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.

I left film school after finishing ‘Madonna and Child’ and didn’t work for three years. Eventually I got the money together to do the last part, ‘Death and Transfiguration’ (1983). People thought ‘The Trilogy’ was entirely without hope, which to a certain extent it is, because I felt hopeless. I don’t like being gay. It has ruined my life. I am celibate – although I think I would have been celibate even if I was straight because I’m not good-looking – why would anyone be interested in me? And nobody has been. Work was my substitute. It was also my substitute for religion, because up until the age of at 22, I was a very devout Catholic. I stopped believing. I think we just die and there isn’t anything beyond us. Sometimes that has to be looked at unflinchingly. It’s a difficult process to be born, it’s a difficult process to die. It’s not pleasant, it’s not easy. And all of us have to face it one day. That’s hard. But that doesn’t pack the Odeon Leicester Square, it doesn’t.

When it came to filming ‘Distant Voices/Still Lives’ I was sufficiently distanced from my childhood. The only person who looked like my family was Peter Postlewaite, who looked like my dad. But life was infinitely worse than the film, I tell you. It was much worse. One time, when I was about six, my father threw my mother and I thought he was going to chop her head off with an axe. My sister hit him with a milk bottle and he stopped. But you can’t put that in a film because nobody would believe you. He was a very violent man, very psychotic. But in an odd way, when he died we’d begun to have a life, especially my mum. So it seemed like two separate families. And that’s how it came about, I was showing you what he’d done and how it affected them. And then after he died, how they’d lived.

‘The Neon Bible’ doesn’t work, and that’s entirely my fault. The only thing I can say is that it’s a transition work. And I couldn’t have done ‘The House of Mirth’ without it. As soon as I read the book of ‘The House of Mirth’ I wanted to do it, but I had to wait 16 years.

I’ve made very few films. Oh my God, yes. Just look at my bank balance. I wanted to do ‘Sunset Song’, which is a great, great novel by the Scottish writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon. And it’s not about people with guns shooting one another. It’s about real people. It’s about our country, our culture. It’s not sub-American. It’s not an extension of television. We got money from all over the world for ‘Sunset Song’ except this country. The UK Film Council turned it down. After four months I was told, ‘It won’t run’. What does that mean? And the man who said that had just put nigh-on £2 million into ‘Sex Lives of the Potato Men’. It was a bit hard to swallow, that. I’ve started a death list. It’s given me hours of pleasure.

There was another film that collapsed. And now it’s been seven years. And of course, when you can’t make a film, you become a non-person. I’m not a kid anymore, I’m 62 in November. I’m trying to make a romantic comedy set in the present day with a happy ending! God knows whether we’ll get any money for it.

A Terence Davies season runs at BFI Southbank from April 16 to 30.

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