Interview. Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton) are vampires who have been married for centuries. They need human blood, but using fangs is so yesterday#151;instead they get their supply from dealers and sip it from cocktail glasses. …

Tom Hiddleston (Only Lovers Left Alive) Interview

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To raise awareness of preserving film for the future through digitisation, and to celebrate the British Film Institute archive’s 80th anniversary Tom Hiddleston writes exclusively for Bazaar about its importance, and why he would choose to preserve the impressionistic Distant Voices, Still Lives

Find out what Tom Hiddleston says about screen classic Lawrence of Arabia, and which films director Danny Boyle and Bond producer Barbara Broccoli chose in the October issue of Harper’s Bazaar. 

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 has 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.

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.

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.

What the BFI is doing to secure financial support to maintain the archive and national collection is brilliant and brave. Films aren’t made in factories, there is so much blood, sweat and tears that goes into a film. There are so many people involved in the making of a film, so much experience and skill. This all should be preserved – in the same way books should be kept on shelves. Cinema is the primary art form of our age. It defines everything. 

– Tom Hiddleston

Tom Hiddleston Writes For Bazaar Magazine