We do not want to be lawbreakers.
We want to be lawmakers!
The only way is forward.
I'm worth no more, no less than you...
and we will win.
I'd been thinking about making a film about suffragettes
for many years, actually. I hadn't learnt any of it at school.
I was aware that there had never been a big screen version
of the story and it seemed like this incredible slice of history
that had changed the course of history, in fact,
these women and what they did, and we owed this debt to them.
And it also seemed incredibly relevant.
I was a bit resistant, cos I was like,
"Oh, big hats, corsets, tambourines, Mary Poppins."
And...
it was a complete revelation when I came to read the research,
because it was incredibly diverse, it had been meticulously done
so far, in terms of what they had been able to find,
because obviously it's quite a buried history.
But I became more and more excited and the thing that really excited me
was the combination between the testimonials of the working women
and also the police surveillance records, which had been opened up
for public consumption from about 2002, 2003,
which really exposed the level of intimidation and surveillance
these women were under and that's where I thought,
"OK, this feels very 21st century."
WOMEN YELLING
GLASS SMASHING
Victory will be ours!
Votes for women!
'Suffragette came into my life about six months,
'I guess, before we turned over.'
I was asked to go and have a cup of tea with Sarah Gavron,
who was thinking about making a movie about suffragettes.
Of course, I didn't know there had been a huge journey
for years for them to get this film off the ground.
But she talked very briefly about...
the world she was trying to create, which inspired and engaged me,
cos I thought, "We're going to be talking about working-class women
"in the suffragette movement?" That's very interesting.
You know, because we have these preconceptions about these women
with time on their hands, you know.
It's a very reductive image of the cause, that they were women
who could afford to have a sort of hobby, you know.
What we decided to do, after a long time of trying different routes,
was to focus it in on this one year, 1912 to 1913,
when militancy was at its height,
and tell the story through the working women.
We could have made a biopic of Emmeline Pankhurst,
who is the most extraordinary, compelling character,
but that would have been a story of an extraordinary woman and what
we wanted was the story of the foot soldiers, of the working women,
who were often at the vanguard of change in these movements.
They were one of the striking things about the suffragette movement,
that it brought together women of all classes.
We always look at the generals, we always look at the prime ministers,
we always look at, you know, the great authors.
We don't look at the people who read their books,
we don't look at the soldiers who fight for that general.
And so, I just wanted to almost pay tribute to these voices
that hadn't been heard.
Many of the women in the working class were illiterate, you know.
There had been a couple of high-profile working-class women
who did go on to write memoirs - Hannah Mitchell, Annie Kenney.
But on the whole,
the kind of everyday woman hadn't been written about.
And the things that they were talking about,
everything from equal pay to sexual violence
and abuse in the workplace, at home,
through to custodial and property rights,
I kept on thinking,
"God, this is chiming with all the kind of global stories
"of inequality I'm reading,"
and so in a weird way, although it took us six years,
it was quite helpful because I think the sort of world and we started to
catch up and then run with each other.
Are you a Suffragette, Mrs Ellyn?
Yes, but I consider myself more of a soldier, Mrs Watts.
These woman's testimonies make a difference.
But, as Mrs Pankhurst says, it's deeds, not words,
that will get us the vote.
I think it felt very helpful in a story of this scale
to have a character, see it through the eyes of, primarily, Maud,
but also her cohorts Violet, played by Anne-Marie, and Edith,
played by Helena Bonham Carter, and the women around her,
but that, you know, what we could do is turn it on two plains,
so have the big historical beats and then the tiny shifts
in this one woman's life, and see how the two interacted,
and understand this journey from quite a personal perspective
so that it was less removed, in a way.
You feel that you're part of the team and that was key, I think,
to obviously making this film, too, because it was about a team
of people and movement of people,
so Sarah really tapped into that.
She's so interested in your research and the things you find out
and she really valued everybody's input.
All the other departments, costume design, et cetera, on this film
are great. This isn't a traditional costume-drama vibe, you know.
