IT has taken 18 years of sweat, toil and ‘lots of tears’ to bring the new version of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song to the cinema.
Now, acclaimed film maker Terence Davies reveals why he never gave up on his labour of love.
“I’m pig headed of course,” he says, grinning of the project which stars Scots actors Kevin Guthrie and Peter Mullan alongside supermodel Agyness Deyn in the lead role.
“If I have a conviction about something it’s very hard for me not to do it.”
Liverpool-born Davies, whose dark autobiographical tale Distant Voices, Still Lives was described as ‘one of the most emotionally communicative British movies of the recent era’, explains why he was compelled to make Sunset Song.
“I’ve loved the story since I first saw the (BBC Scotland) TV adaptation in the early 1970s with Vivien Heilbron in the lead. I then read the book and was enthralled by it.
“Having gone on to become an actor and director, I’d since forgotten the detail of the TV series but I re-read the book and became convinced it had to be done as a film. I really do think it is one of the great unknown novels of the world.”
Davies loves to dissect the family dynamic via film, to tell stories of emotional and physical endurance (his own family featured an abusive father) and Sunset Song offers the perfect backdrop from which to explore these themes.
The 1932 novel tells of a family struggling to make a living in north east Scotland leading up to the First World War and Chris Guthrie is a clever young woman forced to choose between education and loyalty to the land. But she has to cope with her mother’s suicide, the death of twin siblings, her brother’s emigration and an incestuous father. And a violent husband.
Certainly not a cosy storyline with which to persuade producers to put up cash?
“Yes, there were people who were really unpleasant about the film, saying ‘It hasn’t got legs’,” says the director, who made the acclaimed House of Mirth starring Gillian Anderson. “But that’s a really cruel thing to say and that comment still hurts me today.”
The script, written in 2003, lay in a drawer for 10 years. No one wanted to know until Davies’ career was revived with documentary Of Time and the City and film The Deep Blue Sea.
“I then went back to my original producer and he said he wanted to do it but there was still a very stressful time in trying to get all the money, meantime I had a cast and crew who were so fantastic and eager and prepared.”
Remarkably the Liverpool-born auteur had never heard of Agyness Deyn when she arrived to audition. “Modelling is not a part of popular culture I know anything about. But when she came in I knew we had found our Chris. She’s a real talent and she’s lovely, and not at all corrupted by fame. And Kevin Guthrie and Peter Mullan too were wonderful.”
Sunset Song is a harrowing tale, and it’s often been described as bleak, tragic and nihilistic. But Terence Davies doesn’t see it like that at all.
“I don’t think it’s nihilistic. Yes, the central character has a hard passage through life, but what is wonderful about it is that people carry on despite those things. And it’s also a tale of forgiveness, the acceptance of suffering and forgiving it. And it makes you cry at the end with joy. And that’s not nihilistic at all.”
•Sunset Song is released on December 4.
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