Warner Bros. greenlights live-action Akira for 2012
According to Variety, the studio has finally made it official with a greenlight for a $90 million budget and an eye toward a late February/early March start date. The report confirms that Jaume Collett-Serra (Unknown) will direct...

The studio provides this synopsis for the Steve Kloves script: Set in New Manhattan, the cyberpunk sci-fi epic follows the leader of a biker gang who must save his friend, discovered with potentially destructive psychokinetic abilities, from government medical experiments.

Garrett Hedlund (Tron: Legacy) is a frontrunner for one of the leads (most likely Kaneda) while the shortlist of actors for Tetsuo is allegedly Robert Pattinson, Andrew Garfield, James McAvoy.

Edit: Thanks to

grrliz, we have news that it does in fact, get worse. Gary Oldman has been offered the role of The Colonel and Helena Bonham Carter has been offered the role of Lady Miyako.

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	lied_ohne_worte 2011-10-29 03:38 pm UTC (link)
	It is not "the same crime". There is no decades-long Hollywood history in which roles that were originally written for white people or modeled on white people were constantly given to people of other ethnicities. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	bishounenhideto 2011-10-29 07:42 pm UTC (link)
	I thought the issue at hand was that a character of one specifically-designated race was cast with a person of another race entirely. Am I wrong? (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	lied_ohne_worte 2011-10-29 07:48 pm UTC (link)
	Yes, you are. The issue is not that this is one individual case where this happened, but rather that things like this happen very often, and they tend to happen in one particular way - white actors playing roles that are originally written as non-white. It's an issue of racism. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	bishounenhideto 2011-10-30 12:48 am UTC (link)
	So it's completely ok that a black actor played a canonically-white character because it doesn't happen that often compared to the other way around? (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	lied_ohne_worte 2011-10-30 12:50 am UTC (link)
	Yes, it is. One thing is a symptom of marginalisation and racism, the other isn't. I don't know how I can make this any clearer. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

bishounenhideto
2011-10-30 01:23 am UTC (link)

I just wanted to be 100% sure because it was sounding like the issue isn't really about staying accurate to the original canon source as I had thought, but about minority rights to be cast in any role in any movie. Thanks for making that perfectly clear. I understand now.

Would it be ok if Koreans played all the Japanese characters? I don't mean mixed Korean/Japanese descent. I mean full Korean descent.

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lied_ohne_worte
2011-10-30 08:42 am UTC (link)

minority rights to be cast in any role in any movie

No, it's not really that. Rather, it is about the fact that people from minorities already have very few roles available to them which are not somewhat stereotypical and often have trouble being cast in roles that do not say anywhere the people playing them has to be white, and that therefore it is highly unfair if roles that were written as minorities are also given to white people. It's not about a privilege for minorities, but rather about white privilege still being highly entrenched in the movie industry.

As I am white and not even from the US, I am likely not the best person to explain this. There is lots of material available online on this issue, including things written by people who themselves belong to minorities and have first-hand experience. Just google "hollywood racism" or "hollywood whitewashing", and you will find many articles and interviews.

I'm sure it is not my place to say whether it would be OK for Koreans to play Japanese. But if something were cast like this, many people would likely see it as a sign of Hollywood insensitivity, as in "all Asian people being the same". And given Korean/Japanese history, I suspect that there might also be a negative reaction in these countries. As you mentioned "Memoirs of a Geisha": There was indeed some negative reaction to the casting; on that, too, material is easy to google.

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bishounenhideto
2011-10-30 10:50 am UTC (link)

Thank you for such a wonderfully polite and thoughtful response. :) I really do appreciate it. I guess my point was, if the real argument is about minorities getting a fair shot at portraying their own ethnicities in movies instead of a badly-made-up white person or only being allow to be the "Chinese food delivery guy", then we shouldn't be saying, "We want to keep the movie culturally accurate." because none of the Norse gods are black. I'm all for minority actors being given less dehumanizing roles or seeing minority characters being played/cast with more ethnic sensitivity. Fu Manchu, anyone?

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