“I have been rather brutal with the text”: behind the scenes on Terence Davies’s art of adaptation

Terence Davies established himself as one of British cinema’s most individual new talents through a remarkable series of autobiographies: a trilogy of short films (1976 to 1983) followed by his first two features, Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992). Each was set in his native Liverpool, among characters representing his real-life family — most significantly, his beloved mother, who appears in all five. 

Following this cycle of deeply personal films, the transition to the next stage of his career was practically seamless. At the Cannes premiere of The Long Day Closes, Davies was handed a copy of John Kennedy Toole’s first novel, The Neon Bible; in 1995, it would become the first of his four adaptations, followed by The House of Mirth (2000), The Deep Blue Sea (2011) and Sunset Song (2015).

Despite the enduring acclaim of his Liverpudlian films, it was only with his adaptations that Davies confidently declared he had made his first ‘mature’ work. The reasons behind this quixotic assessment are partly to be found among his personal archives, now held by Edge Hill University in Ormskirk, West Lancashire. 

Davies often spoke of his early filmmaking as largely instinctive, his most arresting imagery appearing more or less as he saw it in his own memory. It was therefore only when it came to adaptation that he had to marshal the techniques he’d already honed to near-perfection, and apply them deliberately to stories by other writers.

Instead of being their sole authority, Davies now had to argue the merits of his interpretations with funders and producers, and would on rare occasions accept their own suggestions in turn, provided they honoured the original material. 

Davies was remarkably faithful to his authors: the more he loved their work, the more his screenplays reflected their original text and construction. Even when obliged to add to them, his talent for mimicry was borne out by critics like those who expressed delight at so much of novelist Edith Wharton’s witty dialogue being heard throughout his version of The House of Mirth, little realising that several of the examples they quoted were entirely Davies’s invention.

The exception to the rule was Terence Rattigan’s play The Deep Blue Sea, which was accepted as a quasi-commission, and for which Davies was encouraged to make whatever interpretive changes he thought were necessary. This latitude may well have been granted in the knowledge that there were numerous screen versions of The Deep Blue Sea already in circulation, beginning in 1955 with an aggressively opened-out film that Davies deemed “unwatchable”. 

By contrast, it had been his enraptured 1971 viewing of the BBC’s landmark adaptation of Sunset Song that inspired him to film his own version of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s classic Scottish novel over 40 years later.

Davies’s archives reveal that he also faced competition from his contemporaries: when he began work on The Neon Bible, one of the first things he received from his new production colleagues was a second draft screenplay they’d already commissioned. Although given their blessing to ultimately ignore it and write his own, he had a far less collaborative relationship with the rival production also racing to film The House of Mirth: in planning since 1990, it boasted a formidable creative team in director John Schlesinger, screenwriters Ken Russell and Frederic Raphael, and producer Dustin Hoffman. In the end, Davies only just managed to edge ahead with his version while his opponents were endlessly mired in development hell.

But several of Davies’s other planned adaptations were to meet similar fates: scattered among his archives are a wealth of materials from his long-gestating film of Richard McCann’s cycle of linked short stories, Mother of Sorrows, which sadly never reached the screen. Even Sunset Song had appeared similarly doomed, as an abandoned 2003 shooting schedule attests to. After the film’s funding was suddenly withdrawn, allegedly due to its lack of international viability, the setback meant it would be well over a decade until Davies was finally able to complete it.

His dogged determination in making his adaptations was just one sign of their being no less personal to him than his autobiographies; another indicator can be found in the unifying theme of the main character often tragically out of step with her time. Davies was a rare filmmaker for whom all his narrative features were period pieces, and all the central figures in his later films are at the mercy of the past. 

In his four adaptations, these characters are women, albeit women from opposite ends of various social and geographical spectra. But each is a mirror for the others in her single-minded determination that a better life lies waiting somewhere just beyond her reach. They are all women who would fare better in a more understanding modern present than in the brutally insular communities and families in which their authors fated them to live – something the abused, bullied and closeted Davies felt keenly throughout his childhood.

Even apart from their subject matter, among his adaptations Davies found numerous outlets for his individual style. The most instantly recognisable is his deep affinity for music, and specifically his uncanny ability to select the perfect recorded accompaniments to his visuals. His archives even document the exact moment he heard Radio 3 broadcast ‘Hard Times Come Again No More’, the haunting Stephen Foster song which would ultimately play out over The Neon Bible’s heartbreaking climax.

But perhaps the most astonishing revelation to come from Davies’s archives so far appears in The House of Mirth, the film he singled out as his first mature work, and one widely assumed to be his first totally impersonal film. Its breathtaking central montage, bridging the two halves of Edith Wharton’s original novel, was its most praised sequence, with critic Alexander Walker deeming it “one of the most beautiful passages of narrative transition I’ve ever seen.” 

Over three minutes, it transports the viewer from empty New York estates to the shimmering waters of Monte Carlo, accompanied by a Mozart aria wishing a peaceful voyage to seagoing travellers. But Davies’s carefully annotated script reveals that the sequence was written in February 1997: the month in which his mother, Helen Davies, was dying. In this context, it is impossible to see (or hear) the sequence as anything other than a heartfelt envoi for the woman who, as Davies always acknowledged, was by far the most important person in his life.

