Liverpool-born writer-director Terence Davies is quite simply the creator of some of the most beautiful and haunting films of the last 30 years. After a series of high-profile shorts that he began making in the mid-1970s, Davies made three, family-centric autobiographical works over the course of about 10 years—THE TERENCE DAVIS TRILOGY (1983), DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES (1988), and THE LONG DAY CLOSES (1992)—that created a following among cinephiles that was almost cult-like in their devotion to his delicate and melancholy style of filmmaking.
The followed up those with THE NEON BIBLE, an American-set period work, starring Gena Rowlands; THE HOUSE OF MIRTH, based on the Edith Wharton novel and starring Gillian Anderson; the documentary OF TIME AND THE CITY; and his highest-profile film at the time, THE DEEP BLUE SEA, based on the Terence Rattigan play and starring Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston.
Davies usually takes several years between films, but as if by some cinematic miracle, he released the Scottish coming-of-age story, SUNSET SONG, last year and now has a new film out this year, still in release in art houses around the country, A QUIET PASSION, starring Cynthia Nixon as American poet Emily Dickinson. The movie co-stars the like of Jennifer Ehle, Keith Carradine, Emma Bell, and Catherine Bailey, and it’s a remarkable and often tragic look into Dickinson’s adult life of solitude (at least from male suitors) and under-appreciation by editors, largely unwilling to publish her works. The film is undeniably moving and an intelligent, fragile work that features one of the finest lead performance by a woman you’ll see all year, without question. If the film is playing anywhere near you, you owe it to yourself to see it.
I had a chance recently to sit down with Davies in Chicago to discuss his career, approach to movie-making, and long history as an admirer of Dickinson’s works. As serious as some of his films can get, I found Davies quite funny, charming, and eager to share stories both from his set and his life. With that, please enjoy my talk with the great Terence Davies…
Capone: I always wonder with Emily Dickinson, she seemed to have suffered the fate of a lot of people artistic women of her time. She became an outcast, she was also marginalized, and I think that did a number on her head. Do you think she was marginalized because she was ahead of her time, or was she that driven crazy by being marginalized?
Terence Davies: I don’t think she was marginalized; I think she was just ignored.
Capone: Probably a better choice of words, yes.
TD: And I think her poetry is avant-garde. A lot of women made a lot of money writing Victorian sentimental verse. There was a big market for it. She wasn’t part of that. I don’t think it was justified that her poetry is so good and so ahead of its time. It’s all the other things that go with it. The fact that she was so sick with homesickness they took her out of the seminary, and she never left her home again. When you retreat to your home when you’re that young, you’ve got the world ahead of you. The world seems like a haven. Because her career didn’t take off, she didn’t marry, that then becomes a prison, and it’s too late to do anything about it.
I think she wanted the family to stay like that forever. I wanted my family to stay like that all the time, never change. And her spiritual quest is something that I responded to because I was brought up Catholic and I eventually, after seven long years I wrestling with my conscious, realized it was a lie. Her poetry is about the nature of the soul, but what do you do if there is no God? And she actually oscillates between the two all the while: Is there a God? Is there not a God? And she always implies at the end of the poem that there might be, that there is hope that there will be something.
So it was those things I think that concerned her. Her strengths in a way were her weaknesses too, but the reason I think she speaks to us is that she opened her soul, and that wasn’t common at that time. I suppose you could say Walt Whitman did with “Leaves of Grass,” but the poetry is so boring. He’s not nearly as good as her.
[Both laughs]
Capone: There’s a great shot actually in the beginning of the film that I was going to bring up with regards to that, when Emma Bell is playing her as a young woman, and she’s waiting for her family, and you have her just standing at the window looking out and the light is streaming in and you just hold that shot. It’s so beautifully composed and nothing’s moving, and I thought to me that was you saying “God is with her even if she’s not always with God.”
