Terence Davies talks about his approach to directing in this informative hour long documentary.
He doesn't like the emphasis in most British scripts on dialogue so instead emphasizes a visual strategy based on optical devices such as dissolves and tracking shots, often to the left to indicate movement backwards and to the right to indicate movement forwards.He prefers a studio recreation of his settings rather than real street locations and goes for a minimalist approach in his set designs so the viewers focus on the main details. What he is looking for above all in these reflections on past family life is what he calls "the poetry of the ordinary."
As specifically relates to his own background, he talks about his working class school, his Catholicism, and cites his use of the Doris Day film Young At Heart,a about a happy family with its color and artifice, as a contrast to what he recalls from the time as a rather gray Great Britain after WWII.