TODAY'S turn-up for the books. Terence Davies tells me that he has in fact watched one whole episode of Sex and the City.

Yes, that Terence Davies. The director of Sunset Song and The Long Day Closes and a handful of other perfectly cut jewels of British cinema, and famously a man who has disowned the modern world.

In short, not the kind of man likely to raise a cheer at the prospect of watching a sitcom about sex and shopping. "The level of narcissism," he moans, as we sit in the bar at the Malmaison hotel in Glasgow.

Even so, he is no longer a Sex and the City virgin, as it were. Admittedly, he adds, "I watched it with the sound down."

The reason? Just so he could check out the star of his new film A Quiet Passion, Cynthia Nixon, who played Miranda in the HBO series.

"I wanted to see the reaction shots," he told her afterwards, "and yours were almost always the truest."

Davies is in Scotland for the Glasgow Film Festival. He's here to talk about the new film of course, but in our short time together we also cover spirituality, celibacy, 19th-century American poetry, his fear of death and his love of Singing in the Rain. Sex and the City is the least of it.

A Quiet Passion is, it's fair to say, a world away from the adventures of Carrie Bradshaw and her friends. Alongside a cast that includes Keith Carradine and Jennifer Ehle ("she is radiant, radiant, that woman," coos Davies), the films sees Nixon play the reclusive American poet Emily Dickenson.

"I think she's the greatest 19th-century American poet. I just think she is," Davies tells me, before veering off into a discourse on her contemporaries.

"I don't care about Walt Whitman. The sentences are even longer than they are in Gerard Manley Hopkins. Try saying one sentence on a single breath. The Song of Myself, for God's sake. On the other hand you have Hiawatha by Longfellow. Well, at least that's memorable because it's got that octosyllabic rhythm and you never forget it."

He proceeds to recite the opening lines to prove the point. "On the shores of Gitche Gumee …"

I could listen to Davies talk all day, to be honest. His voice has the rich musicality of the lay preacher (and the rhetorical devices; as you may have noticed he enjoys the poetry of repetition). But more than that an interview with Davies is also a performance. I can't help feel there's an element of theatricality in his rejection of all things contemporary, his affection for the way things used to be done. He enjoys telling you how terrible everything is. And it's fun to listen. That doesn't mean he doesn't believe it, of course.

The reason he wanted to make a film about Dickenson, he says, was because of the parallels he saw with his own life. "I think her family was her whole world. She didn't want it to change and, from seven to 11, I was exactly the same. I thought my family would be like that forever.

"But also her spiritual quest I responded to. Because although she didn't go to church she was very spiritual, very concerned with the nature of the soul. If there is a God how will he judge her? And if there isn't a God and she has this self what happens [when she dies]? Is she completely extinguished?"

All of this chimes with him clearly. "I was brought up a Catholic and I was very fervent and I fought doubt for a long time, seven years in fact, until I was 22 and then I knew it was a lie.

"But the spiritual journey goes on long after you give up religion. I examine my conscience every day because that's what I was taught to do. I can't help it. I just do it. I once told my mother to shut up. It pains me still.

"So I know when you are that fervent about wanting to keep your soul pure. In Catholicism you should be pure in thought, word and deed. It's impossible. No one can do it. When you believe that you constantly fail. So I know what that quest was like. I felt that very much."

Davies is a devil for feeling. It's there in his films; these quiet, small dramas that throb with emotion. Did I read, I ask him, that he felt A Quiet Passion was his most autobiographical film? "That's what my manager said and I think he's right."

Really? This seems remarkable given that Davies made his name with a trio of explicitly autobiographical films about growing up in Liverpool in a big family with a violent father, the realisation that he was gay and his long and painful fallout with the church.

And yet A Quiet Passion is a reflection of the fact that he can locate himself in Dickenson, specifically in her sense of difference.

"She was an outsider and I am. I mean, I am not a participant. I observe. Sometimes that's very enjoyable. Other times it alienates you from the world around you."

More than that, he says, the sting of rejection that marked Dickenson has also marked him. She was largely rejected as a poet, with just a handful of poems published in a minor magazine during her lifetime. And Davies has spent more time in his life not making films than making them. He has often struggled to find the small amounts of money needed to get them off the ground at all.

He is acutely aware of his position in the industry. Or at least of how he sees it. "You go into a room and all the other directors have won all the major prizes at major film festivals and Oscars and Baftas and I haven't and I feel inferior. If you use that criteria I'm the also-ran. I'm the failure. And awards have come to mean more and more."

To you, Terence? "Partially. It would be nice if it happened once. Just once. But it never will because my films just won't win anything like that."

The more he talks the more Dickenson's life story chimes with his. Neither of them, he points out, found a life partner. "She had visions and fantasies about a man who would come and love her.

"It's very interesting," Davies suggests, "She uses the word 'looming' which has a menace to it.

"In that sequence 'let him come, let him come before the afterlife, let him not forget me, please let him not forget me.' I know what that's like. When I was found out I was gay, in those days it was a criminal offence. I hated … I hate being gay. I only went on the scene for a very short time and I said: 'I can't live like this. If this is what it is I don't want to know.' And I became celibate because of that."

Time and again he comes back to the idea of himself as an observer, a man apart, a man alone. He tells me about the reference his headmaster gave him when he left school at 15. "This boy is scrupulously honest," it said.

"I was very proud of that because I tried to be. Sometimes it's better to be kind than honest but most of the time I can't bear it when people are dishonest or dissembling because I can't do it and I don't like it. And it's something I find impossible to forgive."

Here's the thing though. Davies is not a recluse. Davies is still making movies and turning up at film festivals now that he's in his seventies. That's engagement for you, surely?

"It's getting harder and harder as I get older," he insists, "because what's been destroyed is being able to watch films now. I don't watch them because the easiest way to spoil something is to do it as a job. I notice syntax, I notice the acting, intrusive music. I think: 'why are we cutting from this to this?'

"I can't help it. It's like musicians who play in symphony orchestras. How can you give a conductor feeling when you've played the New World Symphony 500 times?"

Well, perhaps, and yet A Quiet Passion – for all that it's a small-scale domestic drama – is clearly made by a man in love with the very idea of cinema. And give him the chance and he will hymn the films he fell in love with as a child, the way the camera moved in Singing in the Rain or the rhythms of the shots or the pleasure of "cutting when the piece of music is right".

Would that that still happened in the cinema today, he says. "I can't bear it when it's just music as wallpaper. Why have it? But what people really want are blockbusters with actors being paid $40m a picture. In the end I think that's all they want."

Still, on he goes. Even now he is writing a script about Siegfried Sassoon for a film to coincide with the centenary of the end of the First World War.

Could he, I ask before he goes, ever make a film set in the here and now? "Probably not. I don't understand the modern world. I'm a technophobe. I have a mobile phone and I have three numbers on it."

Terence, that's two more than you had than the last time we met. "Yes," he laughs, "that's true."

Maybe, just maybe, Terence Davies is creeping into the 21st century.

A Quiet Passion is opens at the Glasgow Film Theatre and the DCA Dundee on Friday, April 14.