TD: But also it lays the template down, “For each ecstatic instant/We must an anguish pay.” In other words, even at the peak of ecstasy, there’s gong to be some sort of retribution, some sort of punishment, and that’s the very first poem, because that I think is what she always had—those fleeting moments of happiness, of ecstatic happiness, but you know even as you’re feeling them already, it is beginning to die and go, and I think she was acutely aware of that, and I think that’s what she did do.
Capone: When you were writing this, did you assign excerpts from poems to certain scenes, or did that come later did that you found a place for them?
TD: No, while I was writing it, I had all the poems. There were 1,800 of them, but I knew there were certain ones I wanted in. “Because I could stop for Death,” “For each ecstatic instant” “I’m a Nobody. Who are you?” and “This is my letter to the world.” I already knew I wanted those, but the others came in as I was writing the script, because it evolves. They start to tell you. It’s like music. The poems are the music. “This is right here,” and you don’t know why. One of the drafts, I was having real problems with “I’m a Nobody,” then it suddenly struck me but of course that’s something she should say to [her brother’s] child. That’s what she should do. That’s where it goes. It’s things like that that you then realize “No, it should go here, not there.”
Capone: The sequence that transitions from the younger her to the older her, and you have those photos, that took my breath away. Where did you you get that idea? That’s an actual special effect.
TD: I have absolutely no idea [laughs]. I have no idea. What I didn’t want is for people to wear prosthetic makeup, so they would be older. It just doesn’t work. And I was thinking “How can you do it in a simple way that’s not complicated?” It just has to be straight forward. I don’t know where it came from. I saw those photographs of Ms. Dickinson and the two photographs of [her brother], who really does look very peculiar. And I thought “That’s where it should happen. In the photographic studio, that’s where it should happen.” I have no idea where it came from. I’m just glad it came.
Capone: I’ve often found that with films about artists, that it’s sometimes not very conducive to cinematic moments, especially with writers. How do you make that cinematic? You do that by using sections of her reciting the poems, but you also compose these moments that look like they are the poems to a degree.
TD: That’s a lovely thing to say.
Capone: You’ve given the poems a point of view. Was that something you struggled with, to find a way to represent the poems beyond just hearing them?
TD: No, not really. When I was writing the script, where they felt right they were put in. That wasn’t difficult at all. You have to listen to what the material is telling you. Content always dictates form. It would tell you what it wants, just as the different voices of different characters. “Would she say that? No she wouldn’t. Would she say it in this way? Yes she would.” But that’s subjective, and it has to be instinctive. There are certain things that will always be there. Shots of people out windows and stairwells. I’ve got obviously some sort of awful psychotic love for these things [laughs]. But the material always tells you where it should go, and you’ve got to listen. That’s got to be instinctive, I think.
Capone: I want to believe in my heart, especially with the scenes set at night, that it was shot entirely with the light we see. The candles, the fireplace. Did you use any artificial light in those scenes?
TD: I don’t think we did, because that’s all they would have had: oil lamps and candles and the fire. That’s all they would have had. And I said “Can we do it like that?” And Florian [Hoffmeister, cinematographer] did, because he’s a great artist like that. It should be. It’s quite shadowy, because candlelight is actually not romantic, it’s rather spectral. I’ve never thought it as romantic. And there’s the flicker there, there’s the light from the fire, and it somehow wraps itself around you as though it’s the womb and you’re safe forever, but of course you’re not.
Capone: You shot it digitally, correct? I’m not sure would have picked up as much light under those circumstances.
TD: Oh, it was all digital.
Capone: I understand you shot some of this at the museum that is her house in Amherst and then you shot the rest—
TD: The whole of the house was rebuilt in Belgium because you can’t shoot a), because it’s a museum, b), you can’t float walls. You just cant. We shot in and around the real house for certain sequences and we shot the funeral procession at a local cemetery, but everything else was in Belgium.
Capone: How did you select Belgium for that?
