Susanna White

Born in England, Susanna got inclined towards filmography, when she was just eight years old. While visiting the set of BBC’s show “Crackerjack”, she just stuck on a wish to get her Super 8 film camera, from her parents. She was endowed with a Fulbright scholarship to study filmography at UCLA.

Although spending 12 years of making documentaries for BBC2, she failed to bag a place on the training program at BBC. Near 2001, Jane Root, a BBC2 controller, funded her with a budget of £200,000 for a drama, named Love Again, about Philip Larkin. In 2005, she won a BAFTA award for Bleak House in the best drama serial.

She was also nominated for Emmy Awards, for directing BBC mini-series, Jane-Eyre. HBO mini-series Generation Kill had four episodes directed by her, which received quite an appreciation. In 2012, she gave direction for Parade’s End.

In her career, she has directed Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang, in 2010 and recently she is working on Woman Walks Ahead.

In her interview with Danielle Woodward, she confessed that she fell in magic spell of cinematography when her father took her to see Dr. Doolittle. She also expressed that she had dreamed of motherhood too with a supportive husband.

Her work when seen from a peak is mostly writer-driven. She had expressed that one of her real joys, is to form a synergy between different talented actors and the rest of the crew.  She believes in spending time with the family, instead of celebrity circuit parties or yacht shows.

She had presented her view that cinema is a platform, which reflects the ideals of our society, so it is necessary to have gender equality along with equal opportunities in the film industry. White’s latest film, Our Kind of Traitor, a spy thriller, is a genre, where less than 3 % of directors are women.

In the UK, she was not given a chance to direct any films until she went to the US and directed the very ’male’ Generation Kill, about US Marines leading the assault on Baghdad, in 2003.