebooting of a franchise they love, nor am I talking about people who have watched the trailer for our movie and didn’t like it. Those are all valid opinions and I respect them all. I am talking about those that write misogyny and hate and threats. Those are the ‘assholes’ of which I spoke. As a lifelong geek and proud member of the geek community (as well as the creator of the TV series Freaks and Geeks), I abhor bullies. Every community has bullies who make up a very small minority of the community as a whole. Bullies scream the loudest and seem to get the most attention. But they are simply bullies who in no way represent the vast majority of wonderful, thoughtful people who make up our geek community. The geek world has been a haven for so many of us and we should all refuse to let these bullies hijack the conversations and debates we all love to engage in, nor should we let them represent our community and culture to the rest of the world. The bullies are not the norm and I would dare say they are not even true geeks. They are the micro minority. God bless the true geeks of the world and here’s to taking our community back from the bullies.” – Paul Feig

Ghostbusters makes its long-awaited return, rebooted with a cast of hilarious new characters. Thirty years after the beloved original franchise took the world by storm, director Paul Feig brings his fresh take to the supernatural comedy, joined by some of the funniest actors working today – Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones, and Chris Hemsworth. This summer, they’re here to save the world!

Ghostbusters is due in theaters July 15, 2016.