TD: Well because they offered a really good tax incentive and they’ve got a wonderful studio and wonderful people who work there. We also dubbed it in Belgium because they’ve got a sound system that’s really fabulous. It’s real state of the art. That was because they gave us good tax credits, otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to afford it, because it would have been impossible to shoot it here. We just wouldn’t be able to raise the money.
Capone: Let’s talk about Cynthia Nixon. She looks like Emily Dickinson in that final photo you show us. Were you a big “Sex in the City” fan?
TD: [laughs] No! I told her I watched it once but with the sound down. She said “Why?” I said, “I wanted to see your reaction shots,” and her reaction shots for me were always the truest. But I had met her about five or six years previously for a film that didn’t come off, and I never forgot her, and I thought “She’s got something, something special, that woman.” And we asked her would she do it when the script was finished. She said “Yes, I’m terrified.” And what was also very touching was she said, “You won’t get any money for me if I’m starring in the film.” I said, “Yes we will.” It took four-and-a-half years. She was very loyal. She could have gone off and done something else, and had she withdrew, I don’t know who I would have chosen. I have no idea who I would have chosen.
Capone: There hasn’t been that much time between this film and SUNSET SONG, so I’m wondering have you decided to pick up that pace? I know it’s not always up to you.
TD: Sheer accident. It wasn’t planned, obviously. What happened with SUNSET SONG was everything that could go wrong on a film went wrong, and the post-production was a long time because we had to keep on raising money, and by the time we’d finished it, I had finished A QUIET PASSION. Nothing went wrong on A QUIET PASSION—not one, single problem. It just happens that they’d both come out close to one another, but it wasn’t by design, obviously.
Capone: The friendship that you depict with Vryling—I don’t know how accurate you tired to make it, but it seems like it was the one time in her life she was about as open and free. I’m wondering if you gave much thought to what was it about that woman that drew her out so much?
TD: That was a complete invention. Vryling Buffam was a friend of [her sister’s] Vinnie’s, not hers. With that name, I thought, she’s got to be fun. Really, she’s based on when I was growing up, my sisters had wonderful friends. Northern women in England are always so funny. I loved when they would come around on a Friday. So she’s an amalgam of them, really.
I saw a photo of Ms. Buffam after she had become Mrs. Wilder, and she looks like a sideboard. She’d never heard a joke in her life. So she was a complete invention on my part. I just wanted someone who was a friend who was honest and would speak her mind, but also is kind and funny. But she’s also a realist, and she says “Do this, but not that.” She has to represent all the people you love to come to visit. It’s a complete invention, really, and it’s only because the name is so extraordinary, and I thought “I want her to be fun,” and I didn’t want the whole film to be solemn. There’s nothing worse than people who were great mooning around with long faces and being glum for 90 minutes. What’s interesting in that?
Capone: She’s also a professional instigator. I think to a degree the implication is she’s pushing Emily to be more provocative in her life, in her writing. Whether Emily actually had a person like that in her life, I don’t know, but it’s nice to see it represented that way.
TD: She encourages the rebelliousness in Emily. She obviously was rebellious. She wouldn’t be browbeaten even at 17, about her soul. No one was allowed to in anyway endanger that. Over that, I think she would fight tooth and nail. She won’t be told what to do. But that’s its power, but then what do you do if you say “Well if I’ve got this thing called a soul, supposing there isn’t a God, then why be moral, why be ethical?” She sets the bar very high. And anyone who falls below it, she’s merciless. She’s also merciless with herself. When she feels that she has fallen below that hight standard…that’s why Vinnie says to her “Integrity taken too far can be equally ruthless.”
Capone: You do something very interesting here with both the sisters that you’ve got these two wonderful actresses with very expressive faces, and they almost never cry because they lived in a time when emotions were buried. Did you do that to add an extra layer of challenge to these two women?
