BAFTA award-winning director and Bromley High School alumna Susanna White won widespread praise for Bleak House, picking up a host of international broadcast awards including the BAFTA and RTS awards for Best Drama Serial. She went on to direct Jane Eyre for the BBC, which earned her an Emmy nomination for directing. For HBO she directed David Simon’s Generation Kill, which was nominated for 11 Emmy awards including Outstanding Directing. She has a reputation for working with new talent – Bleak House was a breakthrough role for Carey Mulligan and Jane Eyre did the same for Ruth Wilson, just as Alexander Skarsgård had his first major television lead in Generation Kill.

We asked Susanna for her insight into life behind the camera

What did you want to do when you were at school?
At primary school, I wanted to be a film director. When I was a Brownie I went to watch a children’s show called Crackerjack being recorded at BBC Television Centre. I remember everyone around me wanted to go up on stage to win prizes but I was far more interested in how the cameras worked—how when a red light came on a camera that shot appeared on the monitor and then when it switched to another one a different angled shot appeared. It had never occurred to me before that that was how TV was made.

What have been the biggest obstacles you’ve had to overcome in your career?
I think the biggest obstacle I had to face, like many women, was being taken seriously as a drama director. Traditionally women have tended to do better in factual programming where they are in charge of small crews. Drama means a leap to being in charge of over 100 people and as the Directors UK report Cut Out of the Picture showed, there is a marked funnel effect from 50% of film school graduates being women to just 3% of high budget feature films having a female director. You see a fall off at every stage of the career ladder – it’s hard for women and people of colour to make their first short, hard to move from being a third assistant director to first assistant director, hard to move from directing entry level TV drama to high end programmes and so on. In 2019, 10.6% of the highest grossing films worldwide had female directors. That’s highest percentage in 13 years, so things are improving, but there’s a long way to go.

What have been your greatest achievements?
I think my single greatest achievement was directing Generation Kill. It was the sharpest learning curve I’ve ever been on—suddenly thrown into the world of directing action and CGI and entrusted with the work of one of the top television writers in the world. I loved every single day working on that mini-series, even though it was a lot of pressure. Who wouldn’t love the chance to direct great scripts with great actors like Alexander Skarsgård and Michael Kelly in South Africa, Namibia and Mozambique with an HBO budget and incredible producers?

Are you seeing more young women interested in working behind the camera now?
Because of all the training on offer now we are starting to see more women in technical jobs such as cinematography, steadicam operators, sound recordists and in the world of CGI. Employing female directors tends to create a virtuous circle—women not only cast female actors in strong roles but also tend to employ more female crew members.

How important is it to you to tell female stories?
Of course I believe female stories should be told. It is unthinkable that we should lack novels from the likes of George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte and Virginia Woolf. Who knows what films we have missed by not allowing brilliant female storytellers to put their work on screen in the past? But we are now starting to see really exciting people emerge—in addition to my role model Jane Campion, we now have great films from people like Greta Gerwig, Alice Rohwacher and Joanna Hogg.