Directing Gillian.

Out British director Terence Davies talks about making his mark with personal films as well as the lush new adaptation of The House of Mirth, starring Gillian Anderson 

British filmmaker Terence Davies comes of age with his new film, an elegant and moving adaptation of Edith Wharton's classic tragic novel The House of Mirth. "It's my first mature work," says the 55-yearold, who cast a revelatory Gillian Anderson in the lead role of Lily Bart even though he'd never seen a single episode of The X-Files. "I cast for the right people," he says, seemingly oblivious to the fame of the names in his cast, which also includes Eric Stoltz, Laura Linney, Elizabeth McGovern, and Anthony LaPaglia.

"Gillian had a lot of responsibility," he adds. "It's a two-hour, 20-minute movie, and I think there are nine shots in which she doesn't appear. It was very tiring for her." Anderson survived the shoot well enough to compliment Davies as well, saying he "is an incredibly gifted, passionate filmmaker with a unique vision."

Indeed, Davies is one of those European directors who strive to remain resolutely outside of the Hollywood radar. Despite the attention gleaned from his first two feature films, Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, he loathes the values of Tinseltown and even says he made The House of Mirth with parallels to Hollywood in mind. "The film is about what you look like, position, and power, and so is Hollywood in extremis," he says. "There is a love of venality and physical beauty in Hollywood. But, as Wilde says, what do you do when beauty fades and the senses rot? You have no inner life."

Davies's work is all about his inner life. Until now his films--three shorts and three features---have been largely autobiographical, dramatizing his youth in Liverpool or, in the case of his last feature, The Neon Bible, equating himself with the boy in the Southern gothic tale by John Kennedy Toole. Especially in the shorts "Children" (1976), "Madonna & Child" (1980), and "Death & Transfiguration" (1983), Davies came to terms with his homosexuality while dealing with his Catholic working-class upbringing as the youngest of 10 children, the bullying he received at school, his violent, alcoholic father, and his complicated relationship with his mother.

But Davies's wry view of being gay is not a happy one. "Being gay has ruined my life. I'll go to my grave hating it," he says. "I'm not good-looking, and I don't have a good body, and it's not a happy existence if you're not beautiful and young and sexually voracious."

The three shorts--collected in the mid 1980s as the Terence Davies Trilogy-present such a bleak view of growing up gay that when they first came to the United States, they were met with perplexity. At that time, Davies recalls, "everyone was meant to be glad to be gay. I remember one critic in San Francisco saying that the films made Ingmar Bergman look like Jerry Lewis. They just weren't politically correct."

At the same time, there was an overwhelming flood of support from men who saw their own experience in the films. "It was truthful for me because I went through it, and now I think people who see them see the veracity of these things," Davies says. "I remember one man weeping at a screening and saying I had given voice to his life."

Melancholic rather than misanthropic, Davies has never had a romantic relationship and is resigned to that fact, if reluctantly. "I have relationships with family and friends whom I do love, and I'm glad to say they love me," he says. "Of course, it would be nice to have someone to sit me down and make me a cup of tea as well, but I think I'm one of those people who will live alone. That's just what's happened to me.

"If I could change it tomorrow," he says with a smile, "I would be very beautiful and very stupid."

Goodridge also writes for Screen International magazine.