TD: I think this is probably not true for modern generations in England, but when I was growing up sentimentality was to be avoided at all cost. James Joyce calls it “unearned emotion,” and it is. Sentimentally cheapens everything it touches. Now, everybody cries all the time, and it doesn’t mean anything. It just does not mean anything. You’ve got to give justification for that. If you don’t, then it just sort of cheapens it. There would be those big events like death that were of enormous importance. My father died when I was six. The body was in the house 10 days, which was not pleasant, and people died in agony, at least Emily did. But you can’t sentimentalize it, just as you can’t soft pedal the agony she must have been in. You just can’t. And once you do that, you betray the story. It’s easy to make people cry. It’s dead easy. But it’s much more difficult to move them.
Capone: You have a couple of moments here—one when the mother has her stroke, and then the first time we see Emily have her first episode —you really hold those shots for a very long time, almost uncomfortably so. Tell me about why you held those for so long.
TD: It’s not so much deliberately as feeling how long it should be held for. Every shot has a moment where it decays. I watch my father die over two years of cancer, and it was awful. As I say, you can’t soft pedal what that was like. They had no means of relieving pain. We don’t know what that’s like now. Our lives are much cushier. It has to be seen with an unflinching eye. This is what happens. This is what she would have gone through, and it’s awful. You can’t soft pedal it. It’s not so much deliberate as it feels right to hold it for that length of time. A lot of people hate what I do, think it’s far too grueling and long.
Capone: I don’t think that. It must have been exhausting for your actors.
TD: Ironically no. When we were doing publicity in Europe, someone said to Cynthia “What was difficult to do? Was it the dying scenes?” She said, “No, that was dead easy. It was the arguments that were difficult.”
Capone: You have this one sequence in the film that almost stands out about the Civil War. Her brother ends up not going and is very concerned that he’ll be looked upon as a coward because of it, but then you have that whole montage of I assume it was real photos of battlefield death, then she has a poem that goes along with that. Talk about that sequence and why did you want to settle in on that?
TD: It’s a curious thing, the Civil War. It’s a very important part of your history, but imagine if you’re miles away from these battles. You never see a battle, all you get are the casualty lists, so it happens somewhere else even though it’s obviously a national trauma. If you don’t actually see it, all you know is what is reported, but it was important to have it in because it happened while she was alive. It was important because his father said “Austin, no you won’t go.” And although that is never developed in the film, what it does imply, to me anyway, is that because he’s been compromised that time, it’s easier then to make the second compromise when he has an affair. Because she says, “He once fought for integrity, and now it’s being disregarded,” and it must have had a terrible effect on him, because there were people in the town he knew who were killed and who knows what people said behind his back. And his father’s doing it for the best of reasons, but sometimes you do things that are very destructive for the best of reasons.
Capone: I believe that Keith Carradine deserves a statue built to him on the side of a mountain. He’s one of my absolute favorites. How did you find him for this part?
TD: We were out in Los Angeles looking for people and we had asked him to come in, but everyone has to read. Everyone. I only ever cast one person who does not have to read, and in this case it was Cynthia because I just knew she was right. And his agent said ”He won’t read.” There’s nothing you can do. And then he came in and I said, “Well, Mr. Carradine, your agent said you won’t read.” He said, “Of course, I’ll read.” He said, “I’m a terrible reader, but I’ll read.” And he read it, and I said “Will you do it?” And he said yes. I can’t explain when I know someone’s right. You just know. You just know they’re right. It’s as vague as that, I’m afraid.
Capone: Dickinson was never put in with the purely feminist writers, and yet I think there’s something in this film where she equates marriage to slavery. She certainly pushes against the patriarchy more than once. Do you think she would fit in comfortably with feminist poets?
TD: Oh, not at all. I think she would be horrified at the way life has changed, not just for women but for everyone. I think she would be horrified at it, because like a lot of geniuses, she was extremely conventional in certain parts of her life. Ibsen was the same. He hated going to the doctor because he didn’t like taking his clothes off in front of a stranger. Usually these really great writers were, in some way, really dull and unconventional, and I think she’d be horrified.
