Among the early breakthroughs in director Sarah Gavron’s career were earning a BAFTA Best New Director TV Award for This Little Life, and later on the feature front being a BAFTA nominee for Most Promising Newcomer on the strength of Brick Lane, which also garnered her nominations for Best Director from the British Independent Film Awards and for Breakthrough British Filmmaking from the London Critics Circle Film Awards. Fast forward to the current awards season and Gavron finds her movie Suffragette (Focus Features) in the running for honors, having earned four British Independent Film Award nominations, winning Best Supporting Actor for Brendan Gleeson, and nods for Best Actress (Carey Mulligan) and Best Supporting Actress (for both Anne-Marie Duff and Helena Bonham Carter).
Among the ties connecting Brick Lane and Suffragette is the collaborative bond between Gavron and screenplay writer Abi Morgan. Additionally Faye Ward and Alison Owen were producers on Brick Lane and Suffragette. Both films center on women finding and fighting for their voices. In Brick Lane, based on a novel by Monica Ali (with a screenplay by Morgan and Laura Jones), the focus is on a Bangladeshi woman living in the heart of East London. She arrives in a country where she doesn’t speak the language but over time attains a unique eloquence. Meanwhile Suffragette is set in the U.K. in 1912, focusing on the early 20th-century campaign of the Suffragettes who were activists trying to win women the right to vote. Mulligan stars as Maud Watts, a working-class wife and mother who toils at a laundry with her husband. Circumstances bring her at first reluctantly into the Women’s Suffrage movement, of which she ultimately becomes a committed member, making major life sacrifices. In the face of change and adversity, Maud’s resolve is strengthened by other members of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WPSU), including Edith Ellyn (Bonham Carter) and Emily Wilding Davison (Natalie Press) as well as WSPU founder Emmeline Pankhurst (Meryl Streep).
Gavron said the story of the Suffragette movement isn’t widely known and she felt a sense of purpose in bringing it to the big screen and helping to raise awareness of the historic human rights struggle and the sacrifices behind it. “There was a hole in cinema offerings in terms of telling this story. And there’s a hole in terms of general knowledge regarding the Suffragettes. Our hope is to help to fill those holes with our film. That’s why we were so passionate about making this movie.”
Appropriately enough, the director, writer and producers of Suffragette are women–and the cast is predominantly female. Gavron said of her team, “They were simply the right people for the job.” At the same time, she observed, “We need more women behind the camera. There are qualified women and opportunities need to be opened up for them. At the moment there’s an imbalance. To have more of a balance is good for everybody.”
Men filled several key roles, though–including cinematographer Edu Grau and editor Barney Pilling. Gavron said of Grau, “He is someone who can be very poetic and get the right movement and fluidity. He is not overwhelmed by the scale of the film, has great energy and a brilliant eye. He can capture actor performances instead of staging actors to perform.”
Grau shot daylight scenes on 16mm with the ARRI ALEXA deployed at night. “We liked the texture of film a lot and how it makes the period more believable,” explained Grau. “But for the night scenes the grain was too much so we shot them with Alexa to make the best use of candlelight. We also pull processed the film stock to get a softer contrast and color. The beauty of 16mm is mesmerizing. Also it has the uniqueness of a dying format that makes it different from all the movies around. But mainly it changes the attitude of the set, as it is light, quick and very versatile, and that ends up changing the film in this direction.”
As for Pilling, Gavron described him as “an editor who had a powerful response to the script” and cut to get the best actor performances, revealing different layers in those performances.” Pilling earned his first Oscar nomination earlier this year for cutting director Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Among the other Suffragette artisans cited by Gavron was production designer Alice Normington. Gavron said that “Alice tapped into an enormous resource of photographic references to bring an authenticity to the film, to make it feel real to the audience while breaking away from the convention of some period dramas.”
Joe Walker
Last year, editor Joe Walker earned his first Academy Award nomination on the strength of the Best Picture Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave directed by Steve McQueen. Walker has cut all three of McQueen’s features, the others being Hunger and Shame. While most closely associated with McQueen, Walker (whose work on Shame earned both a European Film Award for Best Editor, and a British Independent Film Award nomination) has had notable collaborations with other directors, including on a couple of 2015 releases, Michael Mann’s Blackhat (along with editors Mako Kamitsuna, Jeremiah O’Driscoll and Steven E. Rivkin) and Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario (Lionsgate). The latter is in the current Oscar discussion on several fronts, including for the cinematography of Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC, and Walker’s editing. (Deakins was featured in the 12/18 Part 6 installment of this “The Road To Oscar” series.)
