Sarah Gavron is a British filmmaker with only a handful of shorts and two feature films on her resume. But she’s already becoming better known thanks to her third film, the star-studded Suffragette. The movie was chosen as the opening film for the Savannah Film Festival, presented by the Savannah College of Art and Design, on Oct. 24.

Before the film was screened, I sat down with Gavron to talk about making the film, which was as much a struggle as the one portrayed in her movie. Suffragette stars Carey Mulligan as a woman caught up in the U.K. suffragette movement, which tried to get women the right to vote. In the end, they succeeded of course, but the film provides a fascinating look at that fight through the eyes of a footsoldier.

“We felt that that would be the way to connect the story with a present day audience because so many of the issues that working women dealt with are contemporary issues... the pay gap, sexual abuse in the workplace, parental rights, lack of controlling their own finances,” Gavron said.

Suffragette, which began as an idea 10 years ago, also features Helena Bonham Carter, Brendan Gleeson and, in a small but important role, Meryl Streep. The film is currently in limited release.

TheCelebrityCafe.com: Has the experience from your previous work prepared you for such a large cast? There’s some big stars in this movie!

Sarah Gavron: Yeah, this was a big leap in terms of scale, and as you said, in terms of cast. We had these big set pieces. It’s the story of women fighting for the vote at the turn of the last century and their motto was “Deeds not words.” And so, there’s these really action set-pieces - the derby we had to recreate, smashing windows along Oxford Street, filming in the Houses of Parliament to riots... So those were the challenges and there was a lot of storyboarding and preparation. But working with the cast was hugely exciting.

TCC: How did you get involved with the project?

SG: I wanted to make this film for about 10 years and there had never been a cinema film of this story. It was so engaging and extraordinary and such a vital piece of our history... these women who can change the course of our history. I felt passionate about bringing it to the big screen and I linked up with [producers] Alison Owen and Faye Ward, who’d also independently had the same idea.

Then, we went to [writer] Abi Morgan and we did six years of research and honing the script, finding the story that we thought was the most compelling. Then, we went out to our actors - Carey Mulligan, who plays Maud, who we’d had in mind for years and years and years. And we built the cast around her, with Helena Bonham Carter and Anne-Marie Duff and Meryl Streep, who plays Emmeline Pankhurst, which is a small role in the film, but a really vital role as the charismatic leader of the movement.

TCC: Pankhurst is such a small part in the film, but in history, it’s a huge role. So was it important to you to focus on Carey Mulligan’s role as a footsoldier in the fight instead of the leaders?

SG: It felt like that was the way to access the story and to tell the story of a working woman and her journey towards activism, a woman who had no platform and no entitlement and see what drove her. We felt that that would be the way to connect the story with a present day audience because so many of the issues that working women dealt with are contemporary issues... the pay gap, sexual abuse in the workplace, parental rights, lack of controlling their own finances. It felt really resonant with stories of women across the globe today, some of whom are fighting today for basic human rights.

TCC: Are you excited or disappointed that so much of the film is so relevant today even though it takes place 100 years ago?

SG: I think we’ve come a long way in many respects, certainly in the U.K. When [our story takes place], women had no parental rights at all, they had no control of their finances, they couldn’t become solicitors, they couldn’t sit on juries... that access was incredibly limited. So, we’ve obviously come a huge way. We have members of Parliament, we had a female Prime Minister. [But] we still have a long way to go and certainly globally, we have a long way to go.

So yes, I think it’s a reminder of how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go.

TCC: Is there any actress in the film that definitely helped it get made?

SG: I wanted that level of actors to be in this film... I wanted the very best acting talent because it felt like it was exciting to work with them. Certainly having that cast helps get the film made and helps get the film out there to the audience.

TCC: Do you hope it resonates with American audiences, even though it is specifically about events in the U.K.?

SG: Yeah, I think it does resonate and it should resonate globally with women and men who are fighting for equality. There are so many feelings in the film that transcend culture or time, like the police surveillance.

We discovered that, when the archives opened in 2003, there had been this undercover police surveillance operation against the women. [Police] went out on the street with cutting-edge camera technology and pursued the women. That seemed to echo so many stories around surveillance in the news. There’s also the brutality of the state against the women - the force-feeding and the way they attacked them during protests - which also echo a lot of what we read about during the Arab Spring and what we read about with protests, campaigns and activist groups working around the world.

So far, we’ve done a lot of screenings in America to small groups and I’ve been really encouraged by people saying that they’ve been inspired, they’re empowered, they’re engaged and they’ve connected with the issues in the film.

TCC: Even though the subject itself hasn’t been made into a movie, which is completely surprising to me as a film fan, were there any movies that were particularly influential? Something like Norma Rae?

SG: Norma Rae certainly was one of them and Silkwood. There are certainly films that we’re referencing in different ways, like The Battle of Algiers, the [Gillo] Pontecorvo film, and we even looked at things like The French Connection and The Conversation for the surveillance aspects and the chase aspects. We drew widely on different references for different aspects of the process... certainly those films about female empowerment or women finding their voice.

TCC: You mentioned before that this took 10 years to put together. Was there any point where you thought you’d never get this movie made?

SG: Many points! But I think with every movie, there’s always that point... there’s always a number of those points where you feel like there are too many hurdles to overcome. But we were just kept going. We all felt so committed to telling this story and we thought, “We’ve got to be suffragettes about this! We’ve just got to keep petitioning!” Even during the filming, we felt like suffragettes, since we petitioned the Houses of Parliament, which had never given access to a film crew ever. And they let us in to stage an anti-government protest!

It was about not giving up. Never surrender, as they say in the film.