‘He changed my life’: Tom Hiddleston, Rachel Weisz and more on Terence Davies
‘He grew in passion and tears welled in his eyes’ - Tom Hiddleston, The Deep Blue Sea, 2011
I have never met or worked with anyone like Terence. His mind was like a poet’s. He saw poetry everywhere: in the composition or movement of a shot; in a line reading; in the Shipping Forecast. He would often do his own rendition, in his unmistakably sonorous voice, with a twinkle in his eye: “Fair Isle / Cromarty / Forties … south-west veering west, five to seven … showers, moderate or good … with some fog banks.” Everyone laughed. Everyone loved it.
I remember once on set, while directing a scene between Rachel Weisz and I, between takes he suddenly started quoting a long passage from Little Gidding, the fourth of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets. As he recited the poem, completely by heart, he grew in passion and tears started to well in his eyes. It was almost as if Eliot’s poem was for him a key – or a chord – within which he wanted us to play the scene. The poem and his depth of feeling were our cue for the right territory and temperature. He created an atmosphere and our performances were to follow. He was a man of great passion and sensitivity.
I’ll never forget the first time I saw Distant Voices, Still Lives. I never lived in the past he evoked or recreated, but I knew instinctively that it was totally authentic. It knocked me for six. Women and men singing – unaccompanied, often to accompany themselves, in joy or in pain – alone or in the pub, simply for the pleasure of singing. He was such a close, honest observer of his own childhood, and his past.
He wasn’t trying to be anyone else. He was just him. A rare, deep artist. We will miss him.
Extract taken from the Gurdian article by Catherine Shoard, Wed 11 Oct 2023
