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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.
Loach starts to shoot the scene.
When Angie starts to select faces from the crowd, he encourages the
crowd to behave as desperately as possible. ‘Some of you are sending
money back to your families,’ Loach implores, rallying the crowd. ‘If
you don’t work, they suffer.’
He shoots the scene one more
time and then stops, returning to talk to the crowd. He’s keen to wipe
the smile off some of their faces. ‘It’s never a joke,’ he chastens.
When he rolls again, the atmosphere is more lively, and by the sixth
and seventh takes there’s a strong energy to the scene. ‘You’re
useless,’ Angie barks to one unhappy reject, while at the same time
shooing others into the back of a rusty minibus. ‘You – get your hair
cut,’ she snaps at another. ‘You look lazy, I’ve had bad reports about
you.’
Watching
the scene is Paul Laverty, the film’s
49-year-old Scottish writer and a former civil rights lawyer who now
lives in Spain with his wife, the director Iciar Bollain. Laverty and
Loach have worked together on the director’s last six features (and
also Loach’s segments for the portmanteau projects ‘Tickets’ and ‘11’
09” 01 September 11’) – films that include ‘Carla’s Song’, ‘My Name is
Joe’ and ‘The Wind that Shakes the Barley’. Over in the corner of the
car-park, Laverty huddles in an empty lock-up, away from the gaze of
the camera and next to the film’s producer, Rebecca O’Brien, who has a
twenty-year long working relationship with Loach (who walks past,
raising his eyes at the scene around him. ‘It’s really no life for a
grown-up, is it? It’s really ridiculous,’ he jokes). O’Brien and
Laverty agree that they were eager to tackle a modern story after their
foray into Irish Civil War history for ‘The Wind that Shakes the
Barley’. ‘After Ireland, we wanted to do something absolutely,
massively contemporary,’ Laverty explains. ‘I wanted to go back to the
cusp of something. It’s always nice to be digging around.’
After
considering setting ‘These Times’ in Scotland, a natural location for
Laverty’s pen, they ultimately opted for London. ‘The East End has a
long tradition of immigrants coming here, so it made sense to shoot it
here.’
Laverty travelled across Britain and spoke to workers,
collecting stories and experiences. ‘I went up to Birmingham and made
contact with the Polish Centre there, who put me in touch with lots of
people who told me about their lives. Some people were working for a
week and getting £10. Some were working for a month and getting
nothing, they were just told to piss off at the end. Some were brought
down to London from Birmingham and put to work and told, “We’ll pay you
next week, we’ll pay you next week. . .”. There are no statistics. You
just talk to people and listen to them and the amount of abuse out
there is unbelievable.’
Laverty’s research uncovered horror
stories of Mafioso-style involvement in immigrant labour. He heard
tales of people searching for work, handing over money and later being
dumped out of a van, homeless, in the middle of nowhere in a foreign
country. But he and Loach were keen to avoid such extreme stories and
instead focus on the everyday experiences of thousands of workers. They
decided, too, not to make an immigrant worker the focus of the drama.
By exploring a British character such as Angie, an ambitious recruiter
of labour, they wanted to reflect the wider British experience and our
complicity as a nation in the ugly side of the world of
work.
Author: Dave Calhoun. Portrait Rob Greig
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