Director looks to past to get ahead
British writer/director Terence Davies seems to have a preferred milieu in his films. Four of his six features are set in the 1940s and ’50s; two more reach back to the early 1900s. A Quiet Passion, about the life of Emily Dickinson, pushes the envelope a little further, chronicling the famous poet, who died in 1886.
“I don’t choose to stay in the past,” Davies remarks at the Toronto International Film Festival, where A Quiet Passion had its North American premiere. “But the things that I’ve warmed to and made films about are in the past. And I do think there’s a part of me that feels safest there.”
Davies often describes himself as a homebody, a trait that reached a kind of zenith in Dickinson. Though she left behind a huge body of work — nearly 1,800 poems, and volumes of correspondence — she rarely travelled more than a few kilometres from her home in Amherst, Mass., and in her later years lived as a virtual recluse.
“It doesn’t matter that she doesn’t go anywhere,” says Davies, pointing out that family can provide all the drama a life requires. “And even in a big family you can be lonely. I’m the youngest of 10 so I know what that’s like. I think the fact that she withdrew from the world heightened her poetry.”
To play Dickinson, Davies called on actress Cynthia Nixon, still best remembered for six seasons of Sex and the City. He says he never pictured anyone else in the part. But she was astonished, remembering an audition for him years earlier, for a film that never came together.
“He directed me so much in that audition that I could hardly get a line out; he would just stop me. I walked out of the audition thinking, ‘I didn’t do anything right,’ and then I didn’t hear from him for a number of years, and then he’d written a script for me where I play Emily Dickinson.” She dissolves into laughter at the memory. “It was baffling.”
Nixon, 51 plays Dickinson from young adulthood to her death at 55 of Bright’s Disease, a kidney ailment.
“One of the most exciting things to do is to show how a character changes,” she says. “And I think she changes an awful lot.”
Early scenes feature a “more rapturous, younger, in-love-with-nature Emily,” but Nixon found she became increasingly interested in the older, sometimes prickly Dickinson.
“I think it’s really brave of Terence that he gives her due as an artist and as a person. Her last years were very painful, and he doesn’t shy away from that. It’s emblematic of Terence’s films that it’s not shot in soft focus with doilies around.”