Hugh Ellyn [Finbar Lynch] and his wife Edith [Helena Bonham Carter] run the pharmacy, which has been in his family for years. They are ardent supporters of the Women’s Rights movement…
Inspector Steed [Brendan Gleeson] tries to turn Maud [Carey Mulligan] against her fellow protestors…
“Over one thousand Suffragettes received prison sentences for their militancy. Many were sent to Holloway jail in north London where they protested against prison conditions by enduring hunger strikes and forced-feeding.” – Museum of London exhibition
The police step up their surveillance and harsh treatment, with Inspector Steed shadowing Maud’s journey at every step. Ultimately, she and her fellow Suffragettes will risk their very lives to ensure that women’s rights be recognized and respected…
The Suffragette campaign was masterminded from WSPU headquarters in London. Ninety branches were established, as were shops offering publications, jewelry, stationery and other merchandise.
Note the official colors of the WSPU: purple, green and white. The abundance of lilies is for Emily Wilding Davison’s funeral. Each Suffragette carried one.
On the day of Emily Wilding Davison’s funeral, Maud [Carey Mulligan] contemplates her journey thus far, and the one yet to come, seeking equal rights for women…
The moving and powerful film SUFFRAGETTE shines a light on women who risked everything for the right to vote in early-20th century Britain. The film tracks the story of the foot soldiers of the feminist movement, women who were forced underground by an increasingly brutal State.These women came from all classes, from the genteel educated upper echelon to many working women, all who had seen peaceful protest achieve little. Radicalized and turning to civil disobedience as the only route to change, they were willing to lose everything in their fight for equality - their jobs, their homes, their children and their lives.
Maud Watts [Carey Mulligan] was one such foot soldier.
The story of her fight for dignity is as gripping and visceral as any thriller,
it is also heart-breaking and inspirational.”
--Focus Features
“The mere fact that it’s taken 100 years for this story to be told is hugely revealing,” Carey Mulligan says. “This is the story of equal rights in Britain. It took years of struggle and women being tortured, abused and persecuted, and it’s never been put on-screen.”
Director Sarah Gavron, along with Producers Alison Owen and Faye Ward, Writer Abi Morgan, Cinematographer Eduard Grau, Production Designer Alice Normington, Set Decorator Barbara Herman-Skelding and their dedicated crews, brought the history to light and life.
In an in-depth conversation with SET DECOR, Gavron shares details about the making of this significant film and the history revealed…
SET DECOR: Film critic A.O. Scott points out, “One of the ways SUFFRAGETTE escapes the traps of its genre is to focus not on the leadership but on the rank and file, on an ordinary woman whose life is changed by political engagement….Maud works in an industrial laundry, alongside her husband, Sonny [Ben Whishaw], and scores of women for whom dangerous labor, low pay and sexual harassment are matters of daily routine…” The laundry was a key point, bringing us directly into working class day-to-day lives and hardships…
Director Sarah Gavron: It was so critical this world felt real. Sometimes in period films, you see them as if through a proscenium arch, and you admire it. But we wanted to break that convention and to put you in the shoes of Maud walking through those streets. So what we asked of the production designer, this brilliant woman Alice Normington, is that she create a world that was largely 360 degrees, so we could look in any direction as much as possible, and one that didn’t feel heightened, that felt real, felt authentic to the times. We were also depicting a world that you don’t often see, the East London of 1912, so creating the laundry where Maud works, was a real challenge. It was the place we started with our storytelling and we needed to establish so much about Maud’s character through that environment, which tells you both about the workplace and the status quo of her life…
We looked at lots of potential locations, and Alice Normington walked into this deserted basketball court that was going to be pulled down and said, “I can do it here.” And she did! She brought in a full piping system and created machines that actually worked…and steam! You walked around that world, complete with water spilled on the floor, and you felt you were in that laundry, in that time. And you could look in any direction. So that was a gift.
SET DECOR: And with that, too, the multi-levels…
Gavron: And the multi-levels, yes! That was absolutely her idea, having the man who ran the factory literally overseeing, that walkway and his office looking down at the women, having this viewpoint.
