A Director’s Struggle With Art and His Beginnings : Movies: ‘The Long Day Closes’ is the latest of Terence Davies’ films that attempt to come to terms with sexuality and his past in dispassionate Britain.

“I can’t be diplomatic,” Terence Davies declares hotly. “I say what I think, and I mean what I say. Now in England that’s considered ‘vulgar.’ If you’re passionate about something, everybody gets embarrassed, because the English aren’t supposed to be passionate. I cannot be like that.”

If you’re familiar with his films, the notion of Terence Davies getting upset about anything might seem odd. Delicate , sensitive and restrained are the words most often used to describe “Trilogy,” “Distant Voices, Still Lives” and his latest work, “The Long Day Closes” (which opens today at the Sunset 5 and NuWilshire). With their subtle, mood-filled evocations of lower-middle-class Liverpool family life in the 1950s, the films wouldn’t appear to have been made by an angry man.

But as he sits by the pool at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles and recounts the trouble he’s faced in life and art, it’s clear that Davies has no intention of hiding his hostile feelings toward his country--even in the face of the American Anglophilia that embraces everything from Benny Hill to “Howards End.”

“In Britain,” Davies explains, “there seems to be an attitude of making things as difficult as possible for filmmakers. Then, you stick it out, they take you into the ‘club,’ let you put out any kind of rubbish you want and they support it.”

Davies has never been taken into the “club,” and isn’t likely to be in the foreseeable future. The youngest of 10, he slaved for 12 years as an accountant before going to drama school and then embarking on a filmmaking career. “Trilogy,” his critically acclaimed study of the life and death of a lonely gay man, took nearly 10 years to make despite its minuscule budget.

“Distant Voices, Still Lives,” his family memoir in which a psychotic father’s brutal treatment of his wife and children is set against a backdrop of a cappella pop songs, won the International Critics Prize at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival, with many reviewers comparing it to the best work of Robert Bresson and Yasujiro Ozu.

Yet in spite of this, Davies found it was an uphill battle to make “The Long Day Closes,” an even more personal memoir of his early adolescence, whose brief yet carefully constructed scenes feature less in the way of dialogue than they do music. For example, Davies’ youthful alter ego stands in a rainy street as Doris Day cheerily holds forth on the soundtrack with “At Sundown.”

“Long Day” even goes so far as to “sample” the soundtracks of Davies’ favorite films (“The Magnificent Ambersons,” “Great Expectations”), the better to compare and contrast their fictional moods with his remembered real-life emotions. Davies freely admits that it’s hard to find funds for such unconventional work. But he also feels that class snobbery has played an important part in his unsettled British reception.

“The English are odd,” says Davies with undisguised annoyance. “They’re a mixture of the philistine and the intellectually insufferable. Go to any party where they’ve all been to Oxford or Cambridge. You’ll think these people are the greatest advertisements for mercy killing the world has ever known. They’ve all been told that they’ll inherit the Earth, and that’s exactly what they’ve done!

“I remember,” he continues, “one of these undergraduates once said to me, ‘Which college did you go to?’ Because I have a flat accent he’d automatically assumed I’d gone to college. I told him I hadn’t gone to any college at all--I was too poor. I said to him, ‘But supposing I had a thick Liverpool accent and had gone to Jesus College. Would you have asked me that question?’ The subject was dropped like that! That kind of thing really makes me angry.”

Davies is pleased that he’ll soon be free of “that kind of thing” as he will make his next films independently in the United States. Currently he is working on a script called “Vile Bodies” (not to be confused with the Evelyn Waugh novel of the same name), a contemporary drama of unrequited gay love set in New York City. He is also planning a film adaptation of John Kennedy Toole’s “The Neon Bible” for producer Stephen Wooley (“The Crying Game”) to star Gena Rowlands. The first novel by the posthumously prize-winning author of “A Confederacy of Dunces,” “Bible” is a semi-autobiographical tale of growing up in the South during World War II.

“I’ve had to stop working on the script of ‘Vile Bodies’ for a bit,” Davies says, “because the story involves a murder investigation and I haven’t had a chance to study the working methods of the American police. So I think I will be doing ‘Neon Bible’ first. I can’t do any film until I see it visually in my mind, and when I was reading the book I could see what the shots would be so clearly.

“Toole was 16 when he wrote it,” Davies continues, “but it’s very mature for a 16-year-old to write this, as if it were almost a throwaway.

“My only fear,” Davies adds laughing, “comes from the fact that my film won’t provide an American’s view of the South. I do hope I won’t dramatize it in a way that turns it into some sort of English cliche--Chat on a Hot Tin Roof!”

But Davies’ fears and hopes about his work are minor next to those related to his personal life. For while he’s always been candid about his homosexuality and has been far from shy about dealing with it in his work--particularly in “Hallelujah Now,” his harrowing novel about the gay sadomasochist subculture--he is by no means pleased with his sexual orientation. The linchpin of that displeasure, Davies freely admits, has been his inability to engineer a long-term relationship with anyone--a problem, he feels, that is endemic to gay culture as a whole.

“I don’t like being gay,” the filmmaker says matter-of-factly. “If I could change it tomorrow, I would. But that’s a very subjective, very jaundiced view. Had I been very good-looking and had a wonderful body, and had people queuing up for me, then I might think it was absolutely wonderful. Unfortunately, I think there’s this element in gay culture that has created this very, very powerful myth of strength and beauty.”

Yet for all of his misgivings, Davies is far from indifferent to the opposition he feels gays are faced with by the society that surrounds them. “You know in that sequence at the opening of ‘The Long Day Closes’ where the boy looks out the window and sees the workman and discovers that he’s attracted to men?” says Davies. “He pulls away from the window because he’s already been told that it’s wrong. And the thing that makes him feel it’s wrong is not his family, who love him, but the church. That’s why the same workman is seen later in a fantasy scene as Christ on the cross.

“Sexuality is amorphous when you’re 11. You don’t know what’s going on. That’s what’s both powerful and frightening about society’s attitude toward gay people. It’s automatically implied, because it’s never stated, that this is not the norm and therefore must be wrong. It’s a much more difficult thing to combat when that condemnation is only implied, because when it’s actually said you can stand up and say, ‘No, it’s not wrong.’ When it’s just an implication you don’t know where you are.

“Look,” Davies says, making an effort to pull himself out of the gloom that he tends to fall into when discussing sex, “if you don’t come to terms with it--and I think I’ll go to my grave without having come to terms with it--it ruins your life.”

He pauses, briefly lost in thought. “Sometimes,” he says quietly, “you think that all you’ll have to look forward to is being alone all the time. It always comes to you when you’re at your most vulnerable. I arrived here last night and everyone was meeting someone. But still, you’ve got to get over that. You’ve got to find a way to move on.”