True/False caught up with Sarah Gavron, Director of SUFFRAGETTE, which opens today in select US theaters, to talk about connections between her documentary work and her current endeavor.

T/F: Both SUFFRAGETTE and VILLAGE AT THE END OF THE WORLD (T/F 2013) are based on real stories. Could you talk about the process of making films that are based in reality, when one turns out to be narrative and the other a documentary?

SG: There’s a lot of overlap, certainly, in the research phase. With Suffragette, we spent six years working on the script and most of that was research. You know documentaries about historical subjects are spent researching, but I wanted to embed Suffragette in the details of the time and make it feel as authentic as possible.

I wanted to break from the fictional period drama which keeps its distance and, instead, really immerse you in that period. So, I used quite a lot of documentary techniques: a handheld camera, a lot of time, giving actors a lot of freedom to capture the performance, rather than controlling and staging it for the camera.

As you well know in documentary, that’s what you’re doing a lot of the time, unless you’re reconstructing sections.  You’re capturing it.  And so that kind of fluidity and freedom means keeping an eye open and pushing the camera to follow whatever’s interesting and emerging or unfolding in front of you.  We tried to give it that very real aesthetic so that you felt immersed in that world.  It felt believable.

Did you find yourself varying from the script much as you worked?

Well, there were two processes. We rehearsed for quite a long time, and that was really about meticulously pouring over the script and fine tuning with the actors to make it feel right and as bespoke as possible.

Then, when we were on the set, there was a little bit of interpretive dialogue, but mostly interpretative staging and feel.  We sort of improvised– we didn’t improvise in terms of the shape of the scene or the dialogue, but the actors came up with a lot.

There are so many ways of making a film, but if you look at something like The Grand Budapest Hotel, the Wes Anderson film, it’s storyboarded down to the last frame before you begin. The film itself is very much like the storyboard. Suffragette was far from that, at the other end of the spectrum. In it, there was a script and we were following that shape, but in terms of the actual moving, framing, and staging of each scene, it was organic. It evolved out of the process of being there on the set, interacting, and finding it in the moment.

Did you find that filming Suffragette in that way was easier for you?

I think it’s the way I naturally work. I think it felt right and exciting to this piece. You can make a film in a highly fictional, heightened way where you watch it, but you admire it. But we really wanted you to just connect with it, with these working women, to make this piece of history relevant and visceral and resonant today.

That aesthetic translated to every department. They weren’t wearing the usual film make-up, and for the clothing we used a lot of original stock, so actors were wearing clothing from the time, rather than having made lots of pieces.

I think what documentaries have taught me is to be alive to the moment. You have to be watching and absorbing and reassessing. You have to be adapting to what’s unfolding in front of you.

Often with a narrative film you have an enormous crew, and it’s much more flexible, and more planning has to go into every moment because of the scale of it. A documentary, then, is very freeing in that respect: you can go with the flow. I tried to bring that into the filmmaking process as much as possible.

Did you always intend to shoot it like a documentary, or did you have a moment when you realized that it needed to be done that way?

It was always the intent, from very early on. We looked for as many real locations as possible, because if you’re going to shoot in that way, you want as much of the 360 environment, rather than films where there’s a set in the corner and that’s it. It’s got limits.

For instance, I wanted us to shoot in the Parliament. We asked for access, and they said no one ever has; they told us we’d have to build a set or find some corner in another building. But we petitioned them, suffragette style, and we did get access. And then we went in there, with 340 artists, stunt people, horses, period vehicles, and we staged a protest in the very place that barred women for centuries.

When we were shooting that, we had four cameras, so we were really letting the action run. We had rehearsed it to make sure no one was going to get hurt, but we let the action run and then captured it.

Suffragette will be opening at Ragtag in early December.

by Allison Coffelt