M A S T E R C L A S S

ΟΣΤΗΡΙΚΤΗΣ ΜΕΤΑΚΙΝΗΣΗΣ M A S T E R C L A S S 49o ΦΕΣΤΙΒΑΛ ΚΙΝΗΜΑΤΟΓΡΑΦΟΥ ΘΕΣΣΑΛΟΝΙΚΗΣ 49th THESSALONIKI INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL T E R E N C E 14-23.11.2008 www.filmfestival.gr ΕΠΙΣΗΜΟΣ ΧΟΡΗΓΟΣ ΧΟΡΗΓΟΣ ΕΠΙΚΟΙΝΩΝΙΑΣ ΜΕΓΑΣ ΧΟΡΗΓΟΣ ΥΠΟΥΡΓΕΙΟ ΜΑΚΕΔΟΝΙΑΣ ΘΡΑΚΗΣ ΥΠΟΥΡΓΕΙΟ ΑΝΑΠΤΥΞΗΣ ΧΟΡΗΓΟΣ ΒΡΑΒΕΙΩΝ ΚΟΙΝΟΥ YΠΟΣΤΗΡΙΚΤΗΣ ΑΕΡΟΜΕΤΑΦΟΡΩΝ D A V I E S Υ.Π.Α. ΥΠΟΣΤΗΡΙΚΤΗΣ BUSINESS ΥΠΟΣΤΗΡΙΚΤΗΣ ΙΑΤΡΙΚΗΣ ΠΕΡΙΘΑΛΨΗΣ ΧΟΡΗΓΟΙ ΕΠΙΚΟΙΝΩΝΙΑΣ 49o ΦΕΣΤΙΒΑΛ ΚΙΝΗΜΑΤΟΓΡΑΦΟΥ ΘΕΣΣΑΛΟΝΙΚΗΣ 49th THESSALONIKI INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 14-23.11.2008 www.filmfestival.gr

M A S T E R C L A S S E S 4 9 t h T H E S S A L O N I K I I N T E R N A T I O N A L F I L M F E S T I V A L Λευτέρης Αδαμίδης Καλημέρα. Καλώς ήρθατε στο 49ο Φεστιβάλ Κινηματογράφου Θεσσαλονίκης και στις «Ημέρες Ανεξαρτησίας». Ένα από τα σημαντικότερα αφιερώματα της φετινής χρονιάς και ένας από τους πιο διακεκριμένους επισκέπτες μας είναι ο άνθρωπος που βρίσκεται δίπλα μου, ο κύριος. Το masterclass που θα παρακολουθήσετε σε λίγο αποτελεί την κορύφωση αυτού του αφιερώματος. Δεν θα πω πολλά. Θα είναι καθαρά εισαγωγική η παρουσία μου, να σας γνωρίσω τους κυρίους που βρίσκονται δίπλα μου. Το masterclass θα συντονίσει ένας επίσης διακεκριμένος Βρετανός κριτικός και πολύ καλός φίλος του Φεστιβάλ, ο κύριος. Πολλοί ίσως τον ξέρετε από τα γραπτά του στο Time Out ή από τις μονογραφίες του. Είναι επίσης προγραμματιστής στο National Film Theatre του British Film Institute. Οι δυο τους, πρέπει να πω, είναι φίλοι πάρα πολλά χρόνια. Ο κύριος Andrew είναι ένας από τους θερμότερους υποστηρικτές και γνώστες του έργου του κυρίου Davies. Συμμετείχε μάλιστα με ένα εξαιρετικό κείμενο και στην έκδοση του Φεστιβάλ Κινηματογράφου Θεσσαλονίκης και θα ήθελα να τον ευχαριστήσω και γι αυτό. Δεν θέλω να πω τίποτα παραπάνω. Οι δυο τους κάνουν αυτό το masterclass με πολύ μεγάλη επιτυχία. Σας αφήνω, λοιπόν, στα χέρια τους και ελπίζω να περάσετε καλά. Γεια σας. Thank you very much. Thank you for your very kind words. It s a great honor for me to be doing this. I do it in London fairly frequently, not always with Terence, but it s really nice to do it here in Thessaloniki to give something back to the Festival that has given a lot to me in the last few years. And, of course, it s a great pleasure to be sitting here with Terence whom I ve known for quite a few years. We first spoke just after the trilogy was released in Britain when he rang me up to thank me for my review. I think he liked the review because I found moments of humor in the film which some of the other critics, even though they thought it was wonderful, didn t think it was quite as funny as I did. The first time we met was when I interviewed him for Distant Voices, Still Lives. When I reviewed that film, which is -I suppose 20 years ago- I said it was probably the finest British film since the heyday of Michael Powell or Alfred Hitchcock and I still stand by that decision. That s why I am here today. I ve been consistent in saying for many years now that I think Terence is the finest living British filmmaker. We have great filmmakers like Ken Loach and Mike Lee and others and it s impertinent really for me to do any sort of ordering for them in terms of quality, but I do think that Terence s work makes him stand out in a way that nobody else does in Britain. He s one of the world s great filmmakers and the reason for this is that he absolutely thinks in terms of cinema. He understands cinema in a way that very few people do and it s quite interesting actually; I always thought there was nobody else making films quite like Terence s and I still think that, but yesterday I actually realized there is somebody who makes films that have a lot in common with, but are quite different from Terence. And that s Theo Angelopoulos, because both filmmakers are concerned with emotion and memory and the effects of time. Both of them tend to use quite long takes. Both of them have a really original way of constructing stories and constructing shots; sometimes one shot will take in several time periods. Both of them were inspired by their love for Hollywood cinema and classical cinema, but ended up making things very different from that cinema, although the influences sometimes come through. Terence has made films that are very personal, partly because sometimes they are inspired by his own life or his own emotions, sometimes because they are based on the experiences of his family. And always, even if he s adapting somebody else s work, he only makes the film if he feels very personally involved in the subject matter and feels that he can bring something new to it. And we ll be seeing some examples of that later on. He s here partly for a retrospective and partly because of his new film Of Time and the City. There was a ridiculously long period between The House of Mirth and Of Time and the City ; I think it was eight years. This is not because of any laziness on Terence s part. It s because of the idiocy of film funding in Britain today. Fortunately, things happened a couple of years ago and somebody

