SUNSET SONG
As the long-awaited adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song hits the big screen, James Mottram catches up with director Terence Davies and the fi lm’s star Agyness Deyn to discuss loyalty, humanity and subtitles
S itting in the swish coni nes of London’s Corinthia Hotel, Terence Davies is being charmingly modest. He’s talking about his new i lm, Sunset Song, his long-gestating adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s classic 1932 novel of life in rural Scotland. ‘I cannot believe that we’ve got a halfway decent i lm out of it,’ he whispers. ‘I’m very proud of it.’ So he should be; his i rst i lm since 2011’s The Deep Blue Sea (a luscious adaptation of the Terence Rattigan play with Tom Hiddleston and Rachel Weisz), Sunset Song is more than ‘halfway decent’. Beautiful, emotional, rich and textured, it’s a triumphant take on one of the most famous works of Scottish literature: the story of Chris Guthrie, a young woman growing up in a north-east farming family in the early 20th century.
Davies i rst discovered Sunset Song in 1971, when he came across a serialised version on the BBC. ‘It stayed with me,’ he says. Years later after i lms like Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992) established his directing career, Davies began dreaming of adapting it. By 2003, he’d got a script together, only to be dismissed by British i nanciers, ‘which was pretty crushing’, he says.
Sunset Song became a reality. Even then, it was stop-start. Davies, who recently turned 70, cast Agyness Deyn as Chris more than three years ago, without any idea of her former life as an ‘it girl’ model. ‘What moves me is the fact that she stayed with it,’ he remarks. ‘At no point did she say, “no, it’s carrying on too long”.’ He also cast Peter Mullan as her foul-tempered father, basing the decision on a brief clip of his brutal performance in Paddy Considine’s 2011 directorial debut Tyrannosaur. Davies seems bowled over by his cast’s loyalty. Kevin Guthrie (as Chris’ increasingly violent husband Ewan) and Ian Pirie (farmer Chae Strachan) turned down work for two years to work on the i lm. ‘It’s just heartbreaking in a way,’ sighs Davies. ‘And the performances they’ve given are so extraordinary.’
A ‘nerd fan’, Deyn was as desperate to work with him (‘I wanted to do him proud’), as she was to grapple with Chris Guthrie. ‘She’s so inspiring,’ she says. ‘As a woman, I would want to watch that story. And I think it’s important to have stories like that around for young women. I remember reading Jane Eyre for the i rst time: one of the earliest punks, in a way! I feel like Chris has that energy.’
It was only after the moderate success of The Deep Blue Sea that Partly for sunshine requirements, the i lm’s shoot began in New
58 THE LIST 5 Nov 2015–4 Feb 2016