Leading festival heads and UK industry figures have been paying fulsome tribute to Terence Davies, one of the titans of UK cinema who died at the weekend aged 77.
British Film Institute (BFI) chief executive Ben Roberts said that Davies was an inspirational figure to him. He discovered Davies’ work when he was 17 years old and saw a clip of The Long Day Closes on the BBC Film show presented by Barry Norman.
“I was just immediately mesmerised by it. There was something about how his films were queer-coded (I don’t think he would use that phrase) [but] coded with his homosexuality, which made a massive impact on me as a young man,” Roberts stated. “I feel he has no peer. There is no comparable filmmaker in the way he deals with memory and childhood and family and place.”
The BFI supported Davies’ early films and continued to do so under Roberts.
“I really, really loved him as a filmmaker and as a man,” Roberts said. “He seemed to have no real sense of his impact on people like me. He always seemed so tortured by the process of making films and how painful that was. He had such modesty. Each film he released seemed to be met with mixed critical responses and yet they tend to settle into masterpiece status.”
Writer and film producer Colin MacCabe, former head of production at the BFI, met Davies during the 1980s. He recalls reading the script of the final part of Davies’s trilogy, Death And Transfiguration, “and I just knew I was reading the work of a genius.”
The BFI under MacCabe went on to back Distant Voices, the director’s autobiographical film about his childhood in Liverpool.
“I do remember the first time I met Terence because he got down on his knees and crossed himself. He was very funny, one of the wittiest people I’ve ever met,” MacCabe recalled. “Hitchcock shot his films so they could only be edited one way. Terence wrote so that every camera movement was in the text. The film [Distant Voices] was there on the page in its entirety.”
Distant Voices was 45 minutes long - and therefore hard to release theatrically. Davies told MacCabe he also had another film in mind, a companion piece called Still Lives. “With the full support of my board, I remember Salman Rushdie in particular [getting behind it], we decided to sit on a work of genius, not release it and wait for Terence to write, shoot and edit the next film,” MacCabe recalled. “He did it….it went to Cannes. The film, Distant Voices, Still Lives, ended and they cheered for 20 minutes!”
On the back of the Cannes reception, the film was sold by the BFI (under distribution exec Mary Davies) all over the world.
“When we received Of Time And The City, I was deeply moved by the film, which is not a documentary but an essay on film,” said Cannes festival director Thierry Fremaux on how he came to programme Davies’s groundbreaking 2008 documentary, also about his life growing up in Liverpool at the festival.
The film received a special screening in Cannes and was regarded at the time as a comeback for its director after a period in which he had struggled to get new projects financed in the UK.
“Terence was such a nice man,” Fremaux added. “He came to Lyon [Fremaux is also director of Lyon’s Lumiere Festival] last year and we are maybe the last place where he made a public appearance. Which makes our emotion even bigger to think about him, to think that he won’t give us his movies and talent anymore.”
Distant Voices, Still Lives won the Golden Leopard in Locarno and Locarno Film Festival’s current artistic director Giona A Nazzaro hailed Davies as one of the key figures in recent European cinema.
“It’s very difficult to sum up the work of such an accomplished artist. At a moment when everybody thought that British cinema was all about stark social realism, by reworking some of the same elements and weaving them together with his extremely refined and cultivated gaze, and bringing to them poignant biographical elements, Terence Davies created a world that resonated in every landscape,” Nazzaro commented. “He made something so specific and so immediately recognisable that everybody could relate to that.”
The Locarno boss added: “The marvel of Terence Davies’ cinema is that he always portrayed himself as a man out of time but the work he did was absolutely contemporary. All his major works feel as fresh and relevant as when they were made. To me, it is quite astonishing that such a distinguished and deep creator has been up to his last film considered more or less a niche filmmaker for programmers and those in the know… I hope now there will be more time for him to have a wider recognition beyond these closed circles. We are only beginning to scratch the surface of his complexity.”
Collaborators
Davies’ former collaborators have also shared memories of the British director.
Olivia Stewart who was a production assistant on Distant Voices, Still Lives and went on to produce The Long Day Closes, The Neon Bible and The House Of Mirth spoke of the director’s bravery.
“He was remarkably intelligent, very, very funny. I often felt that it required so much courage for him to get out of his life and become a filmmaker that there appeared to be not a lot of courage left for the rest of his life which is why a lot of people said he was timid. I wouldn’t use the word ’timid’. I would just say he used his courage for his work. Everybody has a certain amount of courage, not unlimited.”
