Terence Davies is one of England’s most important living filmmakers, having directed two seminal British films, Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992). His subsequent films—among them The House of Mirth (2000) and The Deep Blue Sea (2011)—are just as rich as these, combining vividly realized settings, balletic camera movements, and exquisitely understated performances to create visions of the past that resonate in your memory long after you watch them. Davies is also an impeccable dramatist, rendering his characters’ emotional pain in palpable terms and writing dialogue that flows like music. His latest feature, A Quiet Passion (which opens Friday at the Music Box), is a moving biography of Emily Dickinson and another deeply personal work. As Davies explained when I spoke to him last month, he frequently drew on his childhood memories when devising the film, and its sympathetic portraits of female characters (not least Dickinson herself) stem from feelings he had as a boy for his mother and sisters. Davies also discussed the early filmic influences that continue to inspire him and some of his working methods.
Do you think of these movies when you’re making your own?
You can’t give the actors modern English. As soon as you do that, it kills [the film] stone-dead. Because [the audience] just thinks, “I’m sorry, but they didn’t speak like that in 1850. They just didn’t.” You have to find a way of getting the flavor of it while still making it entertaining. It’s got to sound true.
One thing I admire about the film is how make her pain felt through your imagery. The second half of A Quiet Passion takes place almost entirely in Dickinson’s home—which, as you show, she never left. The darkness of her home becomes suffocating. I said to Florian [Hoffmeister], who shot the film, that it should be Shaker light at the very beginning. If you’ve ever been to [Dickinson’s home in] Amherst, there are these two parlors with huge windows, so the light would just pour in. I wanted those scenes to look really sharp, but not cold. Then gradually the film gets darker, which reflects Emily’s progression. That was a conscious decision.
But it’s the stories, really. If the story’s good, it doesn’t really matter where it’s set. We can all share loss or love or hurt or anger at the people we love and the people who love us. That’s universal. I’m just drawn to the stories, first and foremost. The last two [I directed] just happened to be about women. The next two are about men, all of them gay. The one I just finished writing is based on a lovely book by Richard McCann called Mother of Sorrows. The other one, which I’m writing now, is about Siegfried Sassoon, one of the three great poets of the First World War. It was him, Wilfred Owen, and Rupert Brooke. They were killed, but he survived. And he was gay and he married, like lots of gay men did then, and later on in his life, he converted to Catholicism, which I find very peculiar.
