Terence Davies: With Siegfried Sassoon, it was very difficult because he went everywhere and he knew everybody. When it comes to your process, do you take a look at the rather obvious moments in one’s life you know you want to exclude in order to shape it around what you find most interesting?
The Film Stage: This is your second film about a poet, once again beautifully subverting the structure of a biopic. He was also a closeted gay man in Britain, where those in power considered his sexual identity a crime.Īs the film arrives in theaters, I spoke with Davies about his unique approach to biopics, making his first explicitly gay film in decades, themes of loneliness and conformity in Benediction, the 30th anniversary of The Long Day Closes, and his next project. It concerns World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden and Peter Capaldi), who was known for his epic, satirical poems detailing trench warfare and the horrors of a war in which he fought bravely but spoke out against. His second consecutive drama about an iconic poet with a life of inner turmoil, Terence Davies’ Benediction affords the filmmaker canvas to explore queerness more explicitly than he has in decades.
