The doleful British auteur makes a case for melancholy outcasts with his latest cinematic triumph, Benediction .
Words and interview by SOPHIE MONKS KAUFMAN Illustration by MICHAEL DUNBABIN
In Profile
All the lonely people. Where do they all come from? The Beatles meant this as a rhetorical question, but I have an answer: Terence Davies. His nine features and seven shorts, made across 40 years, span documentary, autofiction, literary adaptation and non-traditional biopic. Genres mean less than emotional themes. The Terence Davies Trilogy (1983) is literal memoir, yet it is A Quiet Passion (2016), starring Cynthia Nixon as the reclusive American poet, Emily Dickinson, that Davies says is the closest of his films to autobiography. In Dickinson’s loneliness and the lack of recognition she experienced in her lifetime, he sees himself. His new film, Benediction, is a biopic of war poet Siegfried Sassoon, of which he says, “What drew me to Sassoon is a sense of loneliness and of wanting redemption and not finding it.”
The praise that Davies receives from rarefied critical corners does not equate to belonging in the film industry. In a 2006 interview with Simon Hattenstone of The Guardian, headlined ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’, he railed against the British film industry, critiquing its deference to American culture and recounting the reaction to a film proposal he submitted to the BBC drama department. He told Hattesntone, “They actually asked for a reference. That made me feel utterly worthless. I just thought, what is the point of carrying on? I said to the person, ‘Well, I’ve been making films for 30 years, isn’t that a good enough reference?’ and he said, ‘Oh, you mustn’t take it personally’. I said, ‘How else can I take it?’”
The Hattenstone interview took place in a barren period when Davies hadn’t made a film since his heartbreaking Edith Wharton adaptation, The House of Mirth, in 2000. From the outside, it looks like the dam of creativity has since burst: with a lyrical documentary about his birthplace Liverpool, Of Time and the City in 2008; a romantic melodrama adapted from a Terence Rattigan play, ‘The Deep Blue Sea’, in 2011; another literary adaptation starring Agyness Deyn, Sunset Song, in 2015; the aforementioned A Quiet Passion; and now, Benediction. Is he feeling more positive now? “I’m even less positive now. I’m terribly sorry,” he says in distinctive rich cadences that arose from all the BBC radio piped into his childhood home. “I wish that I was populist, I wish I could make a streaming film. I’d love to, but I don’t have the special talent that it requires.”
His tendency towards stark express
