Staying true to the suffragette name, Sarah Gavron’s feature film “Suffragette” has sparked a great deal of controversy in the days leading up to its U.S. release. Sisters Uncut, a British direct-action feminist group, protested at the London premiere, and the film’s actresses were criticized for a photo shoot in which they wore shirts reading, “I would rather be a rebel than a slave.”
Sarah Gavron, the director, and Abi Morgan, the screenwriter, spent six years working to develop this incendiary historical narrative, to which Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter and Meryl Streep all lend their talents.
“Suffragette” opens nationwide this Friday, so The Daily sat down with Gavron and Morgan to discuss anything and everything — from their research process to sexism in the film industry.
The Stanford Daily (TSD): First, why did you decide to tackle the whole history of this decades-long suffrage movement through the story of one woman?
Sarah Gavron (SG): There was so much you could have told, and we wanted to find a way in. We spent a good six years working on it and looking through the research. I think Abi unlocked it by finding the character of Maud and the ordinary, the everywoman.
Abi Morgan (AM): I think that’s part of the reason that when the film opens, they’ve had 40 years of peaceful protesting. It was quite daunting what a long movement it was. So what we were trying to do was find the prism which would really identify and hold the points of change in the movement. When we started to look at this very intense 16-month period where they went from peaceful protest to militant activism, we wanted to find somebody who would also go along with that journey. The character of Maud really came out of reading about the working class women and realizing that they were sort of the foot soldiers, and (asking) what would it be like if at this point you were someone who didn’t realize quite how unhappy you were, and then you see this movement start and change happening around you, and that starts to ignite your own activism. That felt very contemporary, and felt like a very accessible story for us all, rather than taking somebody who may be more of the educated elite, or may have already been in the movement for some time, or may have been exceptional. It was about trying to take an ordinary woman and show how history made her into an exceptional woman.
TSD: What kind of research into the history of the suffrage movement did you conduct before you started filming?
SG: In a way it’s been marginalized from history books, and not been in the school curriculum for years. It is finally now, and at universities. There are books out there, but there are also these amazing archives. The suffragettes themselves collected a lot of stuff from the movement. They had a kind of awareness of their own legacy. There was this thing called the Suffragette Fellowship Collection, which is housed now at the Museum of London, which is letters, and even postcards, and diaries, and accounts from prison. And then one of the national archives opened up with the police records in 2003 revealing the police surveillance operation. Then there are objects you can touch, like in the women’s library they have Emily Wilding Davison’s purse that she dropped on Derby Day when she was hit by the horse, and there were banners, embroidered banners. All that kind of brought it to life, particularly the written accounts of the women, describing their first person accounts of what it was like being force-fed.
TSD: How do you both respond to the Sisters Uncut protest at the film’s premiere?
AM: I think we both thought it was pretty fantastic. We pulled up in the big limos; we’re basically in the world of entertainment. So suddenly to realize that this had such impact, and seeing these incredible smoke bombs in the suffragette colors, we all thought we couldn’t have staged it better. But actually more than that, what was great was that it was a proper suffragette act, and it was women coming together to fight for such an important issue, which is cutting services for victims of domestic violence. So I think we felt hugely appreciative and admiring of those women that night.
SG: One of the missions of the film is to connect with today and remind us that there are ongoing issues for women to fight against, and that is one of them.
TSD: Colin Trevorrow, director of “Jurassic World,” recently asserted that female directors aren’t doing blockbuster movies because they’re not interested in doing a piece of studio business, which launched debate about sexism in entertainment. How would you both respond to that, or what experiences have you had with that?
AM: I think it’s more about women not getting the opportunities. I think women can just as easily as men say, “I’ll do something for the sake of it being a great piece of entertainment.” I don’t think every woman wants to do something that always has to be politically or emotionally connected directly to themselves, as men do. So I think it’s more about the fact that it’s harder for women to prove themselves in the box office both in front of and behind the camera, and if we don’t get those opportunities, then studios won’t take those risks.
SG: But what’s exciting at the moment is the debate, which you talked about, which really in my career feels like the first time people have been engaging profoundly with this issue, and women in the industry are being incredibly vocal about it, and there’s an awareness, and I think that’s such a vital part of shifting the balance.
TSD: Just as a final question, you’ve [AM] mentioned that for the next few years you’d like to write TV and film focusing on women. What do you both see yourselves doing as your next projects?
AM: We’re talking.
SG: Yeah, we’re talking about doing something together, because we want to build on this collaborative relationship that we’ve built up, and with the producers too. I know Abi already has said about doing female-centered things, and I think there are so many stories to be told that haven’t been told yet, that we haven’t seen on-screen with women at the center of them, and I’m excited about that.
Contact Reed Canaan at rcanaan ‘at’ stanford.edu.