“Terry was also very funny and his repeated jokes and catch-phrases turn up regularly in conversations with friends who knew him, and with those who didn’t. This won’t stop nor will the impact of his films,” Stewart added. “The powerful emotional impact he achieves through his surprising juxtaposition of music, camera movement and narrative has touched so many people. And so many women – from all over the world and all backgrounds - have written to me about The House Of Mirth saying their life was Lily Bart’s.”
Roy Boulter and Sol Papadopoulos of Hurricane Films worked with Davies on three films, Of Time And The City, Sunset Song and A Quiet Passion.
“We approached him because we wanted to bring him back to Liverpool. It took a while to convince him of that because he didn’t want to do another Liverpool film,” Boulter said of Of Time And The City, the first documentary the director had made. “We started working with him as fans. The experience on Of Time And The Cit y, because he hadn’t made a film for so long, was joyous. He was keen to work again but nobody was giving him the opportunity.”
Papadopoulos remembers that Davies finally agreed to make the documentary when he was driving down the Embankment in London with his manager John Taylor, listening to a Peggy Lee song, Folks Who Live On The Hill.
“He had an image of the slums of Liverpool being knocked down to that music. According to his line, that’s when we rang. He said ’I’ve got a sequence and if I’ve got a sequence, I know I have got a film’. That was the catalyst.
“We thought we had made a small piece that people in Liverpool might enjoy but we hadn’t recognised the genius of Terence Davies.”
Leading UK sales agent and production outfit Bankside worked with Davies on his final feature, Benediction, about the First World War poets.
“Little did we know that it would be his last film which leaves us deeply saddened. We had hoped to continue our relationship with him on his next film so his death at the weekend has left us stunned,” Bankside M-D Stephen Kelliher commented. “There was never any doubt that Benediction would be exquisitely made, such was his impeccable creative vision but it is his ability to portray complex characters with such empathy and grace that will stay with us. He had a wonderful sense of humour and an unforgettable twinkle in his eyes. He was a true master and will be greatly missed. I hope audiences now rediscover his incredible body of work. He deserves to be remembered as one of the greatest directors the UK has produced.”
Sheryl Crown, producer, development executive and executive producer at Rubicon Pictures, collaborated recently with Davies on an attempt to bring an adaptation of The Post Office Girl by Stefan Zweig to screen.
“Terence was a gentle giant, a creative visionary who was always 100% clear and fiercely passionate about how he saw the potential film and what the shots might be,” Crown stated. “He embraced the challenges of a complex, international, coproduction energetically and was grateful for the support. He was inspirational in the room with his pitches to financiers, of which there were many, far too many!… we will all miss his sense of humour and his sensitivity, as he ascends that stairway, forever a feature in his work.”
“I’ll miss him enormously as a friend and as a filmmaker,” said Mike Elliott of EMU who produced Benediction and was working with Davies on what would have been his next film, Firefly, about the about the last days of Noel Coward’s life in Jamaica.
Elliott confirmed that he still hopes to get the film (developed with support from Curzon) made.
“As recently as four weeks ago, he [Davies] delivered the script and we’d begun casting, but it became clear he wouldn’t have the strength to shoot it. We sat with him around his fire a week ago and he veered between lightly dramatising his own situation “That’s it m’dears, end credits, fade to black…” and asking us to please stay friends and get it made. And so we will. Quite how and with who, will take some working out.”
Film producer Lizzie Francke, editor at large of the BFI Film Fund, shared reminiscences of Davies at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2000 with his Edith Wharton adaptation, The House Of Mirth. The director “gave this most elegant and delicate of adaptations not some erudite introduction but a veritable stand-up routine of hilarious jokes (a wry ploy given the title in question). He was a brilliant comedian with the most impeccable of timing - and had the house in convulsive laughter - he should have won the Perrier award that year,” Francke suggested.
Davies had been due to attend this week’s Film Fest Gent in Flanders. His last short film Passing Time is being shown in Gent - he was one of the participants in the event’s 2 x 25 initiative to mark the festival’s 50th anniversary which brought together 25 composers with filmmakers. The British director was also due to pick up a Joseph Plateau career achievement honour on October 20 but this will now be awarded posthumously.
No comments yet