She also incorporated the use of natural light into the design. When we had looked at all the research photos, we discovered they were trying to not use much electricity because it was early days of electricity. So they relied on a lot of natural light, which was a challenge in terms of us filming, because we had these big glass panels in the ceiling and we had to control the light…
SET DECOR: These days, with the new digital cameras, there’s an extensive use of practicals, which the set dec department provides. But here you were working with Super 16?
Gavron: Yes, all the daylight scenes, we shot on the Super 16. For the night, we shot on the Alexa digitally because we could get more with it.
SET DECOR: And use more ambient light…
Gavron: That’s right. We wanted that kind of grainy real look, and a slightly vérité look and we ran 2 cameras a lot of the time. It was the idea of capturing a performance rather than staging it for the camera, so we were all the time doing that, which was a challenge for the actors.
And also, the costume designer, Jane Petrie, worked with Alice Normington and the set decorator, Barbara Herman-Skelding, so they had corresponding colors, as you always do. Jane had sourced a lot of stock, including the clothes that women really wore a hundred years ago. We were working with the idea that Maud would be wearing often fourth-hand clothes that had been passed down to her, and the Suffragettes themselves passed around clothes, to help each other out, and so that was also interesting, getting these patched and frayed clothes.
SET DECOR: And that ties into the set decoration, that kind of detail applied, for instance, to Maud and Sonny’s house, or rather, their rooms…
Gavron: Yes, their rooms in the tenement. That was another interesting location because that world in East London was essentially destroyed in the blitz of the Second World War, and now parts have been re-gentrified to such an extent that it was almost unusable for our purposes. But we found an area there, the Boundary Estate, and Barbara and Alice and their teams transformed it. They built outside privies and they hung it with washing, which was of course a huge part of women’s lives. And filled it with the street elements of the time.
SET DECOR: That street setting was fantastic. It was so realistic, the whole tenement quality, not precious, not overdone with slight variations to evoke time changes.
Gavron: Yes, and it was wonderful to work with…and then the interior of their house was one of our few sets on stage.
SET DECOR: That makes sense. It was so confined, how else would you be able to shoot it?
Gavron: Exactly. Those real environments are so tiny. And if you were to go into it, there would be sound issues and more...
SET DECOR: The details of the interior told a story, even just the texture of the fabrics, the curtains, the bed coverings…
Gavron: We talked a lot about that. They wouldn’t have much money, but Maud would have a sense of pride and she would want to make their home feel homey. And there would be a feminine element there. So dividing the space between the living room and the bedroom there was a curtain that had a very sort of lacey quality. Alice and Barbara found a wallpaper that had somewhat of a floral print, sort of disguised, muted, but you got that sense of a feminine quality there, that this was her home. The bedspread was a sort of patchwork quilt over rough but soft blankets. The laundry was all metal, and hard colors and textures, so we needed to contrast that with the slightly warmer, more textural atmosphere created by women.
SET DECOR: Yes, even though it was dark, it was browns rather than grays.
Gavron: That’s right, exactly. And in terms of palette, you know, the Suffragettes themselves used their design ability and did a lot of branding. They had this purple, white and green color scheme, which was critical. And they even made tea sets in their design. Sylvia Pankhurst, the daughter of Emily Pankhurst was a brilliant artist, and she did all of the designs for them…
SET DECOR: We knew they had badges and stationery and books, but didn’t realize they had designed tea sets as well…
Gavron: Oh yes, and they also had jewelry, a lot of jewelry, that they created. They had fashioned these beautiful necklaces that still exist, with the purple, green and white stones and very airy design. We actually gave some to the cast and crew. For the medals, the hunger-striking medals that had the little sachets with the medal on the bottom, we went to the original company and they remade them. They wove the ribbons for us and made the little sachets, so that was just perfect.
SD: That’s essential for the set decorator, to not only give the audience the background and some hint to character, place, or what happens in a place, …but also to help the actors with the details given to them…
Gavron: Yes, and the details were amazing. That’s one thing I forgot to say, the set decoration details! You’d turn over a notepad, and you’d see it beautifully printed. You’d open a drawer and it would be filled with the right items…so the actors had each world laid out for them. And I was very keen that it wasn’t just the surface world, that what they dealt with would all be real and they’d have that stuff there so that it felt as visceral and real and equipped as it could.
SET DECOR: And thinking back on the sets, who could not love the pharmacy?
