Elizabeth Karlsen Strikes a Chord with Dagenham

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Saturday, 23 October 2010 19:15

Written by Laura Blum

Swinging London of the '60s meant Mary Quant, mini-skirts and Twiggy. But just a suburban skip from Carnaby Street was Ford's Dagenham plant, where female machinists changed more than fashion history.

British producers Elizabeth Karlsen and Stephen Woolley aim to give this pivotal chapter its due in their new film, Made in Dagenham.

Working with Calendar Girls director Nigel Cole and TV writer Billy Ivory, the duo behind such hits as Ladies in Lavender and Little Voice have dusted off the 1968 saga of the 187 women who stood up for equal pay and altered the status quo for female workers around the world.

Armed with common sense, humor and the courage of their convictions, these sewing machinists fought the good fight that overturned their “unskilled” status and indirectly lead to Great Britain's Equal Pay law in 1970. Along the way, thousands of workers lost their jobs as Europe’s biggest Ford factory closed and moved its production – of half a million cars -- elsewhere.

Sally Hawkins (Happy Go-Lucky) stars as the working-stiff-turned-rabble-rouser Rita O’Grady, alongside a brightly twinkling cast that includes Bob Hoskins, Geraldine James and Jaime Winstone. Rosamund Pike plays the Cambridge-educated wife of a Ford executive (Rupert Graves) who patronizes her, and Miranda Richardson is employment minister Barbara Castle, whose civil servants are similarly chauvanistic. Rounded out by these upper crust women, the story neatly cuts across class.

Working woman producer Elizabeth Karlsen talked about this latest sampling of blue (and other) collar heart-tuggers made in the UK.

Q: What inspired you to do a film about a 1968 strike by female workers at a car factory?

EK: The first thing that drew us to it was the BBC Radio 4 show, The Reunion, which brought together the original women, whom you see at the end of the film. We thought it was a fascinating story to use for a film…we didn’t know about this seminal event. Much of the history of women is unwritten history, as with other marginal groups.

Q: The working class gets plenty of play in British cinema, and in films like Brassed Off, Billy Elliot, The Full Monty and now Made in Dagenham, they tend to end happily. What fuels this tradition?

EK: WWII devastated the country. You had this movement of the British New Wave -- which was inspired by the French New Wave -- with directors like Karel Reisz, Ken Loach and John Schlesinger concerned with the issues of working class people. In Ken Loach’s seminal film, Kes, the strangulation of the young boy's bird at the end symbolized what was perceived as the pre-determined hopelessness of the life of a working class child at that time. It seemed there was no way out.

When those filmmakers were emerging, representing the working class was radical. But more radical was representing the working class with hope, moving away from a grittier realism. Then you started to see films with a narrative arc that suggested economic and social possibility. Brassed Off, for example, is about the son of a miner, and it becomes a feel-good dramatic comedy. This really spoke to people.

Q: What was happening in Great Britain to unleash this feistier spirit?

EK: When Margaret Thatcher came to power, she shut down the mining industry -- all the coal mines, which ran much of England, especially in the north, and the steel industry. This left the community bereft and destitute, and there was a big urge to fight back. Brassed Off was a response to this. You started to see a change in the representation of the working classes, whereas earlier, with films like Lindsay Anderson's Look Back in Anger and Karel Reisz’ Saturday night and Sunday Morning, there wasn’t that possibility in the British New Wave.

Q: Does it concern you that some viewers might find a film championing equal rights for women a bit passé in 2010?

EK: Equal pay has not been achieved, not in developing countries and not in the industrially advanced world. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was only last year. Lilly Ledbedder worked at Goodyear in Alabama, and found that she was getting unequal pay. In the UK the inequality ranges from 17% to 38% -- the 38% is for women in part-time employment.

Q: What’s the message you most want women to hear?

EK: This is a film about female empowerment and about them empowering themselves in a political arena. The idea that these women could bring about change is gripping to us, especially at a time of sweeping economic cuts and the rise of corporate power and globalization, when people are feeling like they’re powerless and have no voice. So seeing a film that reminds people that they can find a voice and bring about change is very powerful.

Q: No one wishes budget cuts like the UK is currently experiencing, but given the reality, do they make the film more resonant?

EK: The film has gone outside of the arts and culture pages and stirred up a much broader debate, even in Parliament. The Fawcett Society, which campaign for equality, have been finding ways to take the government to court, because the cuts will mostly affect women.

Half a million jobs are going to go, and those jobs are mostly held down by women: care for the elderly, the disabled and the sick, and also teachers. And it’s not just women, but people who have suffered various forms of inequality. Left, right and centrist, people are saying that fairness is still not a part of our society, and how can we achieve it?  We’re seeing (the issues portrayed in the film) all over again with the Tory government.

Q: When Dagenham first flagged your attention, were you thinking, This captures the zeitgeist?

EK: My partner Stephen Woolley first heard the radio program in 2004, long before the hard times hit. You respond from the gut as an independent producer; you have to be pretty sure that you feel passionate about a topic. We thought it was a great story that needed to be told. But at the time, the Labor government was in, and everyone was awash with power. Then suddenly the bottom came. People were losing their jobs, and you started hearing about unequal pay and manufacturing disappearing. We had no idea this was going to happen. Suddenly it’s so relevant.

