Lovely Sarah Gavron arrives on the scene with Suffragette, a wanna-be prestige picture with award’s contender written back-and-front. Though I had a fair share of issues with the film itself [our review], Gavron provided a right compelling interview. Sarah and I talked the casting process, getting Meryl Street onboard, women in the film industry, transitioning into larger-scale projects, directorial influences and the battle between historical accuracy and narrative tread.

So let’s talk  about the transition from your earlier film ‘Brick Lane’ to ‘Suffragette‘. What you have learned  as a filmmaker in those down years?


Sarah Gavron:  It was a big leap in scale, Suffragette.  It’s got a much bigger and better known cast.  It’s got these set pieces, action, and visual effects which I’d never done before, so it was a challenge on all those fronts.  I mean, part of the reason for the down time was I did make a feature length documentary in that period with my husband and took my family off to the Arctic and did a documentary called Village at the End of the World, but apart from that I had two young small children. But I’d been developing, I’d been wanting to make Suffragette for about ten years, and developing it for about six, and it took a lot of work to find that story.  I worked with Abi Morgan, the writer, and the producer is Fay Ward. Alison Owen and I sort of spent a lot of time researching and finding our way into that.  It was useful, I just treated it as a challenge on every front so I did a lot of homework about how to tackle those big set pieces and we did storyboards and we did a lot of wrecking and a lot of talking to the visual effects company to really hone how to tack it.

A movie with this topic, obviously very specifically gender equality, but also just equality in general, is such a hot topic issue right now.  Why do you feel that this film is so pertinent today?

SG:  It was really interesting when we were researching it that it seemed to echo so much of what was going on around the world.  As you say, it’s not just about gender equality, I’m really pleased you say that because I think it’s broader than that.  It’s about general inequality, fighting inequality all over the world, which is, as you say, the big issue of our day, or one of the very big issues of our day.  When we were researching it, I’m not sure we could have gotten this film made five or ten years ago, I don’t think there was such an appetite for it.  I think suddenly it kind of touched on so many things that were resonant and felt contemporary like even the police surveillance operation, you see that the government organized against, when they opened the archives in 2003, the National Archives, and revealed that there’d be this special unit set up to track the suffragettes and these undercover police going out on the street taking photographs, that felt so resonant.  And also the police brutality against women and the way that they were force fed, which now we know is torture.  So suddenly it seemed to be really timely, and also there’s this resurgence, I think partly because of the digital age in that it’s allowing all these women’s voices, or voices generally, to speak out against repression.  We’re hearing these people challenging repression, which was again, mirroring what the suffragettes had done.  It also hadn’t been told, so it was time.

In a film like this, and also in your filmography in general, who do you consider your biggest directorial influences?

SG:  You know, it’s interesting, I have an eclectic range of films that I’ve drawn from for inspiration and in a way in each period of your life, there’s a different touchstone.  That’s kind of interesting.  So when I was in my teens, my big revelation was watching films by some of the British directors around me like Terence Davies, Stephen Frears, Ken Loach, who reflected a world that I knew.  That was a revelation for me, but the big leap, the big influence for me was in my early twenties when I saw films by women directors.  I’m hugely influenced by Jane Campion, and then there was Mira Nair, Kathryn Bigelow, Claire Denis in France, and various others and I just thought that made me think I could try my hand at directing because they were role models.  So I dared to put myself forward as a director.

That’s interesting and that brings me to another question.  In a way, you’re making a film about gender inequality inside an industry that itself notoriously unequal, only 7, 8 percent of directors in Hollywood are female.  A., is this something you were very directly cognizant of while you were making the film?  And B., did that add any extra challenges to the making of the film?

