‘I’m more interested in women’s stories than in men’s,’ says Nigel Cole, director of the 2003 hit Calendar Girls. With his latest film, Made in Dagenham, which chronicles the female auto workers strike that lead to the advent of the Equal Pay Act 1970, that love of creating strong female characters and exploring the nuanced relationships between women of different backgrounds is readily evident. The film stars Sally Hawkins as Rita, the leader of the strikers, and Miranda Richardson as Barbara Castle, the leading female politician at the time who takes up the women’s cause. Like Calendar Girls, Made in Dagenham blurs genres, blending lighthearted moments with more weighty ones: ‘It has the right mix of humour, comedy, and drama that I always look for,’ Cole remarks. ‘I don’t really do straight comedy because I like to have some meat and content to my films. And I don’t do bleak, dark drama either: I’m too flippant. So I like a mixture of warmth and comedy and strong drama and this is exactly that.’
Surprisingly, Cole, along with the film’s producers, Stephen Woolley and Elizabeth Karlsen, came to the project knowing little about the 1968 strike at Ford’s Dagenham plant. Yet all three clearly relished the opportunity to bring an overlooked chapter of history to a wider audience. Woolley comments that he had first heard about the strike on a Radio 4 programme called ‘The Reunion.’ ‘I was fascinated by their story, and what struck me in particular was how innocent and unpoliticised they were,’ he observes. ‘All they wanted was a fair deal. It was common sense rather than any kind of axe to grind.’
In preparing to bring the story to the screen, the filmmakers tracked down the original Dagenham strikers. ‘Just hearing their laughter’ was inspiring to Cole, who was struck by the ‘irreverent fun they had telling the stories’ of their days on the picket line. Wooley was equally enthusiastic about meeting the women, noting that their vivacity was hard-won, having lived through the Second World War and rationing. ‘This film works as a reminder that, for many people, the 1960s were downtrodden and not particularly glamorous times,’ he says. ‘I’d forgotten how humorous people could be in terrible working conditions and faced with this inequality of pay. Instead of lying down and moaning about it, they just went and said “All right, well, we’re not going to work for a while then.”‘ Some brief clips of their interviews with the strikers can be seen over the end credits, and while many of these women are now in their eighties, they still possess a no-nonsense sass that is utterly charming.
Cole and Karlsen emphasize that Made in Dagenham is a story of everyday people. ‘They weren’t radical students, they didn’t have radical professors,’ says Karlsen. Cole adds, ‘I hate to use the word “ordinary,” but these were ordinary women: mothers, wives, factory workers. And they went back to it. Perhaps in a modern era they’d all have reality TV shows. They didn’t do this in order to put themselves on the map, they didn’t do it to make themselves famous or for their own vanity, they did it because they were annoyed about how little they were getting paid. And once they got that sorted out they went back to their roles.’ Karlsen notes that the characters in the film were based on a blend of the women they met during the research process. ‘We’re making a film, not a documentary,’ she comments, ‘[Rita] may be a fictionalized amalgam of several real people but we have kept true to the events. The strike did take place in this way and the women did meet Barbara Castle on that day.’
Finding the right actor to play Rita was crucial, Wooley asserts: ‘Once we settled on Sally [Hawkins], it was really a case of casting around her. Then we were able to get fantastic actors – like Andrea Riseborough and Miranda Richardson – to play some quite small parts because they loved the script so much.’ Karlsen adds, ‘When the camera turns on, she really fills the screen.’ Hawkins is clearly the apple of the filmmakers’ eyes, and with good reason, because she truly is the strongest aspect of the film. There can be little doubt her star will continue to rise. Cole had similar praise for Richardson, who delved extensively into archival footage and the diaries of Barbara Castle to prepare for her role. Cole laughs, ‘[The archival footage is] all in black and white, so you don’t get the power of that red hair, which is a weapon she was very happy to use.’ A feisty spitfire as Castle, Richardson practically bathes in that power onscreen, and some of the film’s most satisfying moments come from watching her make her toadies squirm.
While the filmmakers find it easy to applaud their leading ladies, their defense of Made In Dagenham’s unequivocally upbeat ending is somewhat less convincing. Karlsen points out that they had debated whether or not to put in a card at the ending that says ‘The fight goes on.’ Instead, there’s a card about how Ford has become a model employer, which Woolley admits was basically put in to avoid a lawsuit. Without a firmer statement regarding the persistence of wage inequality between the genders, however, the card sounds a discordant, unintentionally humorous note. The ending would have benefited from the fitting observation Cole makes at the end of our interview: ‘The fight does go on, and we hope that this film will stimulate that debate. But this was a victorious battle in a long war.’
