TYF: What’s the best advice, as a director, that you’ve ever gotten?
I mean, the advice I’d give to others is don’t give up. Stephen Frears made me very aware of story and how important it is to communicate a story and another teacher at film school told me to remember that as the director I’m always the adult and that’s quite useful. You’ve got to remember to be in charge.
TYF: To relate back to the film, it’s obvious that sexism is a thing, and it isn’t a new thing, but it is something that this year I feel like is being talked about more in the media, for whatever reason. Maybe people in the media are starting to kind of stake a stance. So I was wondering what your expeirence has been like as a female director in an industry where only 7% of directors are women.
Sometimes less.
TYF: Which is kind of alarming considering the wealth of stories just waiting to be told.
Obviously men can make very good films about women, but on the whole they tend not to so there are many fewer films with women at the center then there are with men. We’re 51% of the population and buy more than half of the tickets to the cinema so we’ve got to have those stories reflected. I really, strongly, believe we need to have more diversity reflected behind the camera, we need those from all wakes of life making films, that’s when it will start reflecting our world.
In terms of experiencing sexism, I mean it’s difficult for me to gauge quite often what the difficulties I experience making films have to do with me being a woman and the fact that it’s pretty difficult to make a film. I don’t get to compare how it is for other people because unlike the cast and crew and commissioners, I don’t see other directors at work. But I’m often in a room with just men. And I am very aware that I have to get…it’s about confidence, for me it was about having role models and like I said it was seeing other women that let me dare put myself forwards as a director.
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Because there is such a precedent for it it feels harder…and film crews are less used to having a woman in charge.
TYF: Who are some female director contemporaries that you’re a fan of?
Many. I mean, I think Ava DuVernay is terrific….Amma Asante and Lone Scherfig are terrific and who I’ve become friends with-they support me anyway. And that’s very helpful. I think Kathryn Bigelow is incredible as a filmmaker who’s kept going in a very male dominated world.
TYF: To jump back to the film again, what made you choose this particular group of working class women, in this particular time frame-which was relatively small.
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It was about focusing in and finding a way to tell the story and we felt like if we chose the story of Emmeline Pankhurst it would have been a story about an exceptional woman and there was something about telling the story of a working woman, a woman who’s every woman, who felt more relatable to and more resonant in the contemporary world and we felt that would be the way in for modern audiences. The leaders of the movement are kind of privileged, educated and from a different class and we thought you know, that the working women have been kind of sidelined throughout history and they were so instrumental and their stories so fascinating that I thought that would be a good way in.
TYF: I know there’s been a little bit of controversy over the lack of women of color in your film but I’ve also read that’s because in the time, there were only a few [in the movement] and they were a part of the upper class.
There were just very few people of color in the U.K. at that time. Because unlike the U.S. we didn’t have immigration, we had tiny pockets of immigration, but the brilliantly diverse version of the U.K. that I live in today didn’t come about until World War I, World II, and really the 1950’s onward. So you get women of color being very prominent in later movements they just weren’t there in the same numbers at that time. So while in America you’ve got, in the women’s movement, you’ve got a lot of women of color, you’ve got Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells -some of them were included, some of them excluded- Ida B. Wells for example was made to go to the back of the march. So there were divisions and prejudice and that’s left lasting wounds, but it was a very different pitch in the U.K., which was dividing matter with class at that time but the movement was inclusive in that way, bringing together women from all wakes of life.
There were these two prominent women who were aristocratic who were treated as aristocrats.
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TYF: So that wouldn’t have fit it with the working class theme.
But there is going to be a TV movie made about Sophia Duleep Singh who was a princess.
TYF: That’s fantastic.
But I hope that it’s known that it’s a story about a two and half mile radius…and I hope that it resonates with women all over the world, everywhere, and that you know, women see themselves in it whoever they are. And what was exciting was when we showed it in London, because the first cinema film I made had not a single white cast member in it, it was all people of color [Brick Lane] and we got some kids from the local school with a large Bangladeshi population, and these girls came to see it and were energized at the end, said they’d always use their vote, it connected with them.
TYF: I was going to say that obviously it’s set in the past but for me I was watching it and feeling empowered, inspired by these women so it’s a very universal theme of fighting for equality. How important was it to make universal?
It was definitely a goal to make it not just a piece of history but be something that connects with today, you know, we had it take place in the period that felt most connected to today with it’s themes of civil disobedience and violence against protesters and the issues it raises like the gender pay gap and issues that feel very 21st Century.
We wanted it to resonate.
Suffragette is out in theaters now.
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