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.