Sixty years after the suffrage movement ended, women were still fighting to earn equality in this country's workplace. For one woman, that fight became the epic court battle of Jenson v. Eveleth Mines, starting in 1979 when a female mine worker in the Iron Range of northern Minnesota took a stand against the reign of terror perpetrated against female miners by their male peers.
Chronicled in "Class Action," a book by Clara Bingham and Laura Leedy Gansler, the story of the women miners' movement is being adapted into "North Country," a Hollywood blockbuster already generating Oscar buzz. The film stars Charlize Theron as the movement's leader, along with an all-star cast including Sissy Spacek, Frances McDormand, and Woody Harrelson.
The Daily sat down with the film's director, Niki Caro, director of 2002's indie hit "Whale Rider," to discuss the monumental task of bringing such a story to life.
Question: At the end [of the film] it says all characters are fictitious...how much license did you take?
Niki Caro: The events in the film are real, but that court case went from 1979 to 1993, and to my mind, those women suffered as much in the judicial system as they did in the mine. And you get a sense of that there, but the film didn't need to be told over that period of time. The characters are all fictitious except for the character of Glory, played by Frances McDormand, who is based on a woman called Pat Kosmach, who got ALS [amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease] and whose presence in that court changed the fortunes of the court case, really turned it around.
Q: Was most of the film made in a real mine? Was there part of that done in a studio?
NC: [mock offended] Which part didn't look like it was done on a location? [laughter] All the exteriors are mines in northern Minnesota on the Iron Range. And all the interiors of the mine are in a dormant mine in Silver City, New Mexico that functioned as a studio set, but was an actual mine.
Q: Regarding the three lead actresses, during the casting process, were there other well known actresses that you had thought of for the role...how did you go about choosing them for those roles?
NC: It's funny, because I was so na??¶? when I started this film. I was at Warner Brothers and they said, "So, okay, who would you like to cast?" So I reeled off the names of the best actors in the world, thinking that the studio was just gonna write the check and bring 'em to me. It doesn't actually work like that! I was shocked to discover that it was actually my job to go and get them. So Charlize [Theron], she was easy; we hit it off immediately...Frances [McDormand] played really hard to get. I gave her a picture of a really big truck, and I could see she was a little bit tempted. [laughter] And then she sent me an e-mail that said, "Men may come and go, but that's a really big truck."
Q: For the women that experienced the abuse, did they actually see the movie...and what was their reaction?
NC: Those women are really, really important to me and they were the first people, not actors, to see the film. I took the film up to Minnesota a couple of weeks ago, and you know, there's always screenings that are special for me as a filmmaker, and that was one of them. They started out squealing and shrieking, and then I could see them really validate things like the graffiti and some of the treatment. And then they got really, really quiet, and then they all cried... I recognized then that they hadn't celebrated, and I asked them to consider that the movie could be a way of them celebrating what they'd done.
Q: In regards to your central character [played by] Charlize Theron...was there a central character, or a real person who was a catalyst with this lawsuit?
NC: Yes, there's a real person. She's very private, and I want to protect her privacy...She did bring about the case. As with the film, the other women initially testified, but they testified against her. Years on, they joined her. It's an amazing, amazing story, and I'm probably unlikely to do another story exactly like this one. But I hope to be doing films that move people and make them think. Some days, I think it's enough just to not insult the world by the stories I tell.
