Weather gods smile on Sunset shoot
Veteran British director Terence Davies can’t praise Canterbury’s ‘‘light’’ highly enough.
The 70-year-old filmmaker, known for sumptuous-looking dramas like The Deep Blue Sea and The Long Day Closes, spent around three weeks on the mainland two summers ago filming scenes for his adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s classic 1932 Scottish novel Sunset Song. Davies, currently in the North Island supporting the screenings of it and his Emily Dickenson biopic A Quiet Passion at the New Zealand Film Festival, says he was lured here by the New Zealand government’s ‘‘generous tax credits’’ and the promise of summer weather.
‘‘We had to have it for the film and you can’t rely on that in Scotland – it rains a lot.’’
The region was experiencing the worst storms in half-a-century just before he arrived. ‘‘I thought, ‘oh, god, we’ve come all this way. I could have got all of that for free’. Luckily, the weather broke and it was glorious, glorious sunshine.’’
Davies says that while scouting locations, he was impressed with the region’s diversity. ‘‘You go through the Canadian rockies, the English home counties and Scotland in just a short distance. The country is spectacular. And the light is so wonderful.’’
Starring Peter Mullan, Kevin Guthrie and Scottish model Agyness Deyn, Sunset Song is the World War I-eve story of Aberdeenshire farm girl Chris Guthrie’s (Deyn) search for independence against the odds.
Davies has spent almost two decades trying to bring his vision of the much-loved novel to life. He describes the treatment of it early on by Britain’s former film funding body the UK Film Council as ‘‘little short of scandalous’’. ‘‘I was told after a six month delay that it just had ‘no legs’, so that was it.’’
The idea was revived years later, with assistance from the British Film Institute, but with a budget that made life more than a little stressful for Davies. ‘‘It was a constant worry and a constant strain. But, somehow the gods seemed to have smiled on us in the end.’’
Davies says it was a 1971 BBC Scotland adaptation (notable also for being that company’s first colour production and containing its first nude scene) that introduced him to the tale.‘‘It is difficult to read because it’s in the Doric dialect, but it is a great, great novel.’’
He recalls a ‘‘lovely moment’’ at last year’s London Film Festival when a woman stood up at a Q&A after a screening of his film and began by saying, ‘‘this is not a question’’. ‘‘I instantly knew who it was. I said, ‘you’re Vivien Heilbron [the actress who played Chris Guthrie in the TV series] aren’t you? Your voice hasn’t changed. You don’t know what you did for me’. It was lovely to be able to introduce her to the audience and everybody applauded her.’’
Currently casting and raising money for an adaptation of Richard McCann’s Mother of Sorrows and researching for a biopic of English poet Siegfried Sassoon, Davies says he would love to return to New Zealand with another project ‘‘I had a wonderful time shooting those sequences here, but I really didn’t have time to do much else, which I’d like to put right sometime.
Sunset Song (M) is screening as part of the New Zealand International Film Festival. For information and session times, see nziff.co.nz