‘It’s about valuing their audience’: why Ghostbusters called in a Muslim ‘cultural consultant’

The film-makers wanted to get the exact nature of the elaborate brass figure carvings right … (l-r) Celeste O’Connor, Kumail Nanjiani, Finn Wolfhard and James Acaster in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. Photograph: Jaap Buitendijk/Courtesy of Sony Pictures

The “sensitivity reader” is a well-established, if controversial, figure in the publishing world, offering advice on whether a book’s content might cause offence. The film and TV industry has also been forced to confront similar issues, with “intimacy coordinators” now widely employed to ensure that filmed sex scenes neither harm the actors nor outrage audiences. Perhaps less well-known, but now gaining ground in film and TV, is the role of a “cultural consultant” – advisers taken on by productions to help them navigate the choppy waters of sensitivities around ethnicity and faith.

Sajid Varda, founder and CEO of media charity UK Muslim Film and director of the UK’s inaugural Muslim international film festival, recently completed an assignment on Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, the latest instalment of the popular and long-running series of supernatural comedies. Varda says the key to such roles is “authenticity”; it is, he says “not just saying what is wrong with this, but how can we make it better and improve it?”