(synth music)
- [Sarah] Because we wanted to make film about young people,
we wanted to make it with them.
- I'ma get my own rap and (indistinct)
(Laughing)
- The first step was to assemble a team.
I mean, I'm very far removed from being a teenager
and I knew that, to tell this story,
I needed to work with people from the community.
I needed to work with the young people themselves.
So the creative team, the writers,
Theresa Ikoko and Claire Wilson,
and I also had an associate director called Anu Henriques,
and I, and others, got together,
and worked with a casting director
right from the start called Lucy Pardee.
(soft piano music)
And we went into schools and youth hubs,
and we found the girls before we developed the script,
which is unusual, 'cause usually, when you're casting,
you're looking for a very particular kind of character,
but we weren't. We were just really open.
It was an open brief. But the collaboration extended,
not just through the development process,
but right into the shoot,
and even the post. Everybody's voice was heard,
I was learning as much from them as they were from me.
I was learning more, to be honest.
All these young women were bringing a lot to the table.
They were contributing to the world of the film
and the development of their own characters.
I mean, they were playing fictional characters,
but they were very much drawing on worlds they knew.
- (dialogue) How's your mum doing?
- Yeah, she's fine, yeah.
(soft beeping background noise)
- (Gavron) It felt important to
immerse ourselves in their world,
to know what their daily lives are like,
to see how they interacted.
And one of the takeaways
from that was how their friendship is so important -
that they form these friendship groups
much like you see on the screen,
and that they're really their support groups.
Working very closely with this associate director, Anu,
and she had much more of a handle
on what felt truthful and what didn't
than I did, 'cause I was so far removed,
age-wise, apart from anything else.
But the girls themselves were also constantly
having a conversation with them and with the writers.
So there was this back and forth, and at one point
Kosar, who plays the British-Somali girl, Sumaya,
came up and went, "This scene is dead. It's just dead.
We need to start again."
So they really knew what was working and what wasn't.
(lighthearted guitar music)
So I worked with a very experienced female DP
called Hélène Louvart, who's shot over 50 films
and worked with some of my cinema heroes like Agnès Varda
and Alice Rohrwacher.
In our conversations, it was less about references,
and less about referencing visual ideas,
and photographs, and films,
and more about talking about the emotion
and the core of the scene.
She also got together with another DP
who worked very closely with her called Rachel Clark,
who operated the second camera.
'Cause, we had two at all times.
We made an early decision that we needed two cameras
because that allowed more freedom in the edit.
It meant that we didn't have to make the girls hit marks,
and do the same thing in every take,
'cause at least we had some coverage on that.
And we tried as much as possible to light
as naturally as possible
to give the girls as much freedom as possible
to move as they wanted.
We did silent rolls. We didn't say "action."
We ran, we got- (chuckles)
We ended up with 150 hours of footage in the cutting room,
which is more than I've ever had on any film.
I definitely learned a lot from these girls,
and I respect them hugely.
They're really, really wise.
They're really smart.
And they're really thoughtful.
They're more than I could ever
have dreamed of, actually.
And they've grown through this journey,
and it makes me realize...
we didn't create these girls.
They were there and we were lucky enough to work with them.
And their imaginations are very rich,
and they've got so much to offer.
And it makes me realize
how often we don't appreciate our young people,
and how often you just read the negative stories
about badly behaved teenagers.
And they've got so much to offer.
If we can build structures that allow them
to achieve their potential,
there's so much room for greatness out of them.
(upbeat synth music)