Capone: I’ve noticed in your films both a love of composition and a desire to throw it off a little bit and have a shot that seems subtly chaotic. Maybe it’s to make us feel off kilter. Talk about your relationship with composition and then throwing a wrench in that every once in a while.
TD: Well, I compose it the way I see it. You have to feel the lens. I never know what lenses I use, and very often Florence will say “Can I put this lens on?” “Yeah, fine.” Then I’ll say there’s something wrong with it—it feels too remote or it looks too cool or it doesn’t feel right. But it’s got to be felt, and where composition is concerned, you have to feel it instinctively. You know it’s not right. Again, it’s as vague as that. I just said, this is the way it should be and that’s what we shoot. If you can give me an example of my throwing a spanner in the works…
Capone: For example, the scene where Emily has her first pain in the kitchen. She falls back and there’s a lot of empty space on one side of the screen. I only noticed it because I’m so used to not seeing that that I feel like you’re letting us know things are not as they should be.
TD: But also, I’m trying to become more asymmetrical where it’s appropriate. But you’re right, that was the reason. When we ran through the scene, it just felt absolutely right that we shouldn’t move. We should watch her because she does this, and that, and there’s all that space. But that space is full of wonderful clutter.
Capone: I agree. I’m looking at this kitchen like “You don’t get to see that very often, do you?” I realize you said you’ve been working on this for a number of years, but what does Emily Dickinson’s life have to tell people of today? What can people of today learn from the way she lived her life?
TD: I don’t know if you learn anything from anybody’s life. You have to read the poetry. The great thing would be if people started to read her, because she deserves it. She really does deserve it. Because it’s not a definitive life, it’s only my subjective prism through which I’ve made it, and I responded to certain things in her life. If somebody else had made it, they would have responded to something else. But it’s very subjective, which is what it should be. I would love people to go and read her, because I really think she deserves it.
Capone: You’ve mentioned a couple of times just while we’re talking here things you went through as a youth that are similar to things she went through. Is this an especially personal story for you?
TD: My manager said it’s my most autobiographical.
Capone: Did you realize that while you were making it?
TD: You never do really, because the things that happened in my life that were echoes in hers—acute home sickness. I was quite ill as a 10 year old I was sent away to convalesce in North Wales, which is not that far from Liverpool, for a month, and I felt miserable all the time. And when that final week came when you would get into the van and go home, I just waited for it. I waited and waited and waited for it, so I knew what she felt. I knew what that spiritual thing was, because I really did believe.
I was very devout. I tried to live up to being pure in thought, word and deed, and it’s impossible. You can’t do it. No one can do it. Not even saints. So the nature of the spirituality and her struggle with that, I was very much part of. I think she saw her family as the haven at first, that this family was perfect. I thought that about mine. And I remember when I was in primary school wanting them to stay like this forever. I don’t want them ever, ever to change. And of course, you can’t hold a family like that. They get older, they marry, they die and all those things, and that in turn was influenced by the family that’s in MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS. Everybody wants to be the Smith family, and I want to be Judy Garland [laughs].
Capone: I was actually going to bring up music, because I feel like there is a rhythm to a lot of your sequences. Do you have music playing ever?
TD: Only if it’s to time a shot. That’s the only time.
Capone: So not for impact, necessarily? Just for timing.
TD: But sometimes, you need for everyone to hear it. Sometimes, it’s much better if you don’t play it on the set but you hear it in headphones. We did a variety of changes like that. Sometimes it was played aloud, sometimes it wasn’t. But you've got to feel that. It’s amazing. When I first started making films, I realized just why in silent movies when they were being shot, they played music. The effect that it has on the listener is so striking. It was a very, very clever decide. Although when sound came in, they were very worried about music. They said nobody will know where it’s coming from.