SG:  Yeah, I mean I think you can’t not be aware of it.  It’s so prevalent and so unusual, we not only had a female director, but a female screenwriter, two of our producers were women, the production design and the location manager, the head of costume, and then we had all the women in front of the camera.  And now we know, out of all the Oscar films last year, not one of them had a female protagonist, out of the best films.  It’s so much part of the culture that when you do something like this, you feel the difference.  There was something about telling this story of these women who had broken every taboo and challenged convention that sort of made it feel appropriate.  We were, the making of the film, was kind of a political act in itself.  There was a great sense of camaraderie and support in that cast and crew, but not only amongst the women.  Interestingly the men like Brendan Gleeson and Ben Whishaw really embraced the subject matter and want to tell the story and supported my vision for it.  I know Brendan Gleeson said he’d never been on such an estrogen filled set in his life.  So I felt that we were supported in that way and we had a few sort of champions in terms of the exec producers, there was Tessa Ross at Film4, there were the people at Focus, and there was Cameron McCracken, a man at Pathe, who were very supportive of the project.  We were grateful for that because it could have been harder, but there’s no doubt that it was hard to get off the ground and I think the fact that it’s part of the conversation now, women are being clamorous, you’ve got Meryl Streep, Patricia Arquette, women are talking about sexism in Hollywood helped, because it’s shone a light on the problem and people are more receptive to us challenging that.

As a director, working with your cast, do you consider yourself very hands-on?  Are you very much articulating what they’re doing?  Or are you someone who kind of steps off and believes in their processes?

SG:  This project I was working with such an experienced cast and they were so sort of skilled and I think the relationship with each actor is different.  They have different needs and you have different requirements from each character.  I mean with Carrie Mulligan who played Maud, she’s so brilliant at inhabiting a character and she’s so watchable, but we did have a constant dialogue about what was truthful all the way through.  She would never settle for a take unless she felt it was truthful.  We really shared a vision and shared a belief in how to make this feel real.  It was about stripping away the acting in a way.  It was about making it feel authentic and not heightened, and she embraced that.

So more on Carrie Mulligan; how did you go about casting her in the role?  Can you talk about some conversations you had, and how you ultimately ended up going with her?

SG:  I was really, we were all actually, when we were working on the script, really keen that Carrie play that central role of Maud because she’s so unique in that, just the way that you can believe every moment of her journey.  Also Maud is quite an internal character at the beginning, and you need someone that you can watch and the tiny shifts will register.  You know you’ll get all that with Carrie.  So we went after her and it was nerve wracking because she’d been in our mind so long, what if she doesn’t want to do it?  We sent the script to her and at the end of the weekend I got a call saying she wanted to meet.  So I met her in a cafe, and within ten minutes, she asked me what I wanted to do with the film, and I started talking, and after ten minutes she said, “I want to do this.”.  She’d been told by her agent never to agree quickly, and never to agree without another meeting, but she did, and I was so delighted.  Then we built the cast around her, and it was very exciting to put her on screen with Helena Bonham Carter, and Meryl Streep, and Anne-Marie Duff, who’s a great theatre actor and also screen actor, Romola Garai, to see those women you don’t often see together.  And Helena Bonham Carter was funny because she’s the great granddaughter of Herbert Asquith, who’s the Prime Minister at the time who opposed the suffragettes, who was their nemesis, their enemy.  So that was quite peculiar, she was very up for playing this role.

Speaking more about casting, you obviously got Meryl Streep to play the role of Emmeline and obviously she’s one of the most, if not the most, in demand actors of today.  Yet, the role itself is so small.  Can you talk about how you ended up recruiting her?

SG:  Yes, as you know, the story is centered around the working women who were the foot soldiers of the movement.  You’ve got Carrie Mulligan, Anne-Marie Duff, and Helena Bonham Carter at the center of that, and then you have, through their eyes you see in one sequence an encounter with Emmeline Pankhurst, who was the leader of the movement.  So we needed someone to play this small, but really vital role, where she would light up the screen and light up the light of these women in this very short amount of time.  We were talking about an icon to play an icon, in a way, and Carrie Mulligan actually mentioned Meryl Streep, and I thought, “Oh, do we dare?  How exciting!”.  We approached her and she came back and agreed to do it, and it was so exciting because she carried into this part, she’s got this aura around and this charisma, and we could use that.  She appeared on the balcony in front of all these supporting artists in our cast, they were all in awe of Meryl Streep, as they would have been of Emmeline Pankhurst.  So that was exciting, and she’s been so generous to the project and she’s one of those people who’s an advocate for women’s rights both in the industry and beyond.  On all fronts, she’s a great person to have on board.

