The supreme rhapsodist of contemporary British cinema, Terence Davies began his career by transmitting his own experiences of growing up gay in the Liverpool of the 1950s and ’60s onto film, weaving pain, nostalgia, domestic strife, cinema love, Catholic guilt, and repressed desire into exquisitely evocative masterpieces like THE TERENCE DAVIES TRILOGY (comprising the shorts CHILDREN, MADONNA AND CHILD, and DEATH AND TRANSFIGURATION); DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES; and THE LONG DAY CLOSES, which eschewed traditional narrative structure in favor of mood and sense-memory impressionism. Davies’s acute emotional sensitivity remains no less piercing when applied to stories of women colliding against the social forces of their time, as seen in the sublime romantic drama THE DEEP BLUE SEA and the stirring Emily Dickinson biography A QUIET PASSION, which feature revelatory performances from Rachel Weisz and Cynthia Nixon respectively.
This interview with director Terence Davies was recorded in 2022.
Directed by Terence Davies • 1976 • United Kingdom
Starring Phillip Mawdsley, Robin Hooper, Nick Stringer
In the first film of Terence Davies’s autobiographical trilogy of shorts, his alter ego Robert Tucker reflects on his youth, remembering the bullying he experienced in his rigid Catholic sch...
Directed by Terence Davies • 1980 • United Kingdom
Starring Terry O’Sullivan, Sheila Raynor, Paul Barber
In the second film of Terence Davies’s autobiographical trilogy of shorts, his alter ego Robert Tucker works an unsatisfying office job, seeking out sexual encounters while being tormented by...
Directed by Terence Davies • 1983 • United Kingdom
Starring Wilfrid Brambell, Terry O’Sullivan, Iain Munro
In the third film of Terence Davies’s autobiographical trilogy of shorts, his alter ego Robert Tucker looks back on the death of his mother while facing his own mortality. Suffused with the...
Directed by Terence Davies • 1988 • United Kingdom, Germany
Starring Freda Dowie, Pete Postlethwaite, Angela Walsh
Winner of the International Critics’ Prize at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival, Terence Davies’s revelatory feature debut heralded the arrival of one of Britain’s finest filmmaking tal...
Directed by Terence Davies • 1992 • United Kingdom
Starring Leigh McCormack, Marjorie Yates, Anthony Watson
THE LONG DAY CLOSES is the most gloriously cinematic expression of the unique sensibility of Terence Davies, widely celebrated as Britain’s greatest living filmmaker. Suffused with both en...
Directed by Terence Davies • 1995 • United Kingdom, Spain
Starring Jacob Tierney, Drake Bell, Gena Rowlands
Terence Davies’s achingly bittersweet adaptation of the novel by John Kennedy Toole (written when the author was just sixteen years old) evokes the the American South of the 1940s, where t...
Directed by Terence Davies • 2008 • United Kingdom
British master Terence Davies weaves a sublime visual poem about his life in Liverpool from 1945 to 1973. A deeply personal portrait of the city beyond The Beatles and its football clubs, OF TIME AND THE CITY transports us to the working-class w...
Directed by Terence Davies • 2011 • United Kingdom, United States
Starring Rachel Weisz, Tom Hiddleston, Simon Russell Beale
Master chronicler of postwar England Terence Davies directs this ravishing adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play about a woman whose overpowering love threatens her w...
Directed by Terence Davies • 2015 • United Kingdom
Starring Agyness Deyn, Peter Mullan, Kevin Guthrie
SUNSET SONG is an intimate epic of hope, tragedy, and love at the dawning of World War I. Acclaimed British auteur Terence Davies brings gritty poetic realism to the novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbo...
Directed by Terence Davies • 2016 • United Kingdom, United States
Starring Cynthia Nixon, Jennifer Ehle, Keith Carradine
Cynthia Nixon delivers a triumphant performance as Emily Dickinson, embodying the wit, intellectual independence, and pathos of the poet whose genius only came to be recognize...
