'The Deep Blue Sea' set visit

It’s early December 2010 and British filmmaking luminary Terence Davies is darting around the back lot of Three Mills Studios near Stratford, east London. Seemingly unperturbed by the seasonal chill winds, he’s sporting a jaunty tartan scarf and, in contrast to the despair and torment that are trademarks of his languid cinematic oeuvre, is actually rather cheerful. He’s reached the final days of shooting a noirish adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s morose, existential 1952 three-hander, ‘The Deep Blue Sea’, a project intended as a centrepiece for this year’s Rattigan centenary celebrations. It will also close the 55th BFI London Film Festival.

But Davies’s unseasonal joviality clearly stems from the buzz he gets from being on set, creating, making movies, bringing his dreams and memories to life. To my mind he’s the best director currently working on our little isle, a celluloid alchemist like no other. His body of work is unrivalled, stupendous in its originality, verve and passion. He’s not someone who just transposes words on to the screen: he takes his source material and sculpts it into something that could only be consumed via the cinema. On the cold set, I’m placed at a remove from the action, though I’m given some headphones and I can overhear Davies cooing directions in an accent so velvety and posh it makes the Queen sound like Chas and/or Dave. Maybe I’ve caught him on a good day, but I expected him to be more of a diva. He appears clear and focused, a man who’s utterly certain of the images he wants to capture. I meet Davies very briefly and, casually dispensing with my, ahem, trademark cool, tell him what an honour it is to watch him at work. He seems elated and humbled. But he must get back to it.

As a studio, Three Mills has an austere, industrial feel. The lot in which Davies is filming – currently housing an artificially grubby replica of a 1950s London bedsit – is the sort of vast, cavernous space where you might expect to find tinned peaches stockpiled against armageddon. You could imagine Davies would have been at home in the bustle of Old Hollywood: jodhpurs, flat cap, riding crop; a phalanx of adoring bystanders; cameras the size of refrigerators; the fug of cigar smoke; and a leggy blonde harlot refusing to come out of her trailer until the runner’s been fired. An era when romanticism and irony were not mutually exclusive. If you’ve ever seen or heard Davies speak, you’ll know he’s a man for whom art and culture died a death in 1955. In the most charming way possible, he’s a walking, talking anachronism. When he speaks, all roads lead to a Doris Day reference, a recitation of TS Eliot’s ‘The Four Quartets’ or a passionate proclamation of his love for Dirk Bogarde.

He is best known for his 1988 film ‘Distant Voices, Still Lives’, though I count its 1992 follow-up, ‘The Long Day Closes’, as one of the modern greats, a rapturous, autobiographical collage about the twin sanctuaries of family and cinema in 1950s Liverpool – the city he was brought up in. Davies’s previous foray into fiction filmmaking was in 2000, a magnificently forlorn take on Edith Wharton’s belle époque satire, ‘The House of Mirth’. It’s a film that remains an unheralded masterpiece, and the scene at the end where Gillian Anderson (the film’s unflappable star) finally breaks down gets me every time. He returned to our screens in 2008 with his lauded documentary-poem, ‘Of Time and the City’, in which he acted as our sardonic, Chekhov-quoting usher on a melancholy nostalgia tour of, again, post-war Liverpool.

Taking place in London ‘some time around 1950’ (naturally), ‘The Deep Blue Sea’ stars Rachel Weisz in Oscar-worthy form as a woman on the brink of madness, driven to suicide by her dashing-though-dangerously-capricious fancy man (Tom Hiddleston, so great in Joanna Hogg’s ‘Archipelago’) while being desperately coaxed back to a life of exasperating frigidity and ritual by the husband she spurned (Simon Russell Beale). At its most basic, it’s about a man who forgets his lover’s birthday. The scene that’s being shot today marks the crux of the film, where a weary and despondent Hester (Weisz) hovers around her dank flat while Freddie (Hiddleston) gabs about his myriad golfing achievements. The room is oppressively dark, albeit with an exquisite curtain of dusty light cascading in from the window. Even watching the scene play out on a monitor the size of a cigarette packet, its brilliance is instantly apparent. Among other things, Davies is a master of dramatic staging, and there’s a simple intensity to the way in which Weisz plays most of the scene with her back to Hiddleston, forcing us to wait impatiently for him to twig on to her misery.

Weisz ambles around the set in little frameless specs and a huge woollen coat but, in terms of an interview, she’s off-limits. It’s understandable considering the importance of the scene. There’s a break for lunch and I dash up to Hiddleston’s dressing room for a chat. He’s a charming fellow, enthusiastic and unpretentious in equal measure. When I enter he’s alone, still decked out in his tweedy get-up, waltzing and miming the lyrics to Jo Stafford’s jazzy 1949 torchsong, ‘You Belong to Me’. Even before introducing himself, he looks over, smiles and says, ‘It takes you straight there, doesn’t it?’ Where exactly? Inside Davies’s head? He’s referring, of course, to an old London boozer, but same difference. He continues singing. It’s deep research for a scene, he says, but he appears to be having far too much fun for that.

Hiddleston has a lot of admiration for Davies and talks about him fondly: ‘He’s a visionary. And what I mean by that is that he is making this film to fit with a very definite vision he has. He’s very defensive about very, very small moments. In the scene we’re shooting now, there’s a point where I have to turn the wireless off, and he’s adamant that it’s done at a very particular knife-edge moment. One of his mantras is: “The camera captures the truth, but it also captures falsity. If you don’t fully believe something, don’t do it.” Another thing he says is, “I don’t want it acted, I want it felt.” They’re the things you want to hear from a director.’

Later I meet Sean O’Connor, one of the film’s producers and an encyclopedia of British theatre trivia. ‘Terence is a man who… knows what he wants,’ he says with a wry smile. In an interview Davies gave during the making of ‘The House of Mirth’, he explained that he knew this was the right source material for him because he could ‘see the camera positions in his mind’s-eye’ while he was reading it. Leafing through Davies’s immaculately detailed adaptation of ‘The Deep Blue Sea’, you’d guess the same was true here. ‘What Terence has done is open the play up,’ explains O’Connor. ‘He’s taken what is essentially a populist, 1950s West End kitchen-sink drama and has loaded it with context and symbolism.’

The term ‘Bergmanesque’ is bandied about in modern film criticism, but this really earns it. Its refined depiction of internal anguish and abuse placing it up there with a film like the Swedish master’s ‘Cries and Whispers’ (1972). O’Connor continues: ‘By telling the story from Hester’s point of view, it reveals itself to be a much more – and I hate using the word – profound piece of work about women in the ’50s, about choice and about a sexual agenda.’

For a gay playwright like Terence Rattigan and a gay director like Terence Davies, a story about illicit romance and the fulfillment of individual passion imbues the material with fascinating metaphorical depths. Davies was once quoted as saying, ‘I make films to come to terms with my family history. If there had been no suffering, there would have been no films.’ This statement encapsulates his entire output, up to and including ‘The Deep Blue Sea’. I catch Davies on my way out. Toadying again, I tell him that today’s scene looked amazing. He appears genuinely delighted: ‘Tell the kids!’ he calls as he’s dragged back in to the fray by one of the production staff.

Read our review of 'The Deep Blue Sea'