Lydia Dean Pilcher is an Academy Award-nominated and two-time Emmy-winning producer, with over 35 feature films with directors including Gina Prince-Bythewood and Mira Nair. Her credits include “The Queen of Katwe,” “Cutie & The Boxer,” and HBO’s “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” Pilcher began her career directing documentaries and recently co-directed “Radium Girls,” a feature film starring Joey King and Abby Quinn that’s slated for release in early 2020.

“Liberté: A Call to Spy” premiered at the 2019 Edinburgh International Film Festival on June 21.

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

LDP: “Liberté: A Call to Spy” is the story of three female SOE spies who played a significant role in defeating the Nazis in the French Resistance of World War II. Vera Atkins (Stana Katic) works in Churchill’s secret Special Operations Executive under the Ministry of Economic Warfare, while hiding her Romanian Jewish heritage. Virginia Hall (Sarah Megan Thomas) is an American with a bold desire to help the Allied Forces even with the challenge of having one leg. Noor Inayat Khan (Radhika Apte) is a pacifist working in Britain’s Women’s Auxiliary Airforce who is driven by a higher moral authority and national pride.

W&H: What drew you to this story?

LDP: I was compelled by the challenge of portraying the journey of these women in a way that could show how the very existence of national and ethnic differences can stimulate deeper humanitarian connection. As we all face the current global epidemic of national extremism, it’s unsettling to realize we are facing the same conditions that set the stage for the Nazism.

I really felt history was beckoning us to unsilence the voices of these women.

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

LDP: Hopefully they will feel inspired to realize we are not powerless. The construct of what it means to be a spy is the perfect metaphor for a question that anyone can ask of themselves: how do we connect our external and internal personas to become one whole person? Can we escape the traps of our own character, the safety of convention, the inertia of the system to have an impact and control our own destiny?

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

LDP: Taking an indie scale budget and constructing the period visually in a way that conveyed the global scope of WWII took more than a village! I had amazing partners in casting director Heidi Levitt, production designer Kim Jennings, costume designer Vanessa Porter, line producer Louise Lovegrove, first AD Jane Ferguson, DPs Robby Baumgartner and Miles Goodall, composer Lillie Rebecca McDonough, and editors Paul Tothill and Tia Douglas.

Everyone brought their A game and were incredibly innovative, resourceful, and committed to telling this story.

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

LDP: The film was financed with equity and tax credits from Philadelphia and Budapest. I went to Hungary to scout the 1940s French exteriors. While I was there, I met the principals of a female-founded company, Pioneer Pictures, and producer Ildikó Kemény, who heads the film and television division.

I shared our project with Ildikó and she immediately responded to help me scout locations and figure out a production plan, and ultimately a finance plan with the tax credits.

Pioneer was all-in to support a new director with a female-driven story, and this was very significant for me in a time when it was quite uphill to mount this story on an indie level.

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

LDP: I grew up in Atlanta, and as a kid I was a voracious reader. I loved stories that opened up my world and expanded my imagination. I loved going to movies and feeling the power that they have to inspire, make us feel things, and think about things differently. It wasn’t until college though, when I was writing weekly film reviews for my college newspaper, that I realized this love could also be a career.

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

LDP: Having spent so many years making films as a producer, I have a keen understanding of the importance of allowing oneself the space to preserve instincts in the maddening crowd of production. It’s not easy! Another take on this theme, I was a producer on “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” and director George C.Wolfe said, “Make it yours. If you don’t make it yours, you’re already lost.”

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

LDP: The leadership component is huge. Everyone on a production contributes to the telling of the story in often uncredited but defining ways. It’s a wellspring of creativity and a great leader encourages everyone to feel part of a synergistic whole and galvanizes people to do their best work. To this end, in the bigger picture, we also need to focus energy on putting checks into current systems and make new systems to override any bias that may be excluding valuable energy.

We should require our own productions to achieve at least a 50/50 gender-balance with an eye toward the reality that women of color reflect over 20 percent of our population in the U.S. Understanding the significance of this in our team-building, and being proactive, makes for stronger teams and makes us stronger storytellers, ultimately reaching wider audiences.

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

LDP: As a young person I was very taken by films like Maya Deren’s “Meshes of the Afternoon,” Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” Jane Campion’s “The Piano,” and later Sarah Polley’s “Stories We Tell.”

These are films that speak to different internal female experiences. I also find what women are doing in television now quite exciting, because they are taking on our culture aggressively and strategically and challenging the status quo: Reed Morano (“The Handmaid’s Tale”) and Ava Duvernay (“When They See Us”) among them.

W&H: It’s been over a year since the reckoning in Hollywood and the global film industry began. What differences have you noticed since the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements launched?

LDP: For me, the amazing change is seeing how almost all women and girls have taken stock of their personal histories with a different lens, and how we’ve come to understand ourselves and our past experiences in a new way. It’s enlightening and empowering.

I’ve seen it also bring more tension in the home and the workplace in this transitional process, but ultimately we all are having conversations now that couldn’t be voiced over a year ago. That’s huge.

I believe we’re starting to see less deflection of women out of the business, and increasing opportunities, but we still have a lot of ground to recover.