To celebrate the British Film Institute archive's 80th anniversary, Bazaar asked luminaries from the film world to pick their favourite British film from their vaults. Here, Tom Hiddleston tells us why he thinks the impressionistic Distant Voices, Still Lives is one of the best British films of all time, and of the big impression it made when he first watched it three years ago.
I first watched Distant Voices, Still Lives when I was auditioning for the director Terence Davies' the Deep Blue Sea in October 2010. Though it's always been highlighted as one of the greats from this country, I'd never seen it so I thought this was the moment to do it. And it just knocked me for six.
I was struck by the confidence that Terence had in his own style; so poetic, so moving, so simple. The film was made 25 years ago but tells the story of a working class family in 1950s Liverpool. It's a Britain I felt I recognised because my paternal grandparents were Scottish working class people from Greenock in Glasgow. My grandfather was a shipbuilder who moved with the industry to live in a bungalow in Sunderland. He would give me a five pound note and a packet of Mint Imperials whenever I saw him.
And it was that sense in Distant Voices – that same sense - that I had from my very shallow experience of my dad's parents (I didn't see them often). That sense of what it was like after the war when there was rationing and the country was rebuilding itself, when it was building a National Health Service, and people still sang in the pub. That huge sense of bonhomie after just stamping out fascism in Western Europe. But also captured in the film is that great deal of emotional repression and domestic pain.
As far as I'm aware, the drama is very close to Terence's own life. Distant Voices doesn't feel gratuitously kitchen sink; there's amazing elegiac poetry to it. It's a very painterly film. That's how Terence remembers his past – bleached of colour. He portrays the cities that were suffering from bombs, blackened and un-swept and sooty. People's coats were a sort of dowdy brown. And there were lots of trinkets in their houses – just full of stuff. These scenes seem very palpable, tangible. The world he creates has texture.
The music is amazing. Terence is closely associated with scenes of sing-alongs down the pub, because that's his memory. This was something that Terence talked a lot with Rachel [Weisz] and I when we were filming the Deep Blue Sea – as it features in both films. He talked about the times where it may have been 10 o'clock at night, and if you walked past four or five pubs and in every single one, people would all be singing together.
And I always remember the very beginning of the film. A soprano sings the words: 'there's a man going round taking names' over a shot of an empty staircase before we see the family preparing for their father's funeral. It's hard to describe when a film makes an emotional impact on you, but that poignancy just split me down the middle.
Tom Hiddleston is an Ambassador for Luminous - the BFI's Fundraising Gala, raising money for the BFI National Archive and the future preservation and digitisation of the UK's National Collection of film and TV.
