Liverpool film director attacks ‘US nonsense’ at Cannes festival

May 22 2008 by Mike Chapple, Liverpool Daily Post

LIVERPOOL-BORN film director Terence Davies, whose new film Of Time And The City, about his birthplace, has wowed the critics at the Cannes Film Festival, has hit out at British film-makers telling them to look to their own country or city for ideas.

At a festival conference staged by the UK Film Council, he criticised “sub-American nonsense” and said Britain should look to itself for ideas.

“If we are going to have a national cinema we have got to make stories which arise from our islands,” he said.

“What we do most of the time is make sub-American nonsense.

“The American template is very often lousy – why do we want to imitate it?”

The film, shown out of competition, has turned out to be one of the highlights of the festival.

Of Time And The City is one of three Liverpool films funded by Digital Departures, a Northwest Vision and Media project that aims to make the region leaders in the micro-budget feature film industry.

The other two films are Salvage and Starstruck.

Of Time And The City is described as a visual poem, which draws on the first 28 years of the director’s life in Liverpool until he left in 1973.

It is accompanied by a soundtrack of popular and classical music, voices, radio clips and a voice-over by Davies.

Themes running through Davies’s work include Catholicism, homosexuality, violence, death, loss, the glory of cinema, being an outsider and childhood.

Speaking about the film, Davies said: “I wanted to capture the essence of what it was like to be a Liverpudlian . . .

“It was re-discovering the city that I knew and grew up in.

“I remembered going on the old overhead railway . . . I saw this footage, which was like out-takes from Metropolis.

“It looked so beautiful.”

He described his work as full of regret and anger at the way that old houses were pulled down and estates were built on the outskirts of the city.

Davies said: “What they could have done was move people out and renovated and then moved them back in.

“That would have taken time and money and we were still recovering from the war.”

He said he had been shocked at slum footage he had seen “even though I grew up in one”.

Talking about growing up as a Catholic, Davies said: “It was very intense.

“I was terribly devout until I was 22. What a waste of bloody time.”

In terms of the regeneration of Liverpool today, Davies said: “Architecturally I could be anywhere.

“But the interior design is terribly impressive.”