TORONTO — Creating memorable women onscreen isn’t just an artistic choice for director Terence Davies. It’s how he was raised.
“I grew up at a time when movies were all about heroines. “All That Heaven Allows,’’ “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing,’’ “Magnificent Obsession,’’ . . . I grew up on that,’’ says Davies, whose early autobiographical features “Distant Voices, Still Lives’’ (1988) and “The Long Day Closes’’ (1992) gave poetic voice to his hardscrabble childhood in postwar Liverpool and the solace and escape he found at the cinema.
Davies’s later films have centered around screen heroines every bit as formidable as the characters once commanded by Jennifer Jones and Jane Wyman. These include Gena Rowlands as spirited Aunt Mae in “The Neon Bible’’ (1995), Gillian Anderson as socialite Lily Bart in “The House of Mirth’’ (2000), and Rachel Weisz as adulterous Hester Collyer in “The Deep Blue Sea’’ (2011). His latest, “Sunset Song,’’ which premiered at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival and opens in the Boston area on Friday, again displays Davies’s penchant for stories anchored by unconventional women constrained by social mores. It’s a pattern that will continue with his upcoming “A Quiet Passion,’’ starring Cynthia Nixon as 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson.
“Sunset Song’’ is adapted from Scottish author Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel. It blends the intimacy of Davies’s early films with an epic visual and thematic scope that’s new for him. The film chronicles the struggle of an educated young woman, Chris Guthrie (Agyness Deyn), to run her family’s farm in rural northeast Scotland at the dawn of the 20th century. Along with marriage and motherhood, Chris faces personal tragedy, physical hardship, and the rumbling threat of the Great War.
Despite the grandeur of this epic story, Davies worked with a modest budget due, he says, to his insistence on casting actors, not stars.
“I cast the actor who gives the best audition. The name makes no difference to me,’’ he says. “I’m not prepared to base a movie on a name in order to raise money. Big names won’t take direction and if anyone refuses to take direction, I will really lose my temper and say, ‘That’s what you’re being paid for. Just do it.’?’’
He shot the sweeping exteriors of the Scottish landscape on 65mm film. Such ambition on a small budget, says Davies, is all about preparation. “I know what the shots are; I know what it should look like,’’ he says. “While shooting, I get the actors in, run the scene, and do it in less than four takes. That captures the sense of newness.’’
Dyen, a British model turned actress, says playing Chris Guthrie was like having five roles in one film. Dyen sought the taxing part because, with Davies at the helm, “this was going to be an experience I was never going to forget — a turning point in my life as an actress and a woman.
“I do feel changed,’’ she says. “When [Davies] talks to you, every fiber of his being is electric and alive and passionate.’’
She says most scenes were done in one take and on one set. “Terence is very sensitive; he doesn’t want you to go through it again. He takes on so much responsibility and it weighs on him quite heavily. So we’d just go for it.’’
“Sunset Song’’ depicts life as both bountiful and unforgiving, like the land itself. It also offers a searing indictment of the rush to war and its devastating cost.
The Great War “scarred Europe even to this day. Everyone across Europe lost someone,’’ says Davies. “The corollary to that is Britain’s obsession with the second World War because that’s the last time we were important. It’s pathetic, really. It’s a long time ago; we’re not an empire anymore.’’
Loren King can be reached at loren.king@comcast.net.