4 9 ο Φ Ε Σ Τ Ι Β Α Λ Κ Ι Ν Η Μ Α Τ Ο Γ Ρ Α Φ Ο Υ Θ Ε Σ Σ Α Λ Ο Ν Ι Κ Η Σ M A S T E R C L A S S E S offered him a little bit of money. A very little bit of money to make a film and he responded with a film that has been a huge success. It played in a special screening in Cannes and since then it s been invited to I don t know how many festivals; I think it s something like 80 festivals. It recently opened in Britain to almost universally rave reviews and it s done very well and the surprising thing about the film is that it has traveled so widely and been received so warmly around the world, given that it s based partly on his own memories. It was supposed to be about Liverpool and it s a very British film, but it obviously touches people in a very broad way. I m going to stop talking now and say thank you, Terence, for coming to Thessaloniki on behalf of the audience and thank you for allowing me to do this with you here today. Thank you. Actually, what I d like to do at this stage is simply show the first clip, which is from Madonna and Child, which is the second film in the trilogy that Terence made. We ll talk about it in a minute, it is a film that is sort of an autobiography, although Terence made it when he was still rather young. The first film is about childhood, the second is about middle age and the last film is about old age. So, it s an autobiography that is sort of prophesying things perhaps. I don t mean to say anything more at this stage, so let s see the clip. (screening) When I was selecting the clips, I did ask Lefteris whether I should choose that one because it is possibly offensive to some people. It s extremely rude. I don t know why it wasn t subtitled but in case you didn t realize, the telephone caller was asking to have his genitals tattooed and to put that against choral music and shots of a church is obviously not exactly a provocation but it could be seen by some as blasphemous or offensive or whatever. Now, can you talk about how that scene came about, because your trilogy is sort of autobiographical but it s not autobiographical to the letter, and I think this scene illustrates that quite well? Watching it is very odd because the church was where I worshiped for seventeen years and I worked in the office in which it was shot. And it brings back a lot of memories because I was doing a job that I absolutely detested but I did it for the money. I was an unqualified accountant. Seeing it just brings back all the memories, the sheer drudgery of doing this job I really detested. The conversation I actually overheard. I was going to see my brother and I got on the wrong bus and when I got off the bus I was outside the tattooist and two lads were actually talking about this. I changed the dialogue a little, so it s a phone call rather than a conversation, but that actually was a conversation I overheard and usually I m pretty good at remembering. If I say it to myself three times, I actually remember and most of it is actually accurate. I just adjusted it a little about the money; every time he asks the tattooist, he says, I will charge more which seems to me the right dramatic thing to do. But what it does bring back, which is extremely painful, was constantly going to confession every Saturday and desperately wanting to be forgiven for being there. Nothing happened. And I prayed many times at that altar. I was so desperate to just be made ordinary and nothing came from God at all. That ruined my teenage years. And being in a job that I detested was such drudgery, I can t tell you. And this brings back all those memories and to me, that sequence has never been funny. It s always been tremendously sad and not because of what he s actually asking for. That actually is irrelevant. It s the desperation of someone dreadfully lonely and I ve known that. I ve known that despair and it s awful. It s awful; such an abyss that you think you ll never ever get away from it. So, it brings back a lot of painful memories, very painful memories.

