At the Suffragette press conference, the cast and crew held nothing back when discussing women’s history, industry sexism, and the importance of female storytellers.
Suffragette premiered earlier this week at the BFI London Film Festival, and before walking the red carpet, the film’s key cast and crew took part in a press conference where they spoke frankly about the role of women in film, industry resistance to the project, and modern-day feminism.
Here are the highlights from the press conference with director Sarah Gavron, screenwriter Abi Morgan, and actors Carey Mulligan and Meryl Streep.
‘These stories have been written out of our history’
Suffragette stars Carey Mulligan as a reluctant member of a militant group of women fighting to secure voting rights for their gender. The suffragette movement is hugely significant for our history, and yet their story is not a popular topic for neither Hollywood nor the history books.
Director Sarah Gavron explains, “When we spoke to the academics that consulted on the film they said they weren’t surprised that today it’s still hard to get women’s history taken seriously. It took a long time to get on the school curriculum – I wasn’t taught anything about it and later read a few lines at the bottom of a history book. I think it’s partly a symptom of inequality and the fact that these stories have been written out of our history.”
Gavron believes that the reason Hollywood hasn’t yet tackled the suffragettes’ story is because there are “so few female teams” in Hollywood, “and it probably was going to be a female team that brought it to the screen.”
Mulligan echoes the sentiment, saying, “I remember there was a small paragraph in a history book saying, ‘Women’s Movement.’ And it was about four lines, basically saying they got it, after a bit of fighting.”
Adds screenwriter Abi Morgan, “It was a real detective job to do all the research for the critical body of the story. You come to realise that so many of these stories have been buried and, like Sarah, I was never taught it at school.”
“There is no women’s history,” Meryl Streep agrees. “There’s history, that women have been shut out of.”
Rousing the interest in female-led storytelling
Streep, who plays historical icon Emmeline Pankhurst in Suffragette, is clearly done mincing her words when it comes to discussing gender inequality in Hollywood.
“I think there’s interest [in women’s stories], but there’s not interest from the people making those decisions,” she says. “So it’s a question of rousing that interest.”
Adds Morgan, “I think a film fronted not by one but by an ensemble of women when they’re not being funny or romantic is hard.”
But clearly, the fact that Suffragette got made at all is a good sign. “Women are half the population, they buy more than half of movie tickets and there is an appetite for female-led or female-made films, so I’m optimistic,” says Gavron. “So many people are talking about it, and it feels like finally when I walk into a room people are receptive and, yes, we do want to employ more women.”
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So why are we not seeing more female-led movies in Hollywood? According to Meryl Streep, the answer lies with the film critics.
“In our industry, it’s all controlled by buzz. Who creates that?” she asks, calling out Rotten Tomatoes and their staggeringly skewered male-female reviewer ratio (read more about Streep’s findings here).
“I submit to you that men and women like different things. Sometimes they like the same thing, but sometimes they diverge,” she says. “If the tomato-meter is weighted so heavily to one set of tastes, that drives box offices.”
‘We still live in a society that’s sexist’
When talking about why she wanted to do Suffragette, Mulligan says, “It didn’t feel like a documentary about that time, it felt like a film about today. I always felt its presence with where we are to mark the achievement and what they gave to us, but also to highlight where we are in the world. And yes, we still live in a society that’s sexist.”
Streep, on a roll, gets right to the point: “Is there sexism in the world now? What annoys me? The lack of inclusion in the decision-making bodies of every industry around the world,” she frankly says. “That seems wrong to me. If men don’t look around at their board of governors table and feel that something is wrong – something is just wrong – that half the people at that table aren’t women then we’re not going to make any progress. More than half the people that are in graduate schools in the U.S. are women; law school, medical school, more than half are women. But do they get to decide? Do they get to write history?”
Why ‘Suffragette’ is so relatable
While Morgan and Gavron originally talked about doing an Emmeline Pankhurst biopic, they shifted their focus because, according to Gavron, “If we told that story it’d be the story of an exceptional woman. We wanted to tell the story of the ordinary women.”
Part of what makes the movie so extraordinary is that it belongs to, “the women with no platform, no privilege: The working-class women who are so often at the vanguard of change but rarely get talked about. We thought, to follow that woman, [we] would basically connect with all women of today.”
According to Meryl Streep, “The great achievement of this film is that it’s not about women of certain class. It’s about the working-girl and I think that’s why we can sort of enter this film so easily and so empathetically, because Carey plays this young laundress who looks like us.”
On those controversies
There have been two major controversies surrounding the promotional campaign for Suffragette. One was the t-shirt slogan “I’d rather be a rebel than a slave,” which has sparked considerable outrage.
While Abi Morgan recognizes that, “certainly in America we have this huge debt to the many diverse women who were involved” with the equality movement, “I think it would be a shame if that conversation – and it is an important conversation – overshadowed what I think is the true intention of the film, which is to empower all women globally.”
The other issue has been Meryl Streep’s now-infamous interview with The Guardian, where she stated she is a humanist rather than a feminist.
“There’s a phrase in this film that says, ‘deeds not words,’ and that’s where I stand on that,” is Streep’s response. “I let the actions of my life stand for what I am as a human being and I’m content with that. Not the words. Contend with that.”
‘Suffragette’ hits cinemas on October 23. Read our spoiler-free review here.
Check out a trailer for the movie below:
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