Ken Loach in the Wardour Street office of his production company Sixteen Films

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Ken Loach interview

With ’Cathy Come Home‘, Ken Loach created one of the most iconic London films ever. Now he‘s back in the capital for the first time in ten years to make a film about the immigrant labour market. Time Out witnesses his unique working methods on set.

The Lord Rookwood pub in Leytonstone, with its West Ham flags tacked to the windows and its early drinkers hovering around the bar at 11am, isn’t the first place you’d expect to find the most recent winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or. But round the back of this East End pub and preparing to start a day’s work on his next film is Ken Loach, whose last picture, the Irish Civil War drama ‘The Wind that Shakes the Barley’ has only just left the capital’s cinema screens. It’s more than a decade since Loach, who turned 70 last year, made a film in London (that was ‘Ladybird Ladybird’ in 1994). Now, with ‘These Times’, he’s aiming at the jugular of modern Britain by setting his film slap-bang in the here and now and crafting a drama out of the shady, desperate world of our city’s immigrant workers. It’s classic Ken Loach: modern, moving and unstinting in its desire to bring a contemporary social issue to film audiences, just as he did over four decades ago with ‘Cathy Come Home’ and homelessness and, more recently, ‘Ae Fond Kiss’ and inter-racial relationships in Scotland.

On this November morning, a group of about 30 extras have gathered in the pub’s scruffy car-park; most, if not all, are completely unaware of the director’s reputation for socially and politically engaged pictures. One man tells me he’s here because he replied to a posting on a website. Another questions out loud what the film is about. All, one imagines, are keen on the extra cash. Many are Polish, and there’s a Polish interpreter on hand. Other extras are Asian or from the Middle East. When he’s ready to start, Loach gathers them together and starts to explain, quietly but with authority, what he wants from them.

‘You’ve all come to this yard today to get jobs,’ Loach starts. He then points out the bottle-blonde, leather-trousered woman in her early thirties who’s standing next to him. She’s Kierston Wareing, the actress who plays Angie, the film’s lead, who until now has only done the odd bit for television. Her character is a tough nut, a hard-nosed recruiter of immigrant workers who meets them in car parks and directs them to jobs on building sites or factory production lines. She treats men and women like cattle and is no-nonsense, utterly unfazed at being a woman in a sea of desperate men clamouring for work to survive in a foreign city.

Loach continues: ‘Angie runs the agency and will be giving jobs to some people and not to others. In fact, you’ll all have to keep on her right side. She’s very temperamental.’ This scene crops up in the middle of ‘These Times’, although having read the script I know more about the film than the actors do. As ever, Loach is drip-feeding the plot to his cast, holding back as much information as possible so as not to influence their performances in the moment. Up until this point, we’ve seen how Angie, a working-class Londoner, has come to be doing this questionable job. We’ve witnessed the development of her ambition: at the beginning of the film, she loses her job at a large, legitimate British recruitment agency that operates in Poland. The loss of that job gives her the idea to start a smaller, underground recruitment firm with a friend, Rose (Juliet Ellis). The script then concerns itself with Angie’s hardening, self-seeking attitude and shows us the miserable lives of these workers, forced to toil for a pittance, often to support families, and always under threat of discovery and deportation.