Jim Loach on 'Oranges and Sunshine'

There’s another Loach on the block: Jim Loach is following in his father’s footsteps with 'Oranges and Sunshine', a film about a shameful episode in our recent history. Dave Calhoun meets him…

It’s an amusing image: Ken Loach, like any proud father, readying himself on the sofa to watch his son Jim Loach’s latest directorial effort: an episode of ‘Footballers’ Wives’. Or maybe Loach junior sent his dad preview discs of the episodes of ‘Bad Girls’ he directed between 2003 and 2006, just to see what he thought?

‘It’s almost like a full house,’ laughs Jim Loach when I mention that he has had a stab at directing almost every mainstream popular drama serial on British television over the last ten years, from ‘The Bill’ to ‘Waterloo Road’. He even directed six episodes of ‘Coronation Street’ in 2000. We’ve met an hour before he’s due on stage to talk about his debut feature film: ‘Oranges and Sunshine’ is the rousing and sensitive story of a Nottingham social worker, Margaret Humphreys, who in the 1980s fought to uncover the secret deportation to Australia of British children in care during the 1950s and ’60s.

Does Loach think television was a good training ground? ‘I would say it was,’ he says, being more careful than his father, who delivered a stinging attack on the guardians of the small screen at the last London Film Festival. ‘You have to shoot fast and get through loads of material and work with all sorts of scripts. You get bollocked if you don’t finish it in time. That said, I find it can be a challenge to hold on to your voice and that was something I thought about a lot.’

He’s had a lot of time to think about it. It was 2002 when Loach first contacted 66-year-old Humphreys, who in 1994 published ‘Empty Cradles’ about the Child Migrants Trust, the charity she founded to expose the British and Australian government’s role in child migration and help former migrants uncover their past. Then, in 2005, Loach partnered with a producer, Camilla Bray, who works at Sixteen Films, his father’s company, and contacted the writer Rona Munro to suggest they collaborate on a script. They finally started shooting in 2009.



‘I’d met Rona when I was much younger,’ he recalls. ‘She wrote one of my dad’s scripts, “Ladybird, Ladybird”, and Camilla and I thought she’d be great as she’s such a brilliant people person. I felt it would take a writer who wasn’t going to get into a passive relationship with the people who had the real experiences by just dutifully writing it all down.’

Emily Watson plays Humphreys, and we watch as this social worker, wife and mother of two kids from Nottingham flies back and forth across the world and meets adults whose parents believed them to have been adopted and who in fact had been shipped across the globe, often to abusive institutions. Watson’s performance is strong and compassionate, while Munro’s script uses Humphreys’s perspective to tell this extraordinary story without allowing her personal battle and difficulty at juggling her work and family lives to overshadow the experiences of the migrants.

Loach has said elsewhere that having such a well-known director as a father slightly put the brakes on his ambitions to direct films. Has that reticence faded? ‘Yeah, I think it’s gone. I was conscious with it being my first film there’d be a spotlight on it, as with anyone’s. That’s why I was worrying. You feel sometimes that a narrative has been created for you, and I don’t seek to control it now, whereas maybe in the past I did.’

Loach has worked his way up through television over more than 15 years. He worked as a researcher before embarking on directing. But surely his best training was having Ken Loach at the table as a child? ‘We talk all the time about films and filmmaking, so I’m lucky in that sense,’ he agrees. ‘Although maybe we talk more about football. My dad recently got a BlackBerry, so I get texts with little tips on. But obviously, to me he’s just my dad.’

I point out that he grew up at a difficult point in his dad’s career: Ken Loach could barely find funding in the 1980s. ‘Absolutely, he has carved out a career over 40 years – but when we were young he couldn’t make a feature. That must have been when I was ten to 18. Growing up with it, you see the ups and downs. My dad’s got a massive work ethic, and I inherited that or just had it drummed into me.’

He says that he, Munro and Bray have a second script almost ready: ‘It’s fiction, but in a way it came out of “Oranges and Sunshine”.’ He also says he’ll be following his father’s pattern of sticking to directing and working closely with writers: ‘I like the checks and balances.’ He admits that when it comes to the sort of films he wants to make, he’s his father’s son. ‘I’ve got a clear sense of the stories I want to tell. I’ve been imbued with the responsibility of filmmaking in terms of what the piece is really saying to an audience.’



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