I read that you were kind of drawn to Sassoon because he's an outsider, and that you consider yourself an outsider. It was those things which I felt that I could perhaps pull off, and make interesting emotionally. I could only write about what I feel is interesting. That's where I drew it from, and also my subjective emotion to that life as well. I mean, one seems to detail his life day by day, which is astonishing. Obviously, the poems, but also these three massive biographies, which are just huge. How did you go about excavating these emotional beats and these emotional truths from his life? You have to do it yourself, because no one else will do it for you. It's about the emotional texture that runs beneath it. What did it actually look like? What was the texture of those lives? But it's not just about textures, what you look at. But in a way, you can't draw other aspects of that from another.
They all got away with it, because they were from a privileged, upper class background. He was very privileged, because none of those people were arrested for being gay. But you have to look at it in terms of that life. Because that was one of the main wellsprings of his life, obviously, of his being. Were there any works of art about homosexuality in England that inspired you beyond Sassoon poems? When I was watching this film, it kind of reminded me a bit of “ Maurice,” the James Ivory film, but if it were a sadder film. I've been looking for it for 76 years now and I've never found it. But when you're looking for something that will balm your soul, would you ever find it? I don't think anybody does. He saw, to a certain extent, his work eclipsed by them, because death does confer on you some kind of special honor. I think in a sort of odd way, to be forgiven, but not for anything specific. What kind of redemption do you think he was seeking?
And of all the religions to wander into, the most guilt ridden is certainly a strange choice. But I think that's what he was looking for. You have to find that within yourself, or you don't find it at all. He wanted redemption, and nothing can give you that. What do you think Sassoon was looking for in Catholicism so late in life? You think: how did they get it that quickly? Astonishing.
The great thing with really, really good actors, is that, like a virtuosi who plays a violin or a piano, you just say one thing, and they do it. So it, you don't really have to go into that with the actors, because they already know it. At least you're not seen as corruptive, or in any way corrupt, because we didn't do anything to anybody.
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But I do think sometimes it's certainly skin deep. What has happened, I think, since then, there's been a much wider acceptance of homosexual all sorts of things. But when you've grown up with it being a criminal offense, even though you've not done anything, and that coupled with being Catholic, made it much, much harder. It was not so much portraying that as I remember, in this country, when homosexuality was a criminal offense, and seeing films like “ Victim.” It was a really important film because it helped change the law. Did any of that inspire how you wrote the older character or how Peter Capaldi played him? He sort of spent the last decade of his life in the shadow of the Wolfenden report. He died in 1967, which was a few weeks before the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 passed. I was really interested in how you showed Siegfried Sassoon’s life from WWI all the way towards the end of his life. spoke to Davies over Zoom about Sassoon’s search for redemption, the loneliness of being an observer, and the importance of casting just the right actor in a role. From doomed love affairs with the likes of Ivor Novello ( Jeremy Irvine) to his later conversion to Catholicism, Davies excavates the sorrows and the joys of Sassoon’s life to paint a portrait of a complex man forever searching for something to fill an unfillable void. “Benediction” intercuts archival footage of the war as we follow Sassoon (played at different ages by Jack Lowden and Peter Capaldi) through many important emotionally charged moments in his turbulent life.