Meet him and it hits you just how fully he has reconstructed his traumas on screen. “Especially when it masks tragedy.” He would know. Jeremy Irvine as a withering Ivor Novello and Simon Russell Beale as Robbie Ross (Oscar Wilde’s former ally) are among the notables trading barbs and throwing shade. But as the dressage line makes clear, the picture is also disarmingly funny in places, conveying the prickly vitality of Sassoon and the men in his orbit. “You can get that from dressage but without the guilt,” says his son.Ĭatholicism, homosexuality, poetry, torment: these are a few of Davies’ favourite things. Peter Capaldi takes over the role in Sassoon’s vinegary dotage, when he is unhappily married and has converted to Catholicism in search of something constant. Jack Lowden plays him as a young man, drifting from one gay relationship to another after his fellow poet Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson), whom he befriended when they were both convalescing at Craiglockhart war hospital, is sent back into battle, and to his death. His ninth feature, Benediction, drops anchor at two points in the life of the first world war poet Siegfried Sassoon. “Being in the past makes me feel safe because I understand that world,” he says. Photograph: Laurence Cendrowicz/Vertigo ReleasingĪside from the trilogy of autobiographical shorts (Children, Madonna and Child, Death and Transfiguration) that announced him as a rigorous, poetic film-maker in the early 1980s, he has never directed anything with a contemporary setting. Humour is so beguiling … Davies on the set of Benediction. I shall just be like one of those wonderful women in 50s British cinema: I’ll be terribly brave, and I’ll call myself Muriel.” “Considering I’m the runt of 10, I’ve not been too bad where health is concerned. I thought: ‘Blimey, I’m heavy!’” He has decided to count his blessings today. “Having a fall reminds you of your mortality,” he sighs. Four days earlier, he tripped and fell at home, dislocated his shoulder, and spent 13 hours in the local A&E department. “I’m not able to shave,” he explains, indicating his right arm hanging limply at his side. On his face are the bristly beginnings of frost-white facial hair.
Rising from an armchair, Davies is wearing a light blue shirt, blue jeans, grey socks and slippers. He is 76 now but has given the impression of being old since the day he was born. It is likely that he popped out of the womb that way, and that his first words took the form of rhapsodies about Bruckner or the Shipping Forecast. Davies’ burly manager, John, shows me in, but the first glimpse I get of the man himself is in oils on the living room wall: a large portrait, painted by a neighbour, shows the bespectacled director of Distant Voices, Still Lives looking ivory-haired, pink-faced and pensive.
T he door of Terence Davies’s 18th-century cottage is ajar when I arrive, the afternoon sun spilling into the hallway from the village green.