M A S T E R C L A S S E S 4 9 t h T H E S S A L O N I K I I N T E R N A T I O N A L F I L M F E S T I V A L I hope the rest of the clips don t have that effect. I m sure they will. I ve got some Valium here with me. But this trilogy is a kind of autobiography. Can you discuss how it came about? Because you didn t want to be a cleric, a clerk, sorry, -you didn t want to be a cleric either I suppose- at a point you did a bit of acting, I think you went to drama school but you always loved film. What was it that made you want to make your own film, or even to write your own film? Well, I don t know where the first one came from. What I did to keep myself sane is that I used to go to two drama classes every week in one of the institutes in Liverpool. I had one drama class on Thursday and one on Friday and on a Tuesday the little writers club met and I went there. This sort of saved my sanity. And eventually I got into the drama school in the Midlands, not in London. And I wrote the first part of the trilogy, which is called Children. I sent it to everyone in the country and everyone turned it down. I didn t know how to write a film; I just wrote it as I saw it and heard it. I thought it couldn t be any good. When I was in drama school, I could afford to go home once every three weeks because I was on a very small grant. And I went home on this particular Friday and there was something on the BBC about the British Film Institute production board, so off I sent my script. Six months later, Mamoun Hassan, who was running the BBC then, said: come down and see me in London. So, I went down to London and he said: you have 8,500 pounds, not a penny more; you will direct. I said: I ve never directed before. Now s your chance, he said. And we got the money and I was allowed to have one term off from drama school and, apart from the cameraman, the crew loved the script. They loved the way I directed and they told me every day. We d set up shots and they would go Oh! and after three weeks I ended up with all the 16mm spaghetti and we put it together and it was just so boring, I can t tell you. And I went back to the production board. By this time Peter Sainsbury ran the BBC and I said: this is just awful; I ve just wasted 8,500 pounds, which in the early 70s was a lot of money. And he said: no, there is a film in there. But I said: I don t know what it is, Peter. He said: I ll find someone for you. And he found this lovely editor called Sarah Ellis and we began looking through it and she was asking: what did you mean by this scene? And I d tell her: could we cut it like this? There was one scene at the end which is a series of pullouts and mixes from a child by the window crying and you pull out and come back and pull out and she said: I really don t think this works. I said: Sarah, could we just have a test? Could we just send it to the laboratory and have a test? So, she said: okay, we ll do that. And it came back and we looked at it and she said: you were right. It works. And I was so grateful. I wanted to adopt her legally. And then we cut it and finished it and I had to go back to drama school to finish my second year, because I had a grant and in those days in England if you didn t complete your course you had to repay your whole grant. I couldn t afford that. So, I went back to drama school and I kept on thinking about it and I thought it was such an awful experience. But one thing that kept on recurring to me was the first time I looked through the camera. I never even had a stills camera before that and the thrill of looking down and seeing the frame was so fabulous because of what it excludes. That I didn t understand. I sort of felt that. And I thought: Oh, I d love to do another one, but do I dare? I applied for film school but didn t get in and I applied a second time and I got in on the second occasion. By this time, I realized it was a trilogy. I don t know why. I just decided my graduation film would be Madonna and Child. And we were cutting it. It was a rough cut when Alexander Mac Kendrick came to teach to school and he d made Sweet Smell of Success and The Ladykillers, a wonderful teacher.

4 9 ο Φ Ε Σ Τ Ι Β Α Λ Κ Ι Ν Η Μ Α Τ Ο Γ Ρ Α Φ Ο Υ Θ Ε Σ Σ Α Λ Ο Ν Ι Κ Η Σ M A S T E R C L A S S E S So, he came to see the rough cut and he was coming out of the cutting room and someone asked him: what have you been to see, Mr. Mac Kendrick? He said: a rough cut of Madonna and Child and they said It s a gay movie, isn t it? and he said: not at the moment. So I finished it as a graduation film and we showed our graduation films in London and one of the governors stood up afterwards and said: this film should never have been made. So, after graduating, I didn t work for three years. I couldn t get any work at all. I managed to write the final part called Death And Transfiguration and I scraped enough money together so that I could pay the actors ten pounds a day; that was all I could afford and the main character in it was very well-known in England as a comedy actor and in fact, this was his last performance. And we did that, finished it and it won a little prize somewhere which I thought was very nice and then I was asked to come to America with it. So, it was shown in New York, at a new directors festival, and the first time in my life I had a queue waiting to see the film and then the next night there was a demonstration saying how filthy it was. I d never expected either of those things. And then it was taken to San Francisco and shown there and at that time it was very much not acceptable to have a view of homosexuality like this. It was very unacceptable. There, they were glad to be gay and beautiful and all that. And it was shown and a journalist said: these films make Ingmar Bergman look like Jerry Lewis, which I think is a wonderful insult, so for me it was a compliment. So, that s how it came about. One of the things that you notice watching the trilogy is seeing you obviously working with a slightly bigger budget as you grow along, but also growing in confidence as a director. Even in the first film, you do play with two levels of time, but by the time you get to the final part the film it s almost impressionistic in the way it mixes together memories and what the film expresses. I think this leads us on to our next clip because Distant Voices, Still Lives was Terence s follow-up to the trilogy. It s called Distant Voices, Still Lives because it was in fact a diptych instead of a trilogy; it s sort of in two parts, so that works obviously best as one film. I didn t think that many of us saw Distant Voices ; I know I did but it was never released as such. And the film is based on stories that Terence has been told by his family. So, he doesn t really appear in it as such. We re going to show a clip that occurs a little way into the film and starts off with one of the sisters of the family and her husband; they ve just left the pub. The film involves quite a few scenes with sing songs, people singing in pubs together, and it moves to one of the most magical scenes in British cinema. So, if we could just watch the film. (screening) I ran that clip beyond the end of the music because I