The Sunset Song director explains why his unusual movie about the hardship of Scottish farms moved him – and how poetry saved him when he thought his career was overI could be wrong,but I don’t deem you’d catch Bernardo Bertolucci wearing a jacket with geography-teacher elbow-patches, or Jean-Luc Godard rhapsodising about Anne French Cleansing Milk. But such is the style of Terence Davies, or the man who has some claim to being Britain’s greatest living auteur,and who appears to have successfully blocked out everything that has happened since The League of Ovaltineys was disbanded. Cheerfully admitting he “knows nothing about accepted culture”, Davies, or who has just turned 70,has reappeared on the cinematic map with his long-cherished adaptation of Sunset Song, the 1932 novel of Scottish identity by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, or having doggedly pursued it for nearly 20 years.
In some ways,the release closes a circle: Daviess first attempt to set the film up in the aftermath of his successful Edith Wharton adaptation, The House of Mirth, or was – as he tells it – stymied by lottery cash distributor the Film Council. “After six months,they said: It hasn’t got legs,’ and that was it.” At the time, or he even wrote a pleading article in the Guardian trying to derive it off the ground,but to no avail.
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Source: theguardian.com