Loach on Loach

From South Yorkshire to the Spanish Civil War, no director is more synonymous with social realism than Ken Loach. As his work is collected in a DVD box set for the first time, he talks exclusively to Dave Calhoun about each of its 16 films – the key works which have defined his illustrious career

Cathy Come Home (1966)
One of ten films made for the BBC’s ‘The Wednesday Play’ series between 1965 and 1969, ‘Cathy Come Home’ tells of Cathy (Carol White), her husband and her two young children who fall into poverty and homelessness. Loach shot the film in a harried, documentary style that he later turned away from with ‘Kes’ and his work with cinematographer Chris Menges.

Ken Loach: ‘The film had an effect in alerting people to the issue of homelessness. The writer was also writing newspaper articles that were part of the groundswell which put homelessness on the agenda. That same groundswell led to the formation of Shelter and a change in the law: local authorities could no longer split families who were homeless – they had to house them as families. I think that’s all it did. There’s nothing in the film to challenge the property relations or the market economy out of which homelessness comes. That’s the root of it, and I think we weren’t even aware of that question when we made it. It’s a social-issue film, with all the limitations that brings. Nevertheless, it came at a time when television was very new and people were watching it with innocent eyes. In one sense, it’s quite shallow, but in another it was quite new in the way we tried to use film.’

Poor Cow (1967)
Loach’s first film for cinema saw him work again with Carol White as Joy, a young mother whose husband Tom (John Bindon) is jailed for thieving. Joy struggles to cope and begins a damaging relationship with Dave (Terence Stamp), a working-class man-about-town and Tom’s best friend.

‘I learned a huge amount making this; I was very young and had only been in the business for about three years. I was very raw. There were various influences that are not properly absorbed. After 40 odd years, I can say that the production itself was not well-organised! It took twice as long to shoot as anything else I’ve ever shot. Nell Dunn’s book is a very sensitive, funny, sharp book, and the film I made is a little bit of a mess to be honest. I’m sure a large part of it was my fault. I wasn’t experienced enough. There was a programme on the TV the other night that inferred that I hadn’t got on with Terence Stamp while making “Poor Cow”, but we got on fine. I was a bit miffed about that, really. I was tingling with irritation. If he saw it, he’d think that was not fair at all.’

Kes (1969)
Loach’s first adaptation of a Barry Hines novel, ‘Kes’ features an astonishingly assured performance from David Bradley as Billy, a young working-class schoolboy in Barnsley who’s set to follow his aggressive older brother down the pits before he finds and fosters a kestrel.

‘I had worked with people who weren’t experienced actors before, like Johnny Bindon in “Poor Cow”. The learning curve for me had happened in “Poor Cow”, and Chris Menges had been a camera operator on that film, and we talked about shooting a film and how to shoot it, and he said that what happens in front of the camera is much more interesting than what happens inside it. So after that we tried to arrange something that was reasonably authentic in front of the camera and just observe, rather than try to race around like eejits. In “Kes” we tried to put it in practice: instead of using a zoom, using a limited range of lenses that correspond to your eye and using natural light, or supplemented natural light.’

The Gamekeeper (1980)
Adapted from a novel by Barry Hines, the writer of ‘Kes’, this tells of a year in the life of a South Yorkshire gamekeeper (Phil Askham), a former Sheffield foundry worker. There’s no great story here, just acute observations of the relationships between the gamekeeper, his family, his peers and his bosses over the course of a normal working year.

‘Barry’s a very underrated writer; the book is worth a read. It’s very thoughtful and understated and funny. It was a real delight to work on that film and, because I was working with a television documentary department at the time, we were able to film it over the course of a year, or at least from late autumn to the game shoot in the following autumn. It was a very nice little film to do. It was absolutely about class, it’s not about birds!’

Hidden Agenda

Hidden Agenda (1990)
A human-rights activist is mysteriously killed in Belfast and accused by the authorities of being an IRA accomplice. An investigation by the dead man’s fiancée (Frances McDormand) and a British policeman (Brian Cox) begins to reveal a top-level conspiracy and the pair find their safety threatened. Loach was playing with fire with this daring thriller that inevitably drew pro-IRA and anti-British accusations, just as ‘The Wind that Shakes the Barley’ would 16 years later.

‘A Tory MP called this “the IRA entry at Cannes”.’ The big stroke of luck was that when everyone else had turned their back on me after a period in the 1980s when I simply couldn’t get anything made, I got a call from David Puttnam who was briefly head of Columbia Pictures and who asked me and Jim Allen if we would like to do a film about the Stalker affair, which was the story of this policeman, John Stalker, who was sent from Manchester to Belfast in the mid-1980s to investigate accusations of a shoot-to-kill policy in the police force. He was pulled back just when he was about to provide the evidence – which of course has subsequently been provided through the Stevens inquiry in 2003. It was proved that there was collusion and people were shot, or executed, without being brought to trial, and the executions continued.’

Riff Raff (1990)
In his first film role, Robert Carlyle is Steve, a young Scot in London who is ripping apart an old hospital with fellow building workers – scousers, Jamaicans and Irishmen. The banter is funny, often political, and Loach captures the rhythm – and the dangers – of daily work.

‘A friend introduced me to a writer called Bill Jesse, who was writing sketches for TV shows. He was a manic, funny Glaswegian who had been a merchant seaman and was working as a builder. We met up and pieced together a narrative. He would write little sketches and we hung the story around a Scotsman in London, which was what Bill was. The main character played by Robert Carlyle is a cover version of Bill and his adventures. It was like doing “Up the Junction” again.’