Q: You’re a female producer in the film industry -- is equality still an issue? Do men have more power?

EK: have been episodes when you think, “Hmmm, is it because I’m a woman that you can speak to me that way?” Here in the UK, 7% -- or maybe 11% -- of directors are women; it’s still changing.

Q: How is that reflected on screen?

EK: We still live in a patriarchal society, and we still have stories by and for men. There are so few films about women, especially in mainstream cinema. Go to YouTube and search “The Bechdel Test.” It came out of an 80s comic strip, and it gives three questions that you need to ask to assess movies: Are there two or more women in it who have names? Do they talk to each other? About anything other than men?

Q: Made in Dagenham aces the test. Tell us about the real women the film is based on.

EK: The film has amalgamated characters, but it’s still so much of the true story of the real women. We met with the real women, read newspaper articles of their story, researched in the TUC (Trade Union Congress) library. This is a feel-good story that was true.

Q: What surprised you about the original workers?

EK: What was so amazing about the women of Dagenham is that they were just working class women who lived a million miles away from the swinging 60s. They don’t know which way to go when they come out of the London subway, left or right. In those days Dagenham was another world from London, just like Lower East Side in New York or Williamsburg across the bridge. Nobody was leftist or had fancy educations. You see in the film that the girl changed the channel very quickly when the Grosvenor Square Riots were shown on the news. No one in the family paid attention.

Q: The Paris riots started on May 6, 1968, and the film indicates that Dagenham happened several weeks later. So the whiff of rebellion would have blown across the Channel in the interim, no?

EK: Yes, but the Paris riots and Grosvenor Square came from politicized, leftist, educated students. The (sewing machinists) at Dagenham weren’t political beings, just working women with kids and husbands, trying to make ends meet. You have to be skilled to sew; it’s not the same as sweeping the floor. It just wasn’t fair.

Q: The clips of the real women show them as anything but bitter.

EK: They’re so spirited and humorous, such lively women. They’re approaching their 80s, but at the opening night party -- we had this great ‘60s music -- I was on the dance floor with them till one o’clock in the morning. They’re also incredibly graceful and humble. The problem with celebrity culture is that we’ve lost that. They could have written books about it: How I Achieved Equal Pay.

Q: Is this a Joan of Arc story, or is there another example from history or mythology that you compared it to while developing the project?

EK: No, strangely enough no one ever mentioned that. We talked about Erin Brockovich and Norma Rae -- a tradition of real women represented on the movie screen who achieved phenomenal things. So they’ve been mythologized in cinema, though their stories are real.

Q: In real life, did someone hang himself like the shop steward’s husband?

EK: Not a specific story, but obviously there were many cases of men who still had Post-traumatic Stress Disorder after WWII. So many of them had seen disaster, and were incapable of working. Women were holding things together after the war. They had been through 50s rationing, and they and the new generation that came up in the 60s were the backbone of society.

Q: The film depicts the tensions that arose between the sexes. Did the women ever consider withholding favors -- Lysistrata style -- to bring the men around to supporting their goals?

EK: The men originally supported the strike, but husbands, fathers and sons started to turn against the women when their jobs were seriously threatened. Ford Dagenham employed 55,000 workers, and when it shut down they were laid off. Physical intimacy becomes very difficult to carry on in these circumstances. I don’t believe we thought of any withholding, but I’m reminded of Mad Men’s Betty Draper, who says, “I kissed you and I realized I didn’t love you anymore.” When the Ford factory shut down, women met with women and deepened their ties.

Q: Despite the workers’ grim conditions, the production is relatively upbeat. What were you going for visually?

EK: We wanted to show that the factory was grimy, freezing in winter, and that rain came through the roof. But the women inside were full of life. There was girl power harnessed within those grubby walls. They had a deep sense of community. Nigel kept the camera moving the whole time, so we had to dress the whole space.

Q: Where did you shoot the factory scenes?

EK: This is a good example of art imitating life imitating art. We shot in the Hoover factory in Wales. The company relocated to Turkey in a situation not unlike the one depicted in the movie: do you want us to move our factories elsewhere? It was prophetic. So manufacturing has moved out, and 5,000 people in that community have been made unemployed. A number of them were extras in the film.

Q: Was there a unifying image or concept to guide such crew members as cinematographer John de Borman, production designer Andrew Mcalpine and costume designer Louise Stjernsward?

EK: We went for a pastel palette, since it took place over a hot summer. We didn’t want to have a bleak look to it. Yes, they were working class, and lived in “council houses” subsidized by government, but that’s not to say they didn’t have parties to celebrate birthdays and such. It was very important to us because it reflected the spirit of the women. We used a lot of pinks, blues and yellows that burst forward from the grayness of the factory. These are the colors of the British summertime. The British love their roses and their gardens.

Q: Billy Ivory’s screenplay was also very accessible. What script notes did you give him?

EK: It was very important for us to make a populist film. We didn’t want to make film about working class struggle, dour. We wanted to give it a very strong narrative arc that goes toward this true but feel-good ending.

Q: What was the most memorable moment on the set?

EK: The director’s wife had a baby, so he left the set late at night after wrap. You’ll see that Stephen Woolley had a credit as "Paternity Director" -- the first ever.

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