As the discussion about gender equality in both Hollywood and otherwise grows, Sarah Gavron, director of the Carey Mulligan lead Suffragette, has created one of the most timely films of 2015. She also, in this writer’s humble opinion, has created one of the most powerful films of the year. I got the chance to speak with her about the film, about her start as a female filmmaker, and about getting the chance to be the first film to shoot at the Houses of Parliament. Check out the interview below and make sure to support the film in theaters.
TYF: So, to kick it off, how did you get into film-making?
Sarah Gavron: As a teenager, I was really interested in drama and art, and I saw Hollywood, mainly mainstream films, I wasn’t a film buff or someone who had their Super 8 camera around growing up. But it was when I was in my late teens I started to see films by British filmmakers like Mike Leigh, Terrence Davis, Stephen Frears and Ken Loach and I thought2 “Oh gosh these are the films about the world around me”, and I started to just have ideas for films, stories I just saw as moving images, but I didn’t think I could be a director, or it didn’t occur to me, until in my early twenties when I saw films by some women, Jane Campion, Mira Niar, Kathryn Bigelow, Clair Dennis, and I suddenly thought “women are doing this”. I thought “wow I could do this” and then I dared to tell people I wanted to train to be a film director and I applied to National Film Television school and by then I was 27.
I made a lot of short films, it was really by the ninth short film that got me out there [laughs]. Then on the basis of that I got meetings of making longer form projects. I got a television films called This Little Life which won me a BAFTA and got me agents, got me into meetings for other things and then I did Brick Lane which was my first cinema film.
TYF: And Brick Lane you did with Abi Morgan (writer of Suffragette)-so was it exciting to get to team back up with her for Suffragette?
It was great, really made sense actually and she’s someone who’s in rehearsal and she’s there for the shoot and the edits and so we have a short hand…she contributes throughout the process.
TYF: What initially drew you to this project? I know that it was in development for quite a while.
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No one had ever told this story on the big screen and also in Britain, it’s not very widely known. We know the Mrs. Banks, Mary Poppins view of it and that’s about it. So it seemed like overdue to tell it and also timely because of how much is going on in the world today that resonated with the aspects of the story we were telling-police surveillance and violence against women, abuse in the work place and all sorts of rights issues, gender pay gap, things that still resonate in the 21st Century.
TYF: I was actually thinking when preparing for the interview that I don’t remember being taught about the Suffragette movement in school either and I could only think of Mrs. Banks, and I kind of pride myself on trying to seek out stories and films about women. Do you think there’s a reason why this story hasn’t been told when there are other historical events told multiple times, sometimes in the same year?
I think it is to do with the fact that it’s a symptom of inequality. Men write the history books and men make the movies mostly so women’s history is being marginalized with stories that haven’t had a light shined on them and I think that there are so few female filmmakers, and it was going to be a female team that would make this. It’s only just gotten into the school curriculum in the U.K.
TYF: It’s a story about women, made by women, produced by women-did you go into the process knowing that that’s how you wanted this story to be told?
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It was kind of instinctive and natural because we met a lot of people for the different heads of department roles. We all support each other and there’s an understanding there and we shared a passion to tell this story. We gravitated towards Alice Normington, the head of production design, and then the costume designer (Jane Petrie), the location designer (Barbara Herman-Skelding)…there were lots of heads of department that were who were passionate that were the right people for the jobs. We did have some men in positions, but we had a lot of women and we really reversed the usual balance on a film set. I think being surrounded by so many women and having so many women in front of the camera was great for me, it gave me confidence in the creative atmosphere, everyone was very committed to telling this story, we felt we were being very Suffragette about it.
TYF: How much research goes into a movie like this? There were parts of the film that shocked me (such as a portion about the hunger strikes in the prison). Was there anything you learned that shocked you?
So much surprised me because I knew so little about it. Really the thing that surprised me the most were the lengths the women went to and the brutality they faced. I knew a little bit but the means they turned to civil disobedience at the end…they even were putting explosives in houses and destroying property, not peoples lives which is important to remember. They faced violence at the hands of the police. They did hunger strikes and were force fed, Emily Wilding Davison (Natalie Press) was force fed 49 times. I mean, we now know it was torture and it was even worse than today because the equipment was so basic and then it was at such personal cost. Many of them lost family and friends in the process it was really understanding getting into their minds to what drove them to that point to be prepared to risk and sacrifice that much.
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TYF: How important was it for you to show that these women kind of saw themselves as the foot soldiers of this movement (in regards to the civil disobedience) and that they were actively out there, making sure their voices were heard no matter the consequence?
We didn’t want to shy away from the rough edges of it and the detail of it, it felt important to show the violence they endured but also the violence they committed and the consequences of their actions and what the personal cost was. We don’t expect that of women, and I think it’s telling about how unequal they felt and how repressed the were that they were willing to fight so hard.
TYF: Could you talk a little about getting the cast together, from the starring roles like Carey Mulligan to the more, supporting players, such as Ben Whishaw (I diverged here to gush about the mini The Hour reunion, which I’m glad to be able to edit around because I’m embarrassing.)
Well it was great, we wanted this collective range of actors, female actors, who you don’t normally seen on the screen together, and the great actors of our day. It was really exciting to me because we had Carey [Mulligan] in mind from the beginning, we really went after her, but only after we got a script that we felt happy with and thankfully she very, very quickly said yes.
Then we built the cast around her so then we went to Helena Bonham-Carter, who had a funny connection to the story because she’s the great-granddaughter of the Prime Minister Herbert H. Asquith who at the time who was opposed to the vote and our main antagonist, so it was funny having that connection. Then Anne Marie Duff who’s a theater actor, then Meryl Strep playing a small role, but an important, charismatic leader role. And then we went to the men. It was more difficult casting the men. We got a great cast in the end [with Ben Whishaw and Brendan Gleeson] but initially some agents did bring up and say ‘they don’t have much to do’ and it was like welcome to the world. We got the men we wanted but we wanted the male parts to be nuanced and complex.
TYF: Was there anything on this shoot that you found more difficult than in your past films?
The scale of it was challenging. Because the women of Suffragette were women of deeds not words, and there were these action set pieces that happened on a big scale we needed a lot of supporting artists and stunts and visual effects. There were good things, like we got access to the Houses of Parliament, and we were the first ever film crew to get access.
TYF: Did it give you an extra sense of scale by being able to shoot on location like that?
Definitely, we wanted it to feel very real and not heightened. Being in a real location was great because it gives you an added sense of what it was like to be there at the time.
TYF: What was one of the most rewarding days on set?
Definitely being at the House of Parliament. There’s the kind of irony of being there as an all female cast and crew, staging an anti-government protest…being able to recreate that moment in history and having these descendants on the set with us all felt very exciting and satisfying and very thrilling actually.
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.
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.
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.
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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