Sarah Gavron’s previous credits include “Brick Lane,” which earned her a BAFTA nomination and The Alfred Dunhill Talent Award at the London Film Festival, and the Dennis Potter Award-winning “This Little Life,” which won her the TV BAFTA for Best New Director and both Royal Television Society and Women in Film and TV Awards for Best Newcomer. Gavron’s most recent feature, 2015’s “Suffragette,” won two British Independent Film Awards, and was nominated for four. She directed some of Season 4 of “Transparent” for Amazon Studios.

“Rocks” will premiere at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival on September 5.

W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words.

SG: It is the story of a teenage girl, Rocks, growing up in London. She fears that she and her little brother will be forced apart if anyone finds out they are living alone. With the help of her friends she evades the authorities and navigates the most defining days of her life.

It is film about the resilience, joy, and spirit of girlhood. 

W&H: What drew you to this story?

SG: The story’s central narrative came from our writer, Theresa Ikoko, who co-wrote with Claire Wilson, during an extended workshop process with young people. These young people, the girls, ended up as our cast and they themselves worked with us to create the world, characters, and details of the film. So the film was born out of a true creative collaboration.

I had wanted to work on a story about young women for some years, as there are so few stories on screen which show teenage girls in all their dimensions. That desire was very much shared by producer Faye Ward, who is my long-time collaborator (“Brick Lane,” “Suffragette”), but the story could not have come from us, as we are so far removed from the world of a teenage girl, so we were open to learning from and hearing the experiences of the teenage girls we met. We saw our job more as facilitators who were there to help the film evolve.

The writers and core creative team were contributing throughout the development process and shoot. Anu Henriques, the associate director, effectively became my co-director during the shoot. In many ways I learned more from our team and cast than they learned from me, both in terms of their lived experience and ways of seeing the world.

We deliberately structured the process in a way that challenged and flattened the established hierarchy on a film. That was the biggest strength for me, as it allowed the story to be what it is. 

However, while our process certainly isn’t followed in every film and stories like this are not frequent, we were not reinventing the wheel. Many film teams in the past have worked with their cast and creatives in this way. There have been films made using some similar methodology from John Cassavetes to Horace Ové to Andrea Arnold, Shane Meadows, and Paweł Pawlikowski. We drew inspiration from them.

W&H: What do you want people to think about when they are leaving the theatre?

SG: Theresa Ikoko describes the film in a way that beautifully sums up the feeling that we want people to leave the theater with. She sees it as a love letter to her big sister and young black women who often have to be stronger and more resilient than their years should require. That is not something I could have conceived, but I hope my work on the film helps do justice to that intention.

I have an additional wish which is secondary — that people leave having had a few laughs amongst the more emotional moments. Faye Ward has made some films with comedy in them, but her and I together really have not! 

I hope the audience seeing “Rocks,” however close or far away they feel from the girls, do smile, at least here and there. The girls made me belly laugh on set every single day. Even when they are dealing with tough real life issues, they manage to find joy, wherever and whenever it is to be found.

W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?

SG: For me, personally, working with young people was both the challenge and the joy. It was their first time acting and they brought huge energy to the set, which we had to harness and channel in the right direction. They were very honest; I am used to actors talking politely around a problem. If I came up with a staging idea that they thought didn’t work, they told me in no uncertain terms. I always remember a moment when Kosar Ali, who plays Sumaya, approached me after some hours of shooting and said: “This scene is dead, Sarah. It’s dead.” I gulped, but after a minute or two, I realized she was right, and we started over.

I drew on the team constantly. We had a brilliant chaperone called Nanette who had worked with Bukky Bakray, [who plays the lead in our film,] as a support teacher in her school since she was quite young. Nanette helped get Bakray into the right frame of mind each day. At certain key points, our writer Theresa Ikoko stepped in and had private words with Bakray and that allowed her, in one of our most emotional scenes in the film, to give the necessary performance. Anu Henriques also kept a constant dialogue going with the girls.

So it was a case of everyone from our creative team finding ways to support the young cast to do their best work. The nine-month workshop period was an essential warming up process. Lucy Pardee, our casting director, and her colleague, Jessica Straker, had also done lots of prep work in getting the girls ready for the shoot.

W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made. 

SG: It was an independent film and all credit to the producers Faye Ward and Ameenah Ayub Allen here — it was not straightforward. Faye began the conversations in early 2016 with Film4 and the British Film Institute and Ameenah joined in 2017. It is just not easy to raise money for a film with unknown cast members. So much of film finance is based on established actors — it is literally predicated on how much money a previous film with a particular actor made. We wanted to start casting right from the outset so we could build the story around the young people we found. We had to come up with different ways of communicating our vision in order to get them to invest.

Right from early on we filmed a large amount of the workshops, which Anu Henriques endlessly edited — to show the best bits of course — and kept sharing them with the financiers. Eventually the financiers began, like us, to invest emotionally in these wonderful girls. All in all they were hugely supportive, but we certainly had more meetings with financiers than I have ever had, as it took a lot of explaining and it kept evolving.

In addition to the BFI and Film4, we had finance and support from Welcome Trust and Headgear. We also got support from Altitude, who are our fantastic distributors.

W&H: What inspired you to become a filmmaker?

SG: I had ideas when I was growing up for stories and I always saw the stories in moving images, never in words. I also loved drama and art and working with people. But I didn’t know there was such a thing as being a director, certainly not a woman director, until much later, when I encountered the work of Jane Campion.

W&H: What’s the best advice you’ve received?

SG: Not sure it is advice but, “You have to see it to be it.” Role models and proper representation are key.

W&H: What advice do you have for other female directors?

SG: Keep going. If you want to direct, don’t give up. I made nine short films before I got one noticed. Now is a good time. It’s never easy, but due to brilliant initiatives like Women and Hollywood, there are more doors opening. 

We all also need to recognize where we can support others coming up. If we’re going to change this industry, we have to do that work collectively. Think about where you can open doors for others, and who you can bring to the fore with you.

W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.

SG: It was always Jane Campion’s “The Piano,” but now I have so many. The truth is my most favorite films are all women directed. I love the work of Agnès Varda, Sally Potter, Lynne Ramsay, who was just above me at film school and her debut film “Rat Catcher” blew me away, Andrea Arnold, Carol Morley, Clio Barnard, Ava DuVernay, and Eliza Hittman, to name a few!

W&H: What differences have you noticed in the industry since the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements launched?

 SG: I feel it’s like a boil has been lanced. Apologies for this analogy. It was painful, but it’s a relief. It needed desperately to happen. We needed the #TimesUp movement to build something positive out of it all. I am so grateful to those women, like the founder of the #MeToo movement, Tarana Burke, who spoke out, and those who have jumped on the opportunity to make change. It has allowed for more honest conversations and I think opened up possibilities.

There have been brilliant advocates for a good while, but the shock of felt #MeToo was a wake-up call for all.