wanted to show the scene that explains this strange vision of two men moving away from the camera in slow motion as if in space and it does explain that. In fact, what we ve just seen is an accident at work; the two men are falling off some scaffolding and ending up in hospital. And that is a very magical moment for a number of reasons. One, of course, is the evocation of the wonderful experience of going to a movie with lots of other people and the other is the cut from the audience to these strange flying men. That s such a bizarre cut. Can you explain how it came about? Well, yes, the reason it s in there because both my sisters took me to see Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing and 1956 and we got the last three seats, I remember, and they were 2.9 pounds which was a great deal of money then. And everybody was crying like mad, because it s terribly sentimental but it really does work because everyone was crying and it wasn t raining at all. It was a very hot summer day. And it was such a wonderful tune. It s so wonderful that you ve got to try and use it somewhere and the opening of the umbrellas is sort of my tiny little homage to Singin in the Rain, which is the first film I ever saw. And when we started doing the takes someone said that the umbrellas looked too static. Could they move? So I said: all right, we ll do a take where they move and it looked incredibly rude because you didn t

M A S T E R C L A S S E S 4 9 t h T H E S S A L O N I K I I N T E R N A T I O N A L F I L M F E S T I V A L know what was going on under the umbrellas. And with the rain on them, they looked like novelty condoms. I said: no, they are not going to move, I m sorry. They are going to stay where they are. So, that was the reason it was in, the reason for the cut. In a film, when you see another film projected in a film, for me it just ruins the illusion and I didn t want people to see what they were looking at and people from my generation would know it was Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing. And the reason for the accidents: there were two separate accidents in real life; my brother-in-law fell off some scaffolding and my brother had an accident in the army; some show boxes fell on him and broke his leg, but because the budget was small I couldn t afford two accidents. So, it had to be combined into one. And I thought: how can you best make something ordinary strange? And there was a laundry near where I lived which had glass roofs like this and I thought that if they fall in the glass and we re looking straight down on them, it would be strange and then I ll explain it in the scene which follows. So, that was its genesis really. It s interesting that you did do the shot with the umbrellas as homage to Singin in the Rain, because I know that you ve seen Ulysses Gaze by Theo Angelopoulos and it also has this shot looking down on umbrellas, which is also connected with a cinema screening at the beginning of the film. This is what I found yesterday when I started thinking of similarities in your work. And I know that Theo put it there because he grew up loving Hollywood thrillers and musicals and things and so did you indeed, and especially musicals, but you ve never made a straight musical. You haven t made a gay musical either, but Distant Voices is almost a musical in that it makes use of lots of music and you do have people singing in it. Did you ever want to make films like the ones you grew up watching or did you just think I can t do that or I want to do something different and would you like to make a musical? When I was growing up, people from my background didn t go to the movies. They certainly didn t direct. They just didn t and I never ever thought I would do that. What I wanted to do originally was act because I remember seeing the first cinemascope film that was ever made, which was The Robe in 1953, and it had a wonderful performance by Jay Robinson as Caligula. He was fabulous. And I learned all his dialogue and that s what I wanted to do. Act and do lots of drama and have a wonderful life where I would act all over the place and probably act very badly. I never thought that would happen. But any influences that come into you, you forget them and then they come out refracted and that is what makes any kind of influence interesting, because you ve just repeated and then it s just imitation and imitation is all about second nature. So, I never thought I d ever make films. I would have loved to have made a musical. I did go and see Steven Sondheim s Follies but there were problems with the copyright and we couldn t clear it and because it s a great score, a really great score, I really don t know whether I would be able to because I love the musicals so much and the really great ones are really great films that happened to be musicals. I doubt whether I ve got the ability to make a musical proper; I don t think I have. It would be lovely though. Even when I see a not very good musical, and there s a moment in it where you just think, Isn t that gorgeous? Wouldn t you have loved to have done that? The thing that makes me truly want to do that is the three strippers in Gypsy ; they have the most fabulous song. I d love to have directed that. I would have given everything to have directed that, if only for the closing stanza. If you want to make it twinkle like you shake it, if you want to grind it, wait till you ve refined it, if you want to bump it, bump it with a trumpet. I think that s fabulous. There is a lot of singing in Distant Voices, Still Lives and the film is around family rituals and that is sort of an evocation and a tribute to a certain working class and middle class life in Britain which is now largely gone. So, I think it s the humor, which we saw in that scene with the sister, and the husband and people often forget that humor in your films because a lot of Distant Voices concerns the cruelty of the father to the family; but do you think that humor is very important to you to have in your films?

4 9 ο Φ Ε Σ Τ Ι Β Α Λ Κ Ι Ν Η Μ Α Τ Ο Γ Ρ Α Φ Ο Υ Θ Ε Σ Σ Α Λ Ο Ν Ι Κ Η Σ M A S T E R C L A S S E S Yes, and I m trying to get more in them than I ve succeeded so far, but I think that one of the things that makes life bearable is humor. If you can laugh at it, no matter how bad the experience, then you are all right. And northern women are very funny. Northern English women are just fantastic to listen to. You ve only got to listen in on any street and you hear the most wonderful things. So, I do love that and I did try to get that in but what I didn t realize, of course, is that the humor is tampered and leavened by what goes before it and what comes after it and largely Distant Voices, Still Lives is tragic; it s about suffering; the suffering of my family because my father was absolutely psychotic and so that does tamper with how you respond to the humor. It tends to give it a slightly darker feel than it would have done had it been just a comedy. But everybody sang. It s not invented. They did. Most of my family had lovely voices, especially my mother. She had a lovely, mellifluous voice and in fact at the end of Death and Transfiguration