Thank you. Oh God, technology. Look, I know. My journey, God, it's been messy and disorganized, so disorganized I couldn't even put this on a teleprompter on Friday. Yep, and now it's going cancel, undo typing. Cancel, it could be a disaster.
Well, I'm very grateful. Thank you to TIFF for this incredible honour, and the women who've received this honour before me, and to all of you tonight who are here to support the extraordinary, inclusive work that TIFF does, not only as a festival, but beyond. So thank you all for being here.
And to Lupita, I mean, I'm here to talk about my journey. I mean...It was 11 years ago that you were here for 12 Years a Slave, and your journey both as an extraordinary human being and as an artist, I mean. A Quiet Place, anybody? And Wild Robot, that's a 250 Kleenex movie that, you know, you must see.
And thank you to the generous Joanna Griffiths and the Women of Knix for supporting the award for making underwear that...women actually can feel like themselves in. I mean...yeah, it’s important. I’m not actually wearing any underwear. But as Michelle Obama says, when I go low, you go high.
Anyway, my journey, boy, it has been messy and eclectic, and I don't have any auto-prompter, I just have a computer and glasses that need updating. So there we go.
But I'm still here, actually, and when I galumphed off the theatrical stage and onto a film set, no one really knew what to do with me and I was certainly, you know, did not expect to still be here and didn't expect to be on a table with Julie Delpy and Alfonso Cuarón, one of the greatest directors on the planet, who advised me to come up here and to put this aside and do a piece of interpretive dance.
We've just made a series together, it may be the last thing we ever do together. But we often talk about individual journeys and our individual successes and the media focuses on our individual failures and our challenges.
But I'm standing here in front of you all and I'm reminded by just how interlinked our journeys are, and how much I owe the actresses, the writers, the cinematographers, the producers, the art directors, the costume designers, the makeup artists, those people who often don't get mentioned, you know, who have come before me whose journeys were far more rocky than mine and far steeper than mine and have boldly made opportunities for themselves and therefore by default made opportunities for people like me and for all of us.
And I'm so aware of those extraordinary younger women who are coming up behind me. Never mind. Blazing trails that, in fact, I feel incredibly energized and inspired by. And so our journeys are so enmeshed. Time collapses in the film industry. It's a very temporal medium, but time does collapse.
And I think it's time we put aside this North American misnomer of the self-made woman, because I think in the words of the brilliant Naomi Klein, we've never, ever been self-made. We've always been made and unmade by each other.
And we often talk about the work that we've still got to do in the industry, and my God, there is so much more work still to be done. But the industry has changed an enormous amount since I've stepped into it. And unfortunately, we do need to keep talking about the changes that we've made. Because I think that fairness and equity and respect are not embedded into the systems that we work in.
And those women who were instrumental in the foundations of this industry, so quickly they found that the industry calcified around them to exclude them. And so we have to keep ourselves front and centre. We have to keep asking questions that open locked doors and knowing our worth. Our worth creatively as well as financially.
And greater inclusivity on our sets lead to less homogenous and more vibrant storytelling as is evidenced by what is going on here at TIFF in this festival. So, you know, I think homogeneity is the enemy of everything we make.
But I only have two minutes, apparently, so the hook is going to come out. But before I go off, one piece of the change puzzle that I don't think we've yet fully grappled with as an industry, so it's saying format. I've got no idea what that means.
In an industry that naturally recycles and re-examines ideas, I think there's an inherent creative circularity to the way that we make work. And as we all know, bloat and excess are the enemy of creativity.
I think the piece of change that we're missing is to make work as an industry more sustainable, more circular. And I think, you know, it was so quick in COVID to have COVID officers. You know, we were an industry that really was at the forefront of being able to continue during the pandemic. But where are the green officers on... Oh, is that music being... You mentioned climate change and that's what you get.
It's the end of a long evening, folks. But, you know, it could be the end of us all. But anyway, I think it's a moral imperative to make this switch into making our work more sustainable.
You know, we are a hugely, hugely influential industry. And there's a huge financial and creative opportunity in making work more sustainably. It's huge. So I would suggest that we seize this opportunity. I'm off my soapbox now and into the bar. Thank you. Thank you.