Gavron: Ah, yes! Helena Bonham Carter particularly liked the pharmacy. It was her world, you know, she was playing Edith Ellyn. [Editor’s note: Much has been made of the fact that HBC is the great-granddaughter of HH Asquith, who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1908-1916, the key years of the Suffrage movement, which he opposed.]
For the pharmacy sets, we went to a street in East London called Princelet Street, which really has kept the feeling of the period. We used 2 buildings there, one for the exterior and one for the interior. Barbara and Alice brought in all these colored bottles and beautiful layering. The interesting thing about pharmacies then, unlike today, is that they were not so clean environments, so ours was full of texture and color and that was all quite wonderful.
SET DECOR: It was truly an apothecary. She was mixing…
Gavron: Exactly! She was mixing the medicines…and also, in the back, using her pharmaceutical knowledge for bomb making.
SET DECOR: That set also presented that she was in a marriage where she was very much an equal, so the feeling there was that the set was equally masculine and feminine. There was of course, the duality of the medical aspect of it where she actually secretly was the chemist but had to do it under his name because a woman wouldn’t be allowed to get the degree, but it also represented both of their personalities. They were a team, and a true couple, they were enmeshed in their relationship. The set gave that feeling—there wasn’t discordance in the set either.
Gavron: Very well put.
SET DECOR: That was all inherent in the set behind the interaction of the actors, to help move the story forward…
Gavron: You know that was absolutely critical. You’re right, that was the one environment where the husband, Hugh Ellyn, played by Finbar Lynch, was a supporter of the cause. And they were based on 3 real-life couples who, together, worked for the movement. It was rather extraordinary that there were these men who were prepared to go to prison for the cause and in support of their wives.
In this, he’s the one who inherited the pharmacy through his family, but she’s the one with the knowledge and the training and the intellect. They’re pretty equally matched, but it’s interesting that you see how in that period a woman was held back. But she’s found an expression and she’s found her way into the community, and she’s found this partner in crime, so to speak.
You’re right, the set does reflect that. That it was both their worlds, that they were both comfortable in this environment. And it was a working environment, but unlike the laundry, which was all about repression—women cleaning the stains of men’s lives and exchanging the servitude of the home for the servitude of the workplace, working long hours for low pay and being treated terribly, suffering in that over-hot environment, under a horrible foreman. The pharmacy world was a safe world where she could be herself, she had power, she had expression…and that was all reflected in the detail of that set. It was comfortable and welcoming, and again, had the warmer colors.
SET DECOR: Yes. And then the other person of privilege, great privilege actually, Alice Haughton, who, quite the opposite, did not have the support from her husband…
Gavron: There were many women like Alice. What was interesting about the movement, is that it brought together women of all backgrounds and classes, so you had aristocratic women, upper-class women, educated women, you had working women…all coming together. So we were privy to these different worlds. Alice Haughton lived in a big London house, she had a full staff of servants, but yet she was repressed.
SET DECOR: Even with her financial status she was subjugated, not allowed control over her own money—money that her husband had married into…
Gavron: And this was often the case. There’s a backstory there that is very lightly touched on, but her husband was sort of threatening her in a way. Many of those women were threatened with being put away in madhouses if they became, or continued to be, activists. The stakes were high. And the men had the control.
SET DECOR: And it’s so fantastic that you brought together all of the aspects…women everywhere, in every circumstance, and none has more to give up than another…all are risking so much…
Gavron: Yes. What was interesting when we went into the research, was finding these ordinary women who are less celebrated, less known, but played a huge part in the movement. And it felt like it was so important to tell their story. Maud is a composite character, but she’s drawn from accounts of primarily 3 or 4 working women of whom we read all the diaries and memoirs and accounts of their lives. We drew aspects of their characters and put them together in Maud. It felt like that was a way to make this film resonate today, to tell the story of an ordinary woman and her journey towards activism rather than tell the story of an exceptional woman like Emily Pankhurst as a biopic.
SET DECOR: There is also a wonderful intertwining of such disparate lives…
Gavron: Yes, the camaraderie between the women. They educated one another, and they grew through the process of being involved in the movement…
SET DECOR: Again, if we take that same thought to the sets, the Suffragettes’ headquarters in London had lightness and warmth within a dark space—that obviously was their haven. It symbolized their hope, it seems…
Gavron: That’s absolutely right. The WSPU, which was the Women’s Social & Political Union, had an office. In fact, it was pretty impressive, this hub. At a certain point when they became more militant, they were often raided and women had to go underground and had to operate in more covert ways, often from their homes, but they still retained the offices—even as often as they were raided, they’d go back in and they’d print pamphlets. When you see the pamphlet machines…they had in some ways cutting edge technology for the time. They had telephones and electric lights.