Having followed his autobiographical films with this quartet of literary adaptations, Davies’s final features would be a synthesis of the two styles, telling the life stories of two favourite poets: Emily Dickinson (A Quiet Passion, 2016) and Siegfried Sassoon (Benediction, 2021). While his preoccupation with protagonists out of key with their times endured, unlike the caged heroines of his adaptations, Dickinson and Sassoon each had the saving grace of their poetry, their inner creative lives granting fleeting respite from times of repression and war. 

It was, as ever, a deeply personal theme for Davies, a sensitive writer and director who felt frequently ill-matched with the world around him, but whose singular salvation lay in his beautiful and brilliant films.

Transcript:

Page 98

21/03/97

Dissolve to:

Scene 162. Interior. Bellomont. Day.

Soundtrack. Bertha Dorset (voiceover): “Good.  You’ll come then?”

Lily Bart (voiceover): “Yes - goodbye.”

Feb. ‘97

The interior of the house is swathed in dust sheets and covered up.

Empty.

The weather outside grey with squally rain.

Pan and track (left to right) to window overlooking the terrace.

Dissolve to:

Scene 163. Exterior. Bellomont. Day.

Shot of terrace and lawn.

Pan and track (left to right) down the lawn past the deserted tennis courts, down through the wet trees to the sea, empty except for some boats bobbing on the grey, rain-swept water.

Soundtrack. The trio from Act I, Così fan tutte.

“Soave sia il vento -” (“May the wind be gentle”)

Start tracking across the surface of the grey water which is heaving and stormy, lashed with rain -

Transcript:

Dear Sean,

Please find attached the first draft of The Deep Blue Sea.

As you will see I have been rather brutal with the text and I just wanted to explain.

There would have been two ways to treat the material.

1. Camera as omniscient narrator.
   Or;
2. The piece from the main protagonist’s viewpoint.

I felt instinctively it should be the latter for it is primarily Hester’s story. Telling the story from her POV, therefore, restricts the amount of material/information that is usable. We cannot have scenes to which Hester is not privy or scenes in which she does not appear.

As a lot of the first act is exposition this had to be drastically curtailed. It is much more cinematic to show something rather than have someone tell you about it.

As Hitchcock, allegedly, said “If the sound and the image are doing the same thing, one of them is redundant.”

The characters of Mrs. Elton and the Welches (whose only function, it seems to me, is to “explain” past history) seem to me to be weak. I have been savage with these and cut them down to the bare minimum.

Miller is intriguing but also quite insubstantial. I’ve done the same with him.

Obviously, this first draft is too short. My process is to get the first draft out of the way quickly so that there is a foundation to build on. Then the second draft is written – after I’ve been given notes – then I do the final polish to that draft.

I would expect notes from both yourself and The Rattigan Trust. These notes may or may not decide what is excised from this first draft and what material (including material initially deleted) should go back into the screenplay and any other ideas about opening the play out.

Transcript:

”THE SONG OF THE EARTH”

It is thirty years ago now.

When the Sunday night serial on BBC1 went out in ancient Black & White.

“Sunset Song” by Lewis Grassic Gibbon was one of them and its grandeur has stayed with me.

It is a dark and brooding novel about the Scottish peasantry, about the land in general and one family — The Guthries — in particular.

They are subsistence farmers extracting a meagre living from the earth.

It is a novel about the power and cruelty of both family and Nature, about the enduring presence of the land and the courage of the human spirit in the face of hardship.

Against this background — but of equal stature — is the story of the daughter of the family, Chris Guthrie and her evolution from schoolgirl to wife to mother to widow then finally becoming a symbol for Scotland itself.

The novel is both symbolic and rhapsodic.

It is a work of epic intimacy set before, during and after The Great War.

Yet it is delicate.

A filigree of the music of the seasons together with the more modest music of pipes and accordion, played at weddings with the Scottish voices singing the melancholy airs of the old times — “THE FLOWERS OF THE FOREST” and “AULD ROBIN”; songs to pull the heartstrings, to make you remember the long-dead, making you wish for the longed-for happiness which we all need — content and secure in the knowledge that we will never die…for we are young and in our prime.

But time is cruel and so is the land which gives life its harsh beauty, as well as its moments of epiphany beside the lamp or in the firelight at gloaming.

The song is yours and mine, of all who feel and have suffered or been happy.  It is the song heard with quiet courage in the face of death.  Or life.

But Chris has a deeper insight, an innate wisdom.  Chris sings the Song of the Earth for humanity, a rhapsody for us all as she charts the eternal cycle of birth, marriage and death. As the song explores the timeless mysteries of land, home and family — this last one being the greatest mystery of all.  For the family contains all our greatest ecstasies and all our cherished terrors.

The book is suffused with a lyrical melancholy, a quiet threnody for the mystery of life…for life is a mystery contained within an enigma.

How can we bear time or subdue nature?

We cannot.

We can only endure.

At the end of the work a remembrance parade and service is held in an attempt to heal all suffering.

At the end of this great work time and the land endure beyond war, beyond human suffering even beyond life itself.

It is a story which deserves to be told.

Love, Sex, Religion, Death: The Complete Films of Terence Davies runs at BFI Southbank in October and November.

The House of Mirth is back in cinemas from 24 October.

Dear Bud: The Creative Mind of Terence Davies is a free exhibition of the Terence Davies archive, running from 1 to 30 November at BFI Southbank.

Explore the Terence Davies collection on BFI Player.