The directors: Terence Davies

Terence Davies‘ ’Trilogy‘ (1976-83) was recently named on a list of forgotten masterpieces. It‘s a bitter-sweet compliment to the 61-year-old director who has struggled in recent years to find funding. The movie, told in three shorts, charts a life from boyhood through to old age and death. It was the first of three autobiographical films, followed by ’Distant Voices/Still Lives‘ (1988) and ’The Long Day Closes‘ (1992). Piece them together and you have a picture of Davies‘ childhood in the scrum of a big Catholic family in Liverpool, a violent father, borstal-grade bullying and queer-bashing at school, Doris Day and singalongs, loneliness and maternal love. He is also the director of ’The Neon Bible‘ (1995) and ’The House of Mirth‘ (2000), an adaptation of Edith Wharton‘s novel.

All my films, up to and including ‘The House of Mirth’, were made with very small budgets and modest intentions. We all started out at the BFI. There was me, Bill Douglas, Derek Jarman, Sally Potter, Peter Greenaway. It was all modest, but all those people had a voice in a way that people haven’t today. Now they want to make Hollywood films, but we do it badly here. We always have. Why do we want to make films that they do better? We don’t do gangster movies well. There’s only one thing more embarrassing than an actor with a gun: a British actor with a gun. Ridiculous. All the people I’ve mentioned, none of us would get money now. No one would touch us.

I was working in accountancy for 12 years. It was awful. What kept me going was that I wrote in the evening and I acted with an amateur-dramatics society. But I hated it. And what’s even worse is that I was good at it. In the end, I decided to leave the firm and go to drama school. While I was in my first year I’d written ‘Children’, the initial part of ‘The Trilogy’. I sent it to everyone – and everyone turned it down. I didn’t think it could be any good. But I found out about the BFI’s Production Board and was called in by them. They said, ‘You have £8,500 and not a penny more and you’ll direct’. That’s how it happened. I’d never thought of directing. I was petrified. Especially when the crew – everyone apart from the cameraman – loathed the script, loathed the way I directed, and told me so every day. It was baptism by fire. I couldn’t argue my corner because I’d never done it before. All I could say was, ‘That’s how I see it, that’s how I hear it’.

When I’d written the first part of ‘The Trilogy’ I felt there should be more. I had to go back to drama school because in those days if you didn’t complete the course you had to repay your grant, and there was no way I could do that. So I finished my second year and applied to film school. ‘Madonna and Child’ (1980) was my graduation film. One of the governors there said, ‘This film should never have been made’. You must remember, when I was growing up – I was 15 in 1960 – being gay was a criminal offence, you could be sent to prison for it. You were considered a complete pariah. The subject matter was considered by this governor something that civilised people didn’t do. I can understand that. Parts of my family were shocked by it. Certainly, when my brothers saw ‘The Trilogy’, they couldn’t even discuss it. With ‘Distant Voices/Still Lives’, they thought it shouldn’t be made. But my mother said, ‘He’s told the truth’ about the family.

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