That was also where they designed and made their posters and banners—posters fighting the system and pointing out how they’re being repressed by the government, and announcements of their rallies. The banner making was extraordinary because they used their embroidery skills. Those banners still exist in The Women’s Library in London. It still has these beautiful banners and all of these totemic objects, like [the martyr] Emily Wilding Davison’s purse, and the jewelry and all the things they produced from there. That building doesn’t exist anymore, unfortunately, so we found an old building and re-created the WSPU Office. Afterwards, we almost wanted to create a museum out of the set because we had found so many of these iconic objects and even some of the desks. When we shot that scene, we had Ellen Pankhurst, the great granddaughter of Emily, come dressed as a Suffragette and sit in the background.
With Emily Wilding Davison’s funeral, they were very aware of the spectacle aspect. They had lilies everywhere and carried them, and they laid out tea tables and created a dramatic presence…
SET DECOR: That scene was so compelling. It’s just a moment, an encapsulation, but just the lines and lines of teacups told you so much right there. Again, the light hitting it made it all the more beautiful.
Gavron: We wanted it to be a light environment, not to feel dark or dingy. We wanted it to be hopeful, as you say, tinged with light.
SET DECOR: And then on the other side…Inspector’s Steed’s [Brendan Gleason] office, the male establishment.
Gavron: Yes, we had these counterpoints in the film—it was all about contrasts in a way, these contrasting worlds. What was so interesting about Steed’s office, was when the national archives opened in 2003, they discovered that there had been this big police surveillance operation against the women during the movement. Scotland Yard had deployed a unit of detectives to go undercover and to follow these women. It was an all-male police force, of course at that time, very much a part of the male establishment. So we created this rather imposing grand world of the room where the ministers and head detectives all meet.
But Steed’s office became a reflection of his brain, where his mind was, as he was tracking these women. He had this big pin-board on the office wall of all the photographs, in sepia as they were at the time, of all these women he and the others were following. He was building up a web of sorts, mapping their movements.
We found these amazing surveillance photographs, the actual photographs, which caught women unposed—which was totally unusual because at the time photography was always posed. It was a burgeoning field. This was the first time they took cameras out into the streets without tripods, so they were capturing the women unawares.
SET DECOR: The first time in British history that covert photographic surveillance had been undertaken by the state against its own citizens! An aspect that came through in the film was that in the very fact that the photographs were unposed, we got a very personal view of these people. And you could see the conflict building in his mind…
Gavron: Yes! I’m glad that showed.
SET DECOR: Just seeing those photographs behind him created the response, “Wait a minute. These are people, they’re not just perpetrators.” And we see that conflicted relationship with Maud build and wane.
Gavron: That’s absolutely what we wanted. Ironically, of course, if you surveil someone, you become quite intimate with their life. Here is a man watching a woman quite close-up, and he’s starting from this viewpoint of upholding the law very rigidly and then becoming conflicted.
SET DECOR: Speaking of the law, this film was the first to film in the House of Parliament, the House of Commons, Palace of Westminster!
Gavron: Now, that was hugely exciting, because never had a commercial film, a narrative film, had access. And that Pugin-Barry architecture, you can’t find elsewhere, it is so unique to the House of Parliament. It’s extraordinary. It was fantastic that we had access.
SET DECOR: Amazing! And the fact that this particular film is the one to break that barrier…
Gavron: It’s remarkable how far we’ve come, that the very institution that barred women for so many hundreds of years let us go there and stage a protest and a riot!
And then we filmed the scene of Maud giving her testimonial in that committee room, re-creating history in the place where it happened, walking those corridors of power…putting our actors in that environment.
That was a gift. That was just wonderful.
It’s exciting and heartening now that there is this resurgence of women’s voices. That’s partly because of social media, how it’s allowed women who would never be heard to have a voice and challenge repression. People like Malala Yousafzai. More women all over the world are now speaking out, and that’s exciting.
