Molly Ringwald is uncomfortable with how many ’80s films addressed sexual assault among teens — and that includes the John Hughes films she starred in.
“You know, when I made those movies with John Hughes, his intention was to not make ‘Porky’s’ or ‘Animal House,’ ” she told NPR on Monday. “But I think, you know, as everyone says and I do believe is true, that times were different and what was acceptable then is definitely not acceptable now and nor should it have been then, but that’s sort of the way that it was.”
“I feel very differently about the movies now and it’s a difficult position for me to be in because there’s a lot that I like about them,” she added. “And of course I don’t want to appear ungrateful to John Hughes, but I do oppose a lot of what is in those movies.”
Ringwald, 50, also addressed those elements of her movies in an essay for the New Yorker published in April, including the treatment of the character Caroline in “Sixteen Candles,” who gets blackout drunk and sleeps with a nerd (and whom the heartthrob, Jake, says he can “violate 10 different ways if [he] wanted to” because she’s passed out).
She told NPR that she watched the ’80s classic with her daughter and that they view the film through a different lens.
“There were parts of that film that bothered me then,” she admitted. “Although everybody likes to say that I had, you know, John Hughes’ ear and he did listen to me in a lot of ways, I wasn’t the filmmaker. And, you know, sometimes I would tell him, ‘Well, I think that this is kind of tacky’ or ‘I think that this is irrelevant’ or ‘This doesn’t ring true,’ and sometimes he would listen to me but in other cases he didn’t. And, you know, you don’t want to speak up too much. You don’t want to cross the line. Or at least that’s the way that I felt at the time.”
Ringwald previously said she experienced a slew of harassment offscreen as well from “plenty of Harveys,” though not from disgraced mogul Harvey Weinstein himself.