Terence Davies - Director

Bigmouth strikes again

Despite a career of critical acclaim, Terence Davies still struggles to get his films made. Whose fault is that? Just about everybody's, he tells Simon Hattenstone.

Terence Davies is angry, make no mistake. British cinema's great arthouse miserablist is better known for his gentle manner and fastidious politeness, but today he's frothing about his inability to get a film made. "Work is my raison d'etre and if that's taken away you become a non-person," he says. "You're just filling in time till you die."

In 2000, Davies looked as if he'd finally cracked the big time. His adaptation of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth was wonderfully reviewed, it had a commercial star in Gillian Anderson, it was showing in big cinemas, and there was even talk of Oscar nominations. But the nominations never came. Nor did anything else. Six years on, Davies is sitting at home, with two scripts completed, and no immediate prospect of making another film.

I first met him when his autobiographical film The Long Day Closes (bags of misery, but with great dollops of joy) came out 14 years ago. He is a lovely man, but a gruelling interview. He doesn't skim surfaces, so when he tells you about his angst you get the whole gestalt - how his father beat the self-esteem out of him when he was young, how he hates the way he looks, how being gay has been a curse, how he has never felt he belonged. Last time I interviewed him was in New York at the height of his success with The House of Mirth - I remember the red carpets, the standing ovations, and more than anything, the fact that he was inconsolable because his mother, the love of his life, had died. And that was the good old days when he could get films made.

I'm worried about what I'll find at his flat in south London. I'm half expecting to have to pick him up off the floor.

In fact, I've never seen him so belligerent. The kettle's on, he's making tea, and telling me exactly what is wrong with the UK Film Council, which looked as if it was going to fund his adaptation of the novel Sunset Song, until it pulled out at the last moment. "There's a man there called Robert Jones [former head of the Film Council's Premiere Fund] who made us jump through all sorts of hoops, and we actually did everything he wanted, and he turned round after four months and said, 'It won't travel'." He pauses for effect. "And that was somebody who had just put money into Sex Lives of the Potato Men! The way in which we were treated was absolutely shocking. If I can misquote Shaw, 'Those who can, do, and those who can't become Robert Jones.' " His voice is deep, theatrical, camp, hints of Liverpudlian with a touch of Noël Coward.

Then there is the proposal he put to the BBC's drama department. "They actually asked for a reference. That made me feel utterly worthless. I just thought, what is the point of carrying on? I said to the person, 'Well I've been making films for 30 years, isn't that a good enough reference?' and he said, 'Oh you mustn't take it personally'. I said, 'How else can I take it?'"

And the proposal he put to Channel 4. "One person at C4 said we're not interested in period, we're only interested in contemporary British. I said, 'I don't know any contemporary British novels, can you suggest anything?' 'The Good Doctor.' I said, 'But that's actually set in South Africa.' Silence. Then she said 'A Complicated Kindness,' and I said, 'But that's about Canadian Mennonites and you said contemporary British.' And she said, 'Well we like these.' So I said, 'But that's not what you said.' And I was shown the door." He always tells stories in this manner, like one of the Liverpudlian women in his earlier films faithfully reporting back an earlier conversation. Was he actually chucked out? "No, but it was clear I was not wanted in that room so I got up and left."

Davies isn't finished with his tales of woe and rejection. "Another person said we need background stories for every character. I said, 'That would make the film four hours long. Are you prepared to fund a four-hour film? And if you can tell me one film where every character has a background story I'll go out and buy it.' 'Do you know Singin' in the Rain?' 'Yes.' I said, 'can you tell me what background story Kathy Seldon has?' Quiet. Again, I was shown the door. You're up against people who know nothing, who have done a media degree or, worst of all, have done the Robert McKee lectures."

Why is that worst of all? "Because they've done a great deal of damage. Who can turn round and say it's good to have a climax on page six? Who said so? Robert McKee, and his theories are based on Casablanca, which was being written as it was being shot. So you're up against that level of philistinism. It beggars belief."

Davies' brilliance as a film-maker has been to bypass conventions. He has always said he wouldn't know how to follow them anyway. His films often seem to have no plots, no climaxes, no structure and barely any dialogue - yet they work. For 30 years he has struggled to make low-budget, wilfully unconventional, quite beautiful films about nothing and everything - unrequited love, loss, domestic violence, disappointment, repressed desires, death, all the cheery stuff.

His most famous film is Distant Voices, Still Lives, which has been restored for the London film festival and will be rereleased next year. It is Davies' tender-brutal remembrance of family life in Liverpool in the 1940s and 50s - a world of shipping forecasts, pub singalongs, Hollywood musicals, coal cellars and terrifying paroxysms of domestic violence.

He has made some of the most miserable films in the history of cinema, all of them illuminated by glimpses of pure joy. If he was beginning now, he doesn't think any of his films would have been made. At least when he was starting out there was the BFI Production Board, which subsidised the first works of auteurs such as Derek Jarman, Peter Greenaway, Bill Douglas and Davies himself. "That's not a bad list. But now if a young film-maker wants to use cinema as a form of expression and an art form, where do they go? How do they get it off the ground? The destruction of the Production Board was an act of such cultural vandalism as to be outrageous."

Actually, he says, there is one sure way to get a film made in Britain today. "Now you'll get money to make a film if you're a television comedian because people think lots of people will go. A Cock and Bull Story, a postmodernist comedy! What's that when it's at home? Is it funny or is it not? When I've seen Steve Coogan on television he's about as funny as tertiary syphilis." Davies is enjoying the rant, getting carried away with his flow. "I think, why are people putting money into him? But unfortunately we are awash with people who are third-rate - Ricky Gervais, Peter Kay, not a scrap of talent between them. None of them."

He stops, surprised by his own vehemence. "Would you like an apple?" he asks sweetly.

Do you think your recent experience has made you bitter? "No, I'm angry and I'm disillusioned. Because we once had an industry of our own, we once had a culture of our own and now it's just been subsumed by America. In 20 years' time we'll be little better than Hawaii, and why we're not admitted to the union I don't know because we're no longer our own country. We swallow hook, line and sinker everything from America. And we've become cheap and shoddy and we do nothing well. And abroad we are despised, and we deserve to be."

Davies was close to giving up earlier this year. What has made it all so much more painful, he says, is that his work has been his life. "I'm on my own. And to belabour the point, I know it's tiresome but it's nonetheless true, being gay has ruined my life, and I've been celibate in order to bear that. And it has been a burden for me. I poured everything into my work."

So what has he been doing these past six years? "Getting into a great deal of debt, which I'm very worried about. Thank goodness I live alone, because if I've got no money the only person who suffers is me."

Somehow, despite everything, and despite himself, he has kept going. He has finished another screenplay - amazingly, a romantic comedy, called Mad About the Boy. At the moment, he's convinced he will be able to get it made, but still he worries. "People might think they don't associate me with things that are amusing so I might not get the money." He has also written poetry, which has been a solace. Shyly, he agrees to read one of the poems. He brings down a ring binder (Davies still has something of the accountant about him, 30 years after quitting that profession). The poem is called End Time, and is, naturally, about death. This is one verse, as tender and bleak as one of his films.

"We will not fight/ We will not strive/ Against the fading of the light/ Or hope to keep our souls alive./ Oh my demons come and get your quarry now."

Was that written on a good day? He laughs. "I was feeling very low."

Simon Hattenstone - The Guardian, Friday October 20 2006