By Gill Pringle
“It’s so crazy,” Thea Sharrock laughs when FilmInk mentions the current dearth of films being directed by women. “I’ve been told that there are two this summer! What does that tell you? The figures are incredible! They really knock my socks off!”
The figures might indeed be dire, but Sharrock’s romantic drama, Me Before You, does go some way to slightly redressing this balance, with its femme-heavy cast and crew: leading lady, Emilia Clarke; screenwriter, Jojo Meyes (who also penned the source novel); producers, Sue Baden-Powell, Alison Owen, and Karen Rosenfelt; and director, Thea Sharrock. But when FilmInk asks the filmmaker about the difficulties that she had in getting the film made, Sharrock is quick to shut down the notion of gender-based decision making. “I’ve never been conscious of being given a job ever, because I was a woman,” she says. “And certainly not this one! For me, it’s quite a difficult subject in a way, because what I don’t believe is that anybody should be given a job just because they’re a woman! And the exact reverse of that is equally true. Nobody should be given a job either just because they’re a man. But when you look at those figures, they are shocking!”
On Me Before You, Sharrock is emphatic in stating that it was a by-merit-only process of organising the cast and crew. “What I love about our movie, is that I believe that wholeheartedly, everybody who was chosen for this movie, was chosen because they’re the right person for the movie, not because of their gender, or, in spite of their gender. But the fact that it’s such a heavily female-led movie, so the majority of people making decisions on this movie, let’s put it that way, are female, is great. If in some small way, we have added to the figures in a very positive way, that’s fantastic. The most important thing about the figures coming out is that surely, it certainly can’t get any worse! [Laughs] I feel very strongly that it’s going to start to get a lot better! When I think about my theatre career, when I started out, there weren’t that many women. And there certainly weren’t any women that I knew of, or at least maybe there was one, who had children. So it seemed that there were a few who had started, then had children, then never went back. So most of my mentors are men! The two mentors who I constantly go back to in my mind are Stephen Daldry and Sam Mendes. That’s because of the choices that they’ve made in terms of the projects that they’ve chosen to work on. But I look behind me now, and there’s a stream of women! The landscape of British theatre has really changed, and strong feeling is that it’s going to continue change. I think that there’ll probably be a real surge after all of these figures. And if we have this discussion in a year’s time, let alone two years’ time, I bet you that the figures will be very different.”
Me Before You is in cinemas now. Check out our interview with Sam Claflin and Emilia Clarke too!
