Terence Davies was born in Liverpool in 1945 and he grew up in a working-class Catholic family, the youngest of seven surviving children. After leaving school aged sixteen he worked for ten years as a clerk in a shipping office and as a bookkeeper before leaving the city and attending Coventry Drama School. While there he wrote the screenplay for Children (1976), the first part of the Terence Davies Trilogy. Davies next went to the National Film School, and over the following seven years wrote and directed Madonna and Child (1980) and Death and Transfiguration (1983). With Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992) Davies continued to draw on his childhood experiences in Liverpool. The two films marked him out as arguably the most important and distinctive British film-maker since Michael Powell. Davies subsequently adapted and directed two novels by American authors: John Kennedy Toole's The Neon Bible (1995), and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (2000), which won a best-actress award for Gillian Anderson and a string of nominations for Best Director.

Davies's output has been sporadic but is characterized by an extraordinary ability to realize the emotional content of a scene through colour, music, framing, lighting, and an inherent sense of rhythm and movement. Central to his oeuvre is a cinematic depiction of memory that examines the ways in which we inhabit a world of familial and social ritual, while experiencing an inner life that is often painfully at odds with the collective. His films occupy a territory which explores on the one hand family history and personal terrors, and on the other the liberating and visionary experience of cinema. As such he is part of a tradition that includes Jean Genet, Max Ophuls, Sergo Paradjanov and Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Davies has written one novel, Hallelujah Now (1984), and his first five screenplays were published as A Modest Pageant (Faber & Faber, 1992). At the time of this interview, plans for a film adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song had fallen through, with the BBC, Channel 4 and the UK Film Council all having turned down at the last stage his funding applications. He lives in London, where I interviewed him on 8 May 2006 at Kettners Restaurant, Soho.