When BuzzFeed News spoke with the stars, screenwriter, and director of Miss Sloane, the U.S. presidential election was four days away.
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were unavoidable topics of conversation during the weeks leading up to Nov. 8, but the discourse surrounding the candidates was doubly relevant to those involved with Miss Sloane, which revolves around a ruthless Washington, DC, lobbyist (Jessica Chastain) who takes on gun control legislation as her latest cause.
Director John Madden told BuzzFeed News they stuck to an expedited schedule in order to get the film into theaters while the issues it addresses were still very much at the forefront of audiences’ minds. “None of us wanted to be behind the politics,” Madden told BuzzFeed News. “We wanted to be in a position to still have relevance.”
But on Dec. 9, Miss Sloane will be released into a very different world than many predicted since Donald Trump was named president-elect. (Select audiences can see it Nov. 25.) “From the beginning, I thought this movie was so timely because it really examines the gun debate, both sides of it, and you learn so much about the issue in the film,” Chastain said. “But you also realize the gender politics in the film and how important it is to show a female character who is overprepared and ambitious and a perfectionist and that's an okay thing for a woman to be.”
This was on Nov. 4, just days before Hillary Clinton would win the popular vote but lose the general election. “I mean, the criticism against Hillary Clinton in the first debate is that she was overprepared. I've never, ever heard anyone say that about a man,” Chastain continued. “Really intelligent men were talking about Hillary Clinton like that and I think we need to look at the way women are discussed in our society and the role we're pushed into being and say, ‘You know what? That's not acceptable. You can be a woman and ambitious and it's all right.’”
Much like Clinton, Chastain’s titular character is a brilliant woman carving out a place for herself in what has long been considered a man’s world. It’s the kind of complicated character male actors have played to great acclaim, like Russell Crowe’s Oscar-nominated performance in 1999’s The Insider or George Clooney’s Oscar-nominated work in 2007’s Michael Clayton. But Chastain believes Hollywood is still wary of making movies in which a woman plays the same sort of character.
“In the past, we've had male characters play these roles. They're the rebel, the loner, the renegade, where people can be collateral damage but he's gonna win his case by doing what he can for the good of the many over the good of the few,” Chastain said, mimicking the gravely serious voice of a movie trailer narrator. “We don't really see women like this. Women in our society are struggling with this feeling we have to be perfect and can't really show our flaws, but I like that [Elizabeth Sloane] is very, very flawed and complicated and I think it's tough for a big studio to challenge the status quo in that way.”
French production company EuropaCorp financed Miss Sloane, which was written and directed by two Englishmen. “Sometimes it takes a different perspective to expose something people have gotten used to,”co-star Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who is also British, told BuzzFeed News of the film’s international origins.
In the case of Miss Sloane, that vantage point results not only in an illuminating investigation of political lobbying, but in the refreshing depiction of a fully realized female relationship between Chastain's Elizabeth Sloane and Mbatha-Raw's Esme Manucharian, a fellow lobbyist Sloane takes under her wing. “We're proud this movie would pass the Bechdel test,” Mbatha-Raw said of the famed cinematic litmus test that asks, among other things, if two female characters talk about something other than a man.
“I didn't approach writing the female characters as ‘OK, what would a female do in this situation?’” screenwriter Jonathan Perera told BuzzFeed News. “You're thinking of them as a rational person with a set of traits. It's not about writing a female character, it's about writing a person's psychology.”
Miss Sloane is the latest project Chastain has intentionally chosen because it either shines a light on forgotten women in history (like The Zookeeper’s Wife and Woman Walks Ahead) or inspirationally depicts the kind of woman who could one day make history.
“I think whenever you become complacent in the status quo and you think, Okay, we're fine, we're an evolved society, it's 2016, that's when you're in trouble,” Chastain said, blissfully unaware of how true that statement would be 96 hours later when Clinton lost the election. “You always have to look back at your history … because only when you know your history can you look at society in the present and say, ‘Are we really that different now?’ And I think, in many cases, we're making the same mistakes over and over again.”