It's got a beautiful steely pallet
and our costumes, I just thought we were filthy.
I was wearing a lot of original frocks that were just hanging by a thread,
which was perfect.
There was no glamour to it, which was appropriate.
You've been here less than a month.
I've been doing laundry work ever since I was 13.
Maggie's only 12 and she's in here already.
It's as tough for us women as it's ever been.
We've got to do what we can, however we can.
It's not respectable.
You want me to respect the law, then make the law respectable.
This film is a real marriage between, you know,
playing with this fictional journey and knowing
when you cut away history and just let that go and allow
the fictional journey to breathe in order to create a kind of authentic
truth, even though it may not factually always be absolutely right.
And actually respecting and honouring those great historical moments, and
most of the time we did that was because they were so dramatic in themselves.
Abi is a really collaborative writer.
She's brilliant at absorbing a lot of feedback and ideas
and going back and reinventing the script endlessly
and revisiting it and re-drafting, and as we went along,
we had a very close working relationship, the two producers,
Abi and I, and we were constantly feeding off each other
and shifting, and initially she wrote a script that was
centred on the Romola Garai character - sort of
upper-middle-class woman, but she'd created this character of Maud
and we read it and thought,
"Oh, actually, Maud is the beating heart of this story,"
and so she went back and rewrote the whole thing
from Maud's perspective.
Edith.
Dear Emily.
This is Mrs Watts, Mrs Pankhurst.
Maud.
Thank you, Maud.
Never surrender.
Never give up the fight.
Recreating period London in 1912 isn't easy,
because lots of it was destroyed in the Blitz,
particularly the areas that Maud would've lived in,
the tenements, and also, lots of it has been regentrified.
So what we had to do was we combined visual effects with real locations.
We were incredibly lucky to get access to the House of Parliament.
I said to the location manager quite early on, "We have to get in there,
"that was the epicentre of battles, it's so key."
She said, "Well, no film crew ever has."
No commercial film crew but we were lucky.
I mean, partly her tenacity and partly good timing
that we did get access, so we were able...
And then, we put in this request to take in 300 supporting artists
and stunt people and period cars and horses
and stage an anti-government protest,
you know, in the very place that had barred women for centuries.
And there we were, this mainly female crew and cast doing that
and that felt very exciting,
recreating history in the place that it happened
and there's something about being in those real locations
that adds a huge amount when you're shooting it.
Just to feel the presence of that building hanging over your head,
to walk past sculptures inside the building
that women had chained themselves to,
because there was a freedom of access at that point in history,
one could wander in and out of the Houses of Parliament,
which is extraordinary for us to imagine, but you could.
Women chained themselves...
Emily Wilding Davison locked herself into the Houses of Parliament
and we walked around and saw all those places and you just feel so...
Well, we just felt...
..very beholden and very grateful, you know,
but also, yeah, it just gets the old nerve endings going,
you don't have to do too much to tickle your imagination on that one.
You're a hypocrite.
The law means nothing to me, I've had no say in making the law.
That's an excuse. It's all we have.
We burn things cos war's the only language men listen to.
Cos you've beaten us and betrayed us and there's nothing else left.
And there's nothing left but to stop you.
Lock us all up?
We're in every home, we're half the human race, you can't stop us all.
You might lose your life before this is over.
And we will win.
It was a great atmosphere of camaraderie on the set
and in a way, the subject matter made us feel quite fearless,
you know, we felt like, "Well, the suffragettes were out there
"breaking every taboo and every convention, so let's do it."
I hope that the film's a reminder of how far we've come, you know,
the debt we owe to these women in previous generations
who've paved the way for our generation,
but also how far we've still got to go.
It was a constant reminder making it of how there are women
around the world who are still fighting for basic human rights.
There are also people in general who are fighting inequality
and I hope that this film speaks beyond just sexual inequality
towards the need for equality in so many areas.
Passion is a good thing.
Passion leads to activism, activism leads to change,
change led to the vote. Use your vote,
you know, at its simplest.
I think it's that sort of equation.
Subtitles by Ericsson