The Brit At The Back
From Film Review with Terence Davies

"The irony is, I've never seen The X-Files, I don't watch television very much," proclaims 55-year-old director Terence Davies when the subject of his leading lady inevitably comes up. He's talking about Gillian Anderson who, as Lily Bart, a beautiful, yet complex socialite, fills nearly every scene of his exceptional ?5.2m budget adaptation of Edith Wharton's classic late 19th Century text, The House of Mirth.

"It's a wonderful performance from Gillian," he continues, "I saw a portrait of her and I immediately thought that she had the right look, the kind of beauty seen in the paintings of John Singer Sargent, the great American portraitist. She happened to be in London and we met, seemed to get on, so I sent her the script and she liked it, so I went down to Los Angeles and she read for me and I said, 'Will you do it?' and she said, 'Yes,' so that's how it happened."

Davies, critically acclaimed for his films, Distant Voices, Still Lives, The Long Day Closes and 1995's The Neon Bible, had been interested in adapting the novel for the screen the instant he read the book 15 years ago. Resisting the temptation to change Wharton's charged turn-of-the-century period drama of social hypocrisy and emotional brutality into more contemporary English, Davies admits the process of casting the other American actors, including Eric Stoltz (as Lily's unsatisfactory lover Lawrence Selden), Dan Aykroyd, Elizabeth McGovern, Laura Linney, Anthony Lapaglia and others, proved problematic.

"It was much more difficult getting the other actors actually," he admits. "Trying to find actors who could actually read the text properly, so when American money came in, and then it was who was on the list and who wasn't, that really was Byzantine and tedious beyond measure. He [Stoltz] is very elegant and one of the few actors who understood the subjective meaning of that formal dialogue. A lot of them can't read it. In the end I went, 'Look, he's the one that can do it, I think you want someone who can deliver the lines and deliver the performance or you can have someone who can't and it will look ridiculous.' What is more important with any actor or actress is not so much that they may be intellectually clever, but that they have to be emotionally clever. Because that's where you get the performance. What I always say to actors is, 'If you feel it will be true. If you act it, it will be phoney.'

"Regards Hollywood," he adds, "there's so much nonsense that goes on, you think at the end of the day, it's not mining coal, it's not a cure for cancer, it's only pretend. Why can't they just get on with it? All this baroque stuff, you just want to say, 'Look, why don't you just go out for a month, live on an estate outside Newcastle, try and bring three kids up on £46 a week? Then you got problems. That's real life, not this."

And talking of real life, Terence Davies is characteristically honest about his own future. "I never have plans for future films," he says, with a laugh, "I'm absolutely hopeless. I wish I could just go onto something else. It would keep me out of debt."© Visual Imagination Ltd 2000.

The House of Mirth is released October 13, and reviewed (with a 'recommended' rating) in the November 2000 Film Review.  In this issue, Gillian Anderson talks about playing Edith Wharton's complex socialite Lily Bart.  Read Film of the Month review online and find out about Film Review's other recommended films.

Source: Planet Britain, Film Review