Embattled ‘Stonewall’ director Roland Emmerich has defended his decision to centre the entire movie on a “straight-acting” middle-class, white man.

Emmerich told Buzzfeed that the casting of Jeremy Irvine was part of a strategy to entice heterosexual audiences to the movie.

“You have to understand one thing: I didn’t make this movie only for gay people, I made it also for straight people,” he said.

“I kind of found out, in the testing process, that actually, for straight people, [Danny] is a very easy in. Danny’s very straight-acting. He gets mistreated because of that. [Straight audiences] can feel for him.”

Emmerich’s decision to insert an entirely fictional character (Danny) into the historical events of the Stonewall riots, together with its alleged “white- and cis-washing” are just some of the many reasons that a petition to boycott the movie has garnered almost 25,000 signatures.

Beyond criticisms from the LGBT community, Stonewall has been widely panned by critics. It currently has a 7% score on movie review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, reports The Guardian.