Stories of women of the 21st century facing extreme situations in their lives. It is the proposal of I am, the British anthology series that premieres this Tuesday on the Cosmo channel at 10pm after recently winning two Bafta awards: best drama for the episode I am Ruth and best actress for Kate Winslet. Writer and director Dominic Savage has created this fiction in close collaboration with each of the leading actresses, from Vicky McClure (Line of Duty) to Suranne Jones (Dr. Foster) through the aforementioned Winslet.
The idea for the series arose from a previous experience of Dominic Savage that led him to the filming of the movie The Pursuit of Happiness (2017). “I had a meeting with the actress Gemma Arterton and we talked about an idea he had of her and it just so happened that he connected with her; I had not written the script and then I already did it thinking about her and it worked very well”, Savage explains to La Vanguardia. “I really liked that approach where you first meet an actor, then an idea comes up, and then you continue with the process of writing a story.”
That formula “of charming, collaborative and trustworthy work” later led her to I am, the Channel 4 series that is now coming to Spain and in which Savage has once again worked with the protagonists both in the conception and in the development of the chapters, thought of as autonomous films. “What I really like is being able to write and make a film from a different perspective, that of a woman. Movies usually feature men and can be interesting stories, but I don’t want to go there,” she confesses.
The stories of the first season are three. “The first episode, starring Vicky McClure, deals with a coercive and controlling relationship, without violence, in which the woman finds herself trapped”, advances Savage, who affirms that “many women feel that they cannot get out of a situation like this because there is nowhere to go, but this episode shows that there is.
The second episode stars Samantha Morton, who plays “a woman with two children who is in debt and has to resort to sex work to pay her bills; a pretty tough story, but one that affects a lot of people.” And in the third story, Gemma Chan gives life to “a woman who lives under the pressure of getting married and having children, but who doesn’t necessarily want to have any of those things.” Although these are not personal stories of these actresses, if for some reason they have wanted to address them because they “mean something” to them.
In the second season, which Cosmo will broadcast from June 13, Suranne Jones is an extremely perfectionist woman who suffers a vital crisis that affects her entire family; Letitia Wright plays a young woman who, fleeing from love, ends up falling in love with a man with a dark secret; and Lesley Manville plays a woman who on her 60th birthday rethinks her life and the painful cracks in her relationship. The third season consists of a 90-minute episode starring Kate Winslet and her real-life daughter, Mia Threapleton, as a middle-class single mother who suddenly loses contact with her daughter, a teenager with a dangerous Social networks addiction. This movie is coming to Cosmo soon.
Still happy about the recently won Baftas, Savage confesses that working with Kate Winslet “has been a dream.” “Winslet is simply the best. She’s amazing, which is not to say that the other actresses haven’t been great, but the relationship I had with Winslet was really special, so we’re going to make another movie together,” the director advances.
The entire series has been shot with a handheld camera, the scenes are reduced to the maximum and some dialogues and sequences are improvised to achieve greater fluidity and naturalness. Shooting in this way “is not necessarily a matter of style, but also a matter of practicality.” The first three episodes of the first season were shot in 29 days. “I don’t like to stop during a scene, I like to keep going and not fall into conventional drama,” continues Savage, who argues that shooting like this “allows the actors the freedom to really feel those scenes.”
Savage believes that all viewers of I Am will feel like they’ve been represented in some way, including men who may be able to see reflected aspects of themselves they don’t like. “And women can learn how to empower themselves and discover that there are ways out of certain situations.”
