Women have long been considered as the gender that speaks most, but according to research by Polygraph, men are chattier than women in films, with male characters ruling film dialogues. After an analysis of 2000 screenplays of different genres, and the number of words spoken by each character, the pop-culture publication has found that it is the white male that speaks most in movies.Their findings also show that women are also lagging behind their male counterparts with regard to occupying lead roles. "The most abysmal stat is that women occupy at least two of the top three roles in a film only 18% of the time. That same scenario for men occurs in about 82% of films."The project was inspired by research released by linguists Carmen Fought and Karen Eisenhauer in January, which revealed that Disney's so-called princess movies had the female protagonists speaking less than other male characters.Findings were that men speak 68% of the time in The Little Mermaid, 71% of the time in Beauty and the Beast, 90% of the time in Aladdin, 76% of the time in Pocahontas and 77% of the time in Mulan.Polygraph found that outside of Disney's animated films, the issue was still significant."Pretty Woman and 10 Things I Hate About You both have lead women."But the overall dialogue for both films is 52% male, due to the number of male supporting characters," stated the study.Local producer Kutlwano Ditsele of Bomb Productions believes the research does not affect South Africa in any way."I don't think it applies to South Africa at all because the majority of the stories that we tell are black," he said.With regard to gender, Ditsele said "the top five most-successful production companies in South Africa - including Quizzical Productions and Bomb Productions - are run by women" and therefore the research is not relevant.Fidel Namisi of Coal Stove Productions says the reason for the imbalance is that "for some weird reason, most of the product that's churned out has a strong male lead".Row dwarfs filmThe director of The Huntsman: Winter's War, starring Charlize Theron, has justified casting normally proportioned actors to play dwarves, saying the dwarf characters in the film are ''a fantasy race".Sheridan Smith, Nick Frost and Rob Brydon all play dwarves in the new film, says Sky News. The New York Post quoted Danny Woodburn, an actor with dwarfism, as saying it was ''akin to blackface".But director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, told the Press Association: ''In this film, dwarves are a fantasy race; a very different thing.''..