that is my mother singing and that was a song that she always sang and at the beginning of Distant Voices, Still Lives, that was a song that she also sang. And when I gave the cast these songs (one of the songs is I got the blues when it s raining which was always my mother s song), Freda Dowie, who played my mother, learned it by listening to her voice and when my mother died, my sister played that song at the funeral and everyone thought it was my mother. She imitated her so well, which was lovely, really lovely. But everyone sang. They got together, they sang. And people those days didn t think Oh, I ve got a good voice, so I need to be on television and make a lot of money. They didn t do that; they just had pleasure in singing and everyone had their own songs and everyone knew what the group songs were. It was just automatic; you just went into it like that. And at the pub, by 9 o clock, when people started getting a little bit merry, they would sing and when they got back to the house, they d sing some more, they d dance, sing another song. That was common. So, it was a reflection of exactly the way it was. And that is very important to you. I know that because I went on the set of your next film to watch you shooting that part of The Long Day Closes and actually what we re going to see in a minute is what I saw being shot and I remember Terence -it involves a little boy swinging on a railing in the street- being quite exacting with the young boy how he should swing because he said: no, that s not how I did it; it s the wrong speed and the legs should come up a bit higher. It was very much you wanting to recreate something very exactly from your past, even if it hadn t actually happened that way but as you remembered it. This is the next film that Terence made after Distant Voices, Still Lives. This time it s based not on his family experiences but on his own. It s about a period of intense happiness during Terence s childhood and again it s an absolutely wonderful film and maybe we could have the clip now, please. (screening) When I was selecting clips, originally I was going to stop that one at the end of the song and Tammy with the boy running into the house. But then I realized, because I was trying to use self-contained sequences so that it would be easier to understand the film if you hadn t seen the film, I was doing all these self-contained sequences and it would have looked like you make pop songs rather than some strange songs. So I wanted to continue that a little bit further to show that this isn t the case, that you do actually have stories and such. The overhead sequence with Tammy is extraordinary. You re uniting the various important social spaces of the child s life: the church, the school, the cinema and the house itself or the railing outside. But you re also referencing cinema and radio and a pop song as well; you re laying all this in there and you re throwing it in the most unusual way with this very long artificial tracking shot which goes from one scene to another, all seen from above. Why, for a start, did you decide to do an overhead shot for this? I was trying to bring together my little world and my little world was my family, my house, my street,

M A S T E R C L A S S E S 4 9 t h T H E S S A L O N I K I I N T E R N A T I O N A L F I L M F E S T I V A L my school, church and the movies. And how can I combine all those things together? In a conventional way of showing things, I suppose that what you would have done would be to have the child run to the window and look down and then see it as a kind of remembrance. But that s not really very interesting. If you suspend disbelief for just a moment and then you don t know where you are, and then you reveal where you are, I think that s more interesting. Why they were overhead shots, I have no idea. I remember going around my flat with these bits of paper and thinking if I do this and then I do that, it would look as though it has come round in a full circle; I don t know where it came from. I suppose it s implying the eye of God. But it was trying to contain just how small my world was and how rich it was. And for those of you who don t know, the clips you hear, they re from very famous British comedies of the period. So, it s just referencing those and as soon as I hear those voices, I know where I saw these films. I know the route I took, I know where I sat. I m glad I did decide to carry on the clip because you ve just been talking about your mother singing and I didn t know you were going to say that -this isn t scripted, I can assure you. I wanted it to go on public because obviously your mother was very important to you, but it also shows the attention -if you haven t noticed it already- you paid to images because that shot of your mother is sort of like a painting. I think Vermeer. Yes, Vermeer is my favorite painter. I don t know what it is about that extraordinary still and the life that is implied beyond that stillness. You could look at those paintings forever and never be tired of them. And do you often think-talk about sort of burying influences or having cinematic influences and then forgetting about them- but in terms of other things like painting and poetry and other art forms, do you think of those things very methodically and consciously while you re putting a film together? Not really, no. I know very little about painting. I only know the things that I like, Vermeer being one of them. So, that s never conscious. Poetry I read all the time so that s always there and if that influences the way which I construct something, again completely unconsciously, it s because form is always dictated by content, never the other way around; otherwise, it is dead I think. And so, all those influences that you ve had in your life or that you re having at that very moment can have a huge effect emotionally on how you do it. I do see things very vividly. I see every shot; I hear everything on the soundtrack and on the script. So, I go on set knowing everything because I couldn t do it otherwise. I d be too worried. And that means that it s not as rigid as it sounds. What you could do if something goes wrong, you could say: let s do that; let s drop that shot and move to that and it will work. Or you think it needs an extra something here. Let s do that. Because you know what the shots are. And also I think it does help the cast, because it is the most difficult form of acting, since you do it out of sequence; and if they feel they know what you re doing as far as the shots are concerned, then I think it s an enormous help because then you could really give yourself completely to the rigor of getting the performance. I am rigorous and some actors or actresses don t like that, but that s something you have to deal with. When we re talking about autobiographical stuff, I know how these people spoke, I know the rhythm and if the rhythm is wrong, it s wrong. The rhythm is this. The emphasis falls there and not there. But what is also wonderful is actors and actresses doing things with the dialogue that you hadn t thought of and that s fabulous. There s a bit of that in Distant Voices, Still Lives when my father threw my brother out when he was eleven, where he said: you can t come back anymore; get lost. And he slept for two nights in