Teaming with Mann and Villeneuve underscores Walker’s successful reaching out from the U.K. (where he initially connected with McQueen) to establish himself more firmly in the U.S.
Walker told SHOOT that he long aspired to cut for Villeneuve, an ambition that started to gather momentum shortly before the 2014 Oscar ceremony. “My daughter and I sat and watched Prisoners together right around that time,” recalled Walker. “It was intense, absolutely brilliant and intensified my desire to work with Denis. I had a conversation at the Oscars with my agent Devin Mann. He asked me who would I like to work with if I got the chance. My answer was Denis. I later got to meet him, read the script [for Sicario] and was hooked on the project. I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to edit the film which has as one of its great strengths a dubious moral compass, meaning I had to be prepared to delve into the murky, a world where sometimes characters do the wrong things for the right reasons.”
Walker said he saw first hand Villeneuve’s creative courage. “When you suggest a bold experiment, it takes a brave director to say okay,” affirmed Walker. “I told Denis that I’d like to cut Sicario as a silent film almost. I wanted to try to make it work without music initially so that the timing of the story is perfect. I wanted the visuals to lead the edit without temp music dictating the emotional beats. Additionally the trouble with temp music is you fall in love with the music and then lose that music. Our approach gave Johan [composer Jóhannsson] a completely clean slate to work with. We were able to find a visual rhythm for the film, and then gave Johan the chance to interject himself into the process without prejudice, without someone else’s preconceived temp score. His original music is brilliant. It takes a confident filmmaker to allow this process to happen.” (Jóhannsson was an Best Original Score Oscar nominee earlier this year for The Theory Of Everything, directed by James Marsh.)
Walker described working on Sicario as “a luxury edit. There was nothing that needed emergency surgery. You’re dealing with Denis’ vision and incredible footage from Roger Deakins. So I could take the time to concentrate on making the film as taught, rhythmic, tense and muscular as possible, finessing every frame.”
At the same time, though, Walker said he sought forgiveness from Villeneuve and Deakins for cutting out one of their favorite sequences which dramatically introduced the character of Alejandro (portrayed by Benicio Del Toro) prior to the appearance of Kate (played by Emily Blunt). “But in streamlining the story, it had to be more from Kate’s point of view from the very beginning, with it later transitioning to Alejandro’s point of view,” related Walker. “So we had to sacrifice a great scene for the overall story.”
Asked if there were any parallels between the collaborative experiences of working with McQueen and Villeneuve, Walker assessed, “They never dictate a cut. Through discussion, examination and trying things, we work it out. They will lob thought bombs into the conversation and help to bring about a breakthrough. You make a fantastic discovery that you hadn’t imagined, sometimes by their just saying, ‘What if we did this?’ Then an inspired breakthrough seemingly comes from nowhere. Or it might be that they are just fantastic at giving you the illusion that things are like that. You get up at 2 in the morning with an idea because of something they did or said, and that way they make you think the idea is your own. They both have a fantastic way of fanning the creative flames. They will you on when they see you are in a good direction, and their feedback is so valuable.”
And just as he has realized repeat collaborations with McQueen, Walker too is on that path with Villeneuve. The editor is currently in the throes of his second film for Villeneuve, Story of Your Life (Paramount Pictures) with a cast that includes Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Michael Stuhlbarg and Forest Whitaker.
This is the seventh in a multi-part series with future installments of The Road To Oscar slated to run in the weekly SHOOT>e.dition, The SHOOT Dailies, SHOOT’s January print issue (and PDF versions) and on SHOOTonline.com. The series will appear weekly through the Academy Awards. The 88th Academy Awards nominations will be announced on Thursday, January 14, 2016. The Oscars will be held on Sunday, February 28, 2016, at the Dolby Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center in Hollywood, and will be televised live by the ABC Television Network at 7 pm ET/4 pm PT. The Oscar presentation also will be televised live in more than 225 countries and territories worldwide.
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