Watch The SUFFRAGETTE Discussion At The Academy With Director Sarah Gavron, Writer Abi Morgan And Producer Alison Owen

Credit: Steffan Hill/Focus Features

After winning the Best Actress Oscar at the 84th Academy Awards for her portrayal as Margaret Thatcher in THE IRON LADY, Meryl Streep came backstage for the standard Q&A with the press. As she stood there with her Oscar statuette, I asked her:

Q. For young girls today, young women watching the Oscars, what advice would you give to them if they are thinking about going into filmmaking or acting?
A. Or anything.

Q. Or anything?
A. Or anything.  Never give up.  Don’t give up, don’t give up.  I mean, many girls around the world live in circumstances that are unimaginably difficult.  And it’s not, you know, show business is a golf game compared to the way most kids grow up in the world.  But I would say never give up.

Inspired by true events, SUFFRAGETTE movingly explores the passion and heartbreak of those who risked all they had for women’s right to vote – their jobs, their homes, their children, and even their lives.

Academy Award nominees Carey Mulligan and Helena Bonham Carter, and three-time Academy Award winner Meryl Streep, lead the cast of the powerful drama about the fight for equality in early-20th-century Britain.

The stirring story centers on Maud, a working wife and mother who becomes an activist for the Suffragette cause alongside women from all walks of life.

Below is the SUFFRAGETTE discussion with director Sarah Gavron, writer Abi Morgan and producer Alison Owen on October 13, 2015 at The Academy.

Gavron says, “All of this happened 100 years ago. I was amazed that this extraordinary and powerful true story of ordinary women willing to sacrifice everything for the right to vote had never been told. There was a miniseries back in the 1970s titled Shoulder to Shoulder which made a generation of women more aware of this history – but, no feature film.”

When the BAFTA Award winner made her much-admired feature film directorial debut, 2007’s Brick Lane, she found kindred spirits in the project’s producers, Academy Award nominee Alison Owen and Faye Ward, and screenwriter Abi Morgan. Not long after, Owen remembers, “I was speaking with a friend, and I wondered why no one had ever made a movie about the Suffragettes. The Suffragette movement in the U.K. didn’t have the associations that the U.S movement did, closely allied – or perceived as being – with the Temperance movement. I realized that the subject to tackle was its being kick-ass, more like a guerrilla movement.”

Director Sarah Gavron

Gavron marvels, “Suddenly we had a team of women filmmakers mobilizing, realizing that we were all drawn to, and being inspired by, what those women achieved. It was time for us to tell their untold story with all its excitement and contemporary resonance.”

“We knew there was a looming responsibility, but we all felt so strongly that it came naturally. It was imperative to us that our film would speak to a wide audience,” comments Ward, a Golden Globe Award nominee. “We also wanted to make sure that its relevance to today would overcome any sense of this being a story locked in the past.”

Ms. Streep concludes, “The full measure of our equality as human beings has yet to be gained across the world as well as here at home. I think it will shock people that this was London in 1912-1913, and how hard won the vote is. I don’t think any young woman who sees Suffragette can conscientiously sit out any election after seeing how people suffered to give her the right to decide her own future.”

SUFFRAGETTE opens in St. Louis on November 6. Take your sisters, your mothers, your daughters – go see this very important and inspirational film!

Visit the movie’s official site: suffragettethemovie.com