4 9 ο Φ Ε Σ Τ Ι Β Α Λ Κ Ι Ν Η Μ Α Τ Ο Γ Ρ Α Φ Ο Υ Θ Ε Σ Σ Α Λ Ο Ν Ι Κ Η Σ M A S T E R C L A S S E S the park and then he lived with my grandmother. And the line was Frig off! like Get lost! and I had written it with an exclamation mark and Pete Postlethwaite said: can I do it quietly? And I said: yeah, fine. And he just says, frig off and it s infinitely more thrilling because it s so understated and so nasty. That s exciting. I remember on The House Of Mirth when Lily Bart goes to her cousin, Grace Stepney, to ask for help -she s got no money- and Grace Stepney wouldn t help and the line was in the middle of that scene You won t help me then, which I d heard as a falling cadence and she said: you won t help me then? It pierced your heart because it was so unexpected and it had even more pleading in it. That s when it s wonderful; when they do things that you hadn t thought of. Also, what is very satisfying is when you hear it in a specific way and they do it. You think, I was right after all. So, we ve dealt with your autobiographical films or the biographical films about your family. You then went on to make an adaptation of somebody else s work, John Kennedy Toole s, The Neon Bible, which sadly we re not able today to show a clip from; we didn t have a good enough DVD to show you, but it is a film that ties in with the many recurring themes from your previous work. It s about a young boy growing up in Depression America and the influence of the church and family and whatever. You just said when you were making the other films, because they were based on your memories and the world you knew, you knew what you wanted and that gave you a certain confidence. How was it making a film in America based on somebody else s story about a world that you hadn t experienced for yourself? I had experienced it sort of vicariously in things like Elmer Gantry. So, I had this view of this gothic southern America, which was completely incorrect, and which is why this film really does not work; it s far too long and a lot of the shots should have been cut way before; they were held for too long. It is a transition work. I must have got good things in it but as a whole, it simply does not work. What is in a way rather exciting, but rather terrifying as well is the religion, because it s so seductive. The speakers are so seductive and you realize just how chilling they are and there is this man called Bobbie Lee Taylor who comes to the town to speak there. And to win them you have to speak like in the opera, really, because that s what it is; it s opera. And he starts with these Jesus will save you things and there are ordinary people in Crawfordville who were the extras and this was like a hyperbole. It was like an evangelical audience responded to the spell. That was frightening because there s something sinister about people telling you that if you do this and this, you ll come to God. That s really disturbing. No one knows the way to God if indeed there is a God. But anybody who tells you they ve got the line to Him, distrust. But these people are charismatic; there was one moment when they were doing the jitterbug in a factory, and there were only women doing the jitterbug. It was a long track in; far too long. And there were only people from Crawfordville, they weren t actors and these two girls did the most fabulous jitterbug and I said: look, you ve got to stop halfway through. They won t be looking at Gena Rowlands; they ll be looking at you. They were so good and at one point she dances with this rather large lady who bumps her like this and she fell over and these two women caught her and that s the take I used because you can t plan that. But there were certain things that were very sad. When we were looking for a small town, we went to one town that basically had just one street, but they had a general store down at the bottom. And we went and it was owned by two old men; they were in their 80s, brothers; they were never married and all the merchandise was from the 40s and there were suits that were rotting from the 40s and you looked in this case -do you know there were those two shoes they wore in the 40s? They were just sitting there and they hadn t been open since the war. And it was so sad. It was so extraordinarily sad because the store had to close down and God knows what they were going to do. But halfway up the street there was a café, which was owned by this woman; and when discrimination was abolished in America and blacks and whites could eat in the

M A S T E R C L A S S E S 4 9 t h T H E S S A L O N I K I I N T E R N A T I O N A L F I L M F E S T I V A L same places, she was so right-wing that she said: I m going to close the café down, I m not going to serve black people. And the state troopers apparently came and said: you ve got to open it; and she stood on the roof with a shotgun and said: I will not open my café. I ll close it before I serve black people. That kind of extraordinary racism! The man who literally owned the town refused us permission to shoot there. This is why we went to Crawfordville. And my producer said: have you actually read the script? And he said: no. And she said: would you at least read the script? He said: I know it s the work of the devil. And she said: with all the best will, if you haven t read it, how can you tell? And he said: I m about to meet my Maker; I m not going to have myself compromised. No, you can t use the town. I thought that kind of thing was fiction but it actually existed. There, it s actually incredible. It s quite incredible. It s like going to a foreign country. Well, America is a foreign country. It s true. But then, so is Britain. I think perhaps you re a little unfair on the film, as it contains one of the most moving death sequences I know in cinema. It was the audience who died. And there is a very fine American critic called Jonathan Rosenbaum who said that he grew up in this world and said it was very accurately portrayed. So, I think you re probably being a little unkind to the film. Your next film, The House of Mirth was also an adaptation. This time I suppose it bore far less resemblance to your own stories in that it wasn t about a young boy but about a young woman trying to survive in the very strictly regulated world of New York high society. It s based on a novel by Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence. The Age of Innocence I think is Scorsese s last very fine film, but I must say I prefer The House of Mirth. Much as I liked the Scorsese film, Terence takes things a little bit further. Let s have a look at the clip from The House of Mirth. (screening) 10 That was obviously a different clip from the previous two, just to show that you can behave yourself and not use overhead shots etc. It looks so simple but it s obviously not. That scene is full of nuances of what is important, of what is not being said, what is said; the lies that are being told in a way that the speaker knows that the listener is aware of those lies and the use of the camera gradually coming closer