Absolutely.  In making a film like this, if you had to weigh out and measure the importance of one or the other, what do you think is more essential to the film: either being historically accurate or narratively compelling?  And do you feel like there is a tug of war between the two of them at times?

SG:  I do think you have to balance those two.  You want to make a story that takes the audience on a journey, and we decided not to do a biopic where you’re constrained, often, by the order of events and a life story.  We decided to release ourselves from that and we wanted to tell the story of an ordinary working woman and there were so many of them involved in the movement at the vanguard of change, and that seemed exciting and contemporary.  But what we did was create a composite character, a couple of compound characters, in fact.  So Maud is drawn from essentially three working women, and we’ve taken aspects of their lives, to have a kind of compelling narrative that you can follow and someone’s journey towards activism, so that was exciting.  But we definitely want to embed it in the world and make it feel as historically accurate as possible.

Sure.  So as a young girl growing up, I imagine that there weren’t too many movies of this nature.  Is this something you kind of wish that you had been exposed to while growing up?  Maybe, I don’t know what you learn about in school over there, is this something you feel you knew of as a young girl?



SG:  I didn’t, and I wasn’t taught it at school at all, which is kind of extraordinary, and it’s not widely known, this story.  There’s the Mary Poppins version of it, of singing suffragettes, and sashes, drinking tea, but the truth of it, the lengths which the women went and the police brutality they faced, the hunger striking and the force feeding is not widely known.  So, yeah, I wish I had seen films like this as I was growing up.  I hope that the next generation is inspired to make more films from the female perspective.

Q:  Absolutely, and I was just going to ask, what do you hope the film impresses upon young women today?

SG:  I’m very keen that it does get seen by the younger generation, because I think that they’re the generation that can change their world.  What I hope comes out of the film was how hard fought for the vote was, how far we’ve come in so many ways, but also how far we’ve still got to go, how the battling goes on.  And that’s the generation that’s got to stand up and be counted.

Especially when you tack on that bit at the end and see all the different countries who have either gotten gender equality or are still striving for it today.


SG:  Yeah, you realize how recent it is.  1971 for Switzerland, 2015 Saudi Arabia are just getting women to register for the vote for the first time.

”

Yeah, it’s definitely a harrowing reminder that gender equality is less than a century old.


SG:  Exactly, and in many parts of the world, not even.  There’s still women fighting for basic human rights.

From a filmmaking perspective, what was the most challenging scene, or scenes, or moment in the film, both from an emotional standpoint and a logistical POV?

SG:  Well logistically, the big set pieces were the most challenging.  I think one of the most exciting, but challenging sequences was filming in the Houses of Parliament.  We were the first ever film crew to get access to the House of Parliament which was very exciting, because this was this institution that had barred women for centuries, and there we were, this predominantly female cast and crew allowed access, and not only that, but we took in 300 supporting artists, horses, period cast, stunt people, staged a riot in central courtyard that was active government that showed the government in a terrible light.  That seemed like a marker of how far we’d gone, but in terms of challenges, emotionally the most challenging stuff was around Carrie Mulligan’s relationship with her son, George, so the character of Maud and George, because it’s a very heartbreaking…there is a particularly heartbreaking scene between them and this little boy that we cast, Adam, was so vulnerable and so respondent to the material that he kept on weeping just at the thought of the scene.  So we had to really make sure we filmed him first and it was all very delicate, and we wanted it to be really emotionally truthful and heartfelt.

So the readers can get a sense of your taste, can you  tell me some of your favorite films, and films you think everyone should be required to see?

SG:  That’s interesting, you know, because as I said, there are all these films at different moments that I love.  One of the films that has really made a lasting impact and influence on me is The Piano by Jane Campion, that’s definitely one of the last ones.  Then there’s this extraordinary filmmaker called Larisa Shepitko, who was a Russian filmmaker who only made two films.  One of them is called The Ascent, one of them is called Wings, and she’s a kind of, in some ways, forgotten, but wonderful female filmmaker.  And there are many more!