and closer on them, forcing them closer together. It s one of the greatest erotic scenes, I think, in cinema and in the true sense of the word romantic without being at all sentimental. That s not really a question, is it? So, what attracted you to this project in the first place? Well, I love the book. I think it s one of the greatest novels of American literature and in fact, Edith Wharton is better than Henry James and a lot more fun. This book is a savage satire of the American high society of the late 1890s, the belle époque, which was even more rigid that the British high society of the period. What I realized when we were trying to put the money together is that we went to Los Angeles and Hollywood and they are exactly like that. It s full of these rules that no one tells you but you forget at your peril. There s a pecking order and everyone knows what the pecking order is. Nobody tells you but you know. I remember having lunch with Gillian Anderson and few other people and sitting in the restaurant; you know by where you are seated whether you re important or not. It s just chilling beyond words

4 9 ο Φ Ε Σ Τ Ι Β Α Λ Κ Ι Ν Η Μ Α Τ Ο Γ Ρ Α Φ Ο Υ Θ Ε Σ Σ Α Λ Ο Ν Ι Κ Η Σ M A S T E R C L A S S E S and the level of ruthless insincerity there is chilling. And there are certain things that you don t do at lunch. No one tells you this, but you don t drink any alcohol, for instance. If you have one gin and tonic, they think you re a dipsomaniac. And these lunches were agony. I have no small talk. I don t know what to say to these people and it became utterly agonizing because at least, if it s an agonizing lunch, you can get through it with a gin and tonic, but you can t over there. So, they drink water all the time and have no sense of humor, which is even worse in lunches. And I got so depressed on one particular occasion where we were sitting and having another lunch and when they got to me and they asked me: what would you like to drink? I said: water. Sparkling or still? I said: decaf. Nothing. So, I go to the lavatory and sit on the lavatory for a while and I wonder how long it will be before they notice I ve actually gone and then I d have to go back and order the main course. Everyone would have broccoli and egg white. Again, I couldn t eat because they d probably think I m a glutton. So, I would have something very small like those very distressed salads. Anyway, this next story really shows how alike The House of Mirth and Hollywood are. We sat down to get another grizzly lunch and this man came up to one of the people at the table and they jumped up and hugged one another and kissed one another. It was wonderful to see all that. When the man walked away, she said: who was that? Terrifying! But it s a wonderful book for the way it dissects American society, because below all that easy friendliness, it s really ruthless. That s what is really terrifying about that society. A ruthlessness that you see on a daily basis and that I did find shocking. Whenever I have to go there, I can t wait to come home. I really feel so dispirited by that level of competitiveness, that level of ruthlessness, wanting to be top dog. And you think: all that energy for something so venal and all this fame and money. What are you going to do when you re old? Because you re not allowed to be old there; everyone has face-lifts. I went to the opening of the Matisse exhibition in New York and all the people who give money to the Museum of Modern Art are very rich and wealthy and all had face-lifts. And you look at these terrifying people and you think: God, they think this is the right thing to do. It was sinister. I don t like going there at all. When we finished the film, we showed it to the Edith Wharton society. They know her work backwards. They almost memorized it. And so I was very worried about that because some of the dialogues are not Edith Wharton s; they re mine and the greatest compliment I got was we can t tell the difference between Edith Wharton s dialogue and yours, which was lovely because I was very proud of that, especially in the opera sequence when Aunt Julia says to Grace Stepney Thank you for this unwelcome information, Grace, but I must say it has completely ruined the Mozart for me. I was very proud of that. Well, many people thought that The House of Mirth was a masterpiece. Sadly, that didn t make a lot of difference to people who give the money in Britain. I m sorry about that but we had to wait eight years for the next film to come out from Terence. And when it did, it was made on a very small budget; it was a commission to celebrate Liverpool as the European capital of culture and there were three films to be funded and Terence was approached by a producer and then they had to apply to see if their film could be one of the three films that got made. I saw this film in a very rough cut on a DVD on my little television at home -not the best way to see it by any means. Within about twenty minutes, tears were running down my eyes, not because it s a sad film -it has some amazingly moving sequences- but I was so pleased to see this man back at work again. I was seeing things that I knew nobody else could do. Nobody on the planet; maybe nobody else wants to, but that s another question. We re going to see one of the very finest sequences, I think, from Of Time and the City, even though it s almost impossible to pick anything out from this film. (screening) Most of the film consists of archive footage, so Terence actually only filmed only a little bit of stuff himself; I think it was about 10% of the finished film. But despite that, he has put his very own 11

M A S T E R C L A S S E S 4 9 t h T H E S S A L O N I K I I N T E R N A T I O N A L F I L M F E S T I V A L 12 distinctive imprint on this work. Lots of that looks as if he could have shot it with a little bit of help from the make-up and costume department. You were asked by or invited by Solon Papadopoulos to make this film. Could you explain how that happened and how it progressed from there? I got a call from a man called Solon Papadopoulos who was British but of Greek extraction and he said: do you remember me? I said: yes, I do, because you took some beautiful pictures of my mother 20 years ago and I still got them. He said: I m not a photographer anymore; I m a producer and there s this thing called Digital Departures and they want to make three films in Liverpool only for 250,000 pounds each. Would you be interested in making a film about Liverpool? And I said no. I said: I ve done my fiction. I don t really want to do it again. But I said: what would be interesting to do is a documentary about from when I was born, which is 45, until I left, 1973 and then contrast those two Liverpools. I thought that might be interesting. The template would be Humphrey Jennings listening to Britain of 1941, which is a wonderful 90-minute film; it s just sheer poetry, it s wonderful. So he said: yes, I would love to do that. There s only one drawback. It s competitive and 170 people have applied. So, I said: we won t get it. Why would they give money to someone who s never made a documentary before? Anyway, we went through a very long process and we got the money. And I always knew that it was going to be largely archival material. It would be a subjective essay; it wouldn t be telling you this happened in 1984 and this happened in 1952 because that s not interesting. So, I said to the people who put up the money: look, if you don t want a subjective essay, you d better give the money to someone else because I m not interested in doing a straight documentary; I m just not. And they said no, that was fine. Needless to say, of course, when we were doing the final cuts, you get the usual thing: why haven t you contextualized this? And I said: I told you I didn t want to do that. And I have contextualized it by putting it with all this other material. That particular fight at some point was very tedious. But it was made with very modest money and with very modest intentions. I can tell you. And it was accepted in the Edinburgh film festival and Edinburgh has always been very supportive and I was very pleased about that because it s a lovely city, as you know. And there s a wonderful woman who works in French television but lives in London and she said: I m going to put it forward for Cannes. And I said: that s very sweet of you, but you know, they re not going to take it. And they took it. And when I went to Cannes, we met there and she said that she told them: if you don t accept this film, I will commit suicide in the center of Paris. And I said: for God s sake, don t do that. It s only a documentary, thinking that it would get a little showing and that would be it. And then at the press screening I wasn t there, I was having some lunch with some friends. And Geoff called us and said: the press screening went very well. I thought that was nice. And it seems to have taken off. It seems to have somehow touched a sort of zeitgeist; I don t understand why. I still don t. I cannot believe that it s had this kind of response and it s been invited to 87 festivals and a lot of them want to give me retrospectives. They think I m dead, so for God s sake, don t say anything. You didn t mention it when I called you to say it had gone well. I also said: you are going to be invited to several festivals and one of those I mentioned was Thessaloniki because Lefteris and Alexis had come out and said: do you think you can get him to come to Thessaloniki? And I said: well, I ll ask him; I ll suggest it, because they have wanted to get you here for some time, God knows why. Sorry, God doesn t exist, so he doesn t know why. I think we should ask the audience now. There must be someone here wanting to ask questions. Do we have mikes? So, if you put up your hands, please. Over there. From the audience Hello. Today we woke up to a very sunny day. You said: what awful weather we have in Thessaloniki, welcoming you with rain, typical British weather, and you are carrying with you your umbrella. Yes?

4 9 ο Φ Ε Σ Τ Ι Β Α Λ Κ Ι Ν Η Μ Α Τ Ο Γ Ρ Α Φ Ο Υ Θ Ε Σ Σ Α Λ Ο Ν Ι Κ Η Σ M A S T E R C L A S S E S But today we have sunshine and we ordered it for you, believe it or not. I made this small comment because, as you explained about your childhood and your religious background, I think there was a lot of pressure coming from the Catholics and the church. Does that mean that you became something extreme, like an atheist or agnostic? I don t know how to put it. But in all your films we always see the religion and there are many shots of Liverpool -I have been there many times- and I know the cathedral and all that. Is religion still in your life or not? Well, I hope I ve understood your question properly, but I was a very devout child and I was devout until I was 22; I thought that if I lived by the tenets of the church then I would be made whole. I really did believe that with a great deal of passion. And I also believed what we were told as English Catholics: that any kind of doubt was the work of the devil and you had to fight against it and I did for a long time and I got no sucker from God at all. And that sense of despair, I don t think I can go through that again because I thought there would be some kind of answer. I would be told in some way how I could become ordinary. I ve always wanted to just be ordinary and like everybody else, because being an outsider (and I feel that I am with my family, my class, my country and other people) is very hard to bear. There s nothing worse than real despair and I did become full of despair and I remember going to Mass one night and I suddenly knew it was a lie. I knew it was a lie and that was absolutely awful because I had this belief for so long and it s very difficult to release that and say, It s all a lie. I remember when I was at school when my classmates said that they made up things to say in confession, I was so shocked because I thought God would know you are not telling the truth and the priest will and it will endanger your soul. Stupid. I suppose after that I wanted to learn. I wanted to learn as much as I could about music, about poetry, about literature; I devoured the whole of Shakespeare and the whole of Bronte in a single year. I just read and read. And then I discovered Bruckner and Sibelius and Shostakovich, which were huge revelations to me, but there was something missing; that assurance that you believe what you ve been told and when you die, you ll come into the grace of God. I don t believe that anymore and that makes it very difficult for me in regard to the people in my family who ve died. I know I ll never see them again, particularly my mother who was the love of my life, and if I had still been a practicing Catholic, I would be thinking I will meet her in heaven. Now I know that s not the case and I would give everything I own just to hear her voice again. I ll never hear that. Yes, there are some people over there. From the audience Hello. Thank you for your masterclass. It s been very precious to me. It might be naïve of me to say that, but I ve always thought that a director is a kind of a small god because he s able to create a world and dedicate it to an audience. So, in a way, your films have taught me how to live. Has the process of filmmaking taught you how to live? No, it hasn t. It s an enormous compliment that you ve paid me for which I m extremely grateful, but after I finish each film I feel they don t have anything to do with me. I just don t and I don t watch them because I can run them in my head. But what it s done, if anything, it s opened my sense of not being part of the whole and feeling that everybody s got the key except me, which is nonsense. No one has the key. No one; but when you see the ease with which some people go through life, I would love to have that. I would love to have that ease that people seem to have in life, particularly small talk. I mean, I have no small talk at all and there s nothing worse than going to a gathering of filmmakers and you stand in the corner with your glass of warm white wine thinking: oh God, why have I come? Why? And they all look like filmmakers and I look like an accountant. I long to be big and talk like that (change in voice), as they supposedly do in British gangster movies. No one talks like that; perhaps 13