Raining stones

Raining Stones (1993)
With a great opening sequence in which Tommy (Ricky Tomlinson) and Bob (Bruce Jones) steal a sheep then try to sell it to a butcher, this drama was set in a housing estate near Manchester and captured the hopelessness of unemployment.

‘The writer, Jim Allen, tended to favour big themes, yet right under his nose were these amazing stories. We were talking about what to do next and he incidentally happened to mention some guy who got into debt wanting to buy a communion dress for his little girl. Immediately I said to him: “Well, that is the story.” It was a nice film to do, it was very contained around the estate where Jim had lived for a long time, the Langley estate in Rochdale. There were some great lines from Ricky that got cut because we didn’t have time; he was in the back of the van with the sheep and said: "They’re quite attractive when you get close to them, aren’t they?"'

Ladybird Ladybird (1994)
A devastating film – one of Loach’s best – in which Maggie (Crissy Rock) is a scouser in London who has had her two children taken away by social services. She tries to start a new life with Jorge (Vladimir Vega), but her past, her violent temper and a cold bureaucracy all conspire against her.

‘There are parallels with the plot of “Cathy Come Home”, but the character here is much deeper and more rounded: a seriously tragic figure. She has huge qualities but there’s one part of her make-up which will destroy her. Rona Munro’s script was brilliant, and the part of Maggie was huge. The actress absolutely had to be a poor, working-class woman; any sense of somebody playing down wouldn’t work. I guess we’ve all got good antennae for that now. I went to Liverpool because of Ricky Tomlinson, who got the point of the film, and found about 20 or 30 people in a dockers’ club in Everton. They were mainly club acts, who always have a sense of performance but are rooted in where they come from. We picked Crissy Rock in the end. She was amazing. Of all the people I’ve ever worked with, she was just breathtaking. What was really sad was that we went to the Berlin Film Festival and she won Best Actress, but nobody here recognised what she had done. It passed beneath their noses, really.’

Ian Hart (front) goes to war in 'Land an Freedom'

Land and Freedom (1995)
An epic undertaking: Loach travelled to Spain to make this story set in the Spanish Civil War. As with ‘The Wind that Shakes the Barley’, Loach concerns himself with a split on the political left and what could have been as he follows a Liverpudlian (Ian Hart) who joins the brigadistas.

‘Jim Allen and I had talked about the Spanish Civil War for years and years and it hadn’t come to fruition. Then we got the opportunity when the producers Sally Hibbin and Rebecca O’Brien pulled it together. It was a massive adventure. I remember Rebecca and I standing in Barcelona, not speaking any Spanish and thinking: How on earth are we going to persuade people that we should come here and get them to re-enact their civil war, which they don’t really talk about much anyway? There were so many ghosts still abroad from that time. Initially, it was very daunting, but once we started and people could see we were reasonably serious in what we were trying to do, they were very helpful.’

Carla’s Song (1996)
Robert Carlyle returned to work with Loach as George, a bus driver who falls for Nicaraguan refugee Carla (Oyanka Cabezas), and goes with her to her home country.

‘Around the time we were doing “Ladybird Ladybird”, I met Paul Laverty, who had worked in Nicaragua and written a script about it. He was a very good writer who I immediately got on with. He spent a year in Los Angeles on a writers’ course and hung out with various lowlifes. I phoned and said I needed someone who could speak Spanish and be a link to all the brigadistas in Spain, so he appears as an actor in “Land and Freedom”, but also out of that time came “Carla’s Song”, which he wrote.’

Louise Goodall and Peter Mullan in 'My Name is Joe'

My Name is Joe (1998)
Peter Mullan is Joe, a football coach and recovering alcoholic, who strikes up a relationship with Sarah (Louise Goodall), a social worker.

‘This came after Paul Laverty had written “Carla’s Song”. It was clear that Paul had a lot to say and write about his home country and home city; he’s from near Glasgow. We talked about that, and Paul went back and stayed in Glasgow. We imagined the character of the social worker first: someone whose life was their work, really, and was afraid of commitment in other areas. Joe was a complementary character. But in the end, it was Joe’s story that drove the film.’



Bread and Roses (2000)
Loach shot this film, written by Paul Laverty, in LA and focused on the experiences of illegal Mexican workers. Maya (Pilar Padilla) crosses the border and persuades her sister Rosa (Elpidia Carrillo) to get her a job as an office cleaner. Union activist Sam (Adrien Brody) stokes her political idealism.

‘This came out of Paul Laverty’s time in Los Angeles. It was quite difficult to film there. We met some people who were absolutely brilliant and very sympathetic and very supportive, and we met others for whom we were just below their radar. They couldn’t understand what we were messing about with and why we weren’t making the film on their terms properly. There was no American money: we were a European production on location in America, and anyone who was prepared to invest just wanted to rip us off, tell us how to make the film, who to have in it and so on.’

The Navigators

The Navigators (2001)
This was Loach’s response to the privatisation of the rail industry, from a script by Rob Dawber, an ex-railway worker who died during production from mesothelioma, an asbestos-related disease thought to be linked to his work. Coming before the Hatfield disaster, it proved as prescient as many of Loach’s other works.

‘I’ve been lucky to work on things that concerned me at the time. I began in the theatre with the idea of community theatre, which was all very much stimulated by people like Joan Littlewood and the writings of people like Brecht. Politically, everything came together for me between about 1964 and ’68. In the early ’60s at the BBC I delivered leaflets for Harold Wilson; I was a Labour supporter. But then the party revealed itself as what we would later call a social democratic party: when the chips were down they would rather support the bosses rather than the people who work for them.’

Sweet Sixteen (2002)
Fifteen-year-old Liam (Martin Compston) has good reasons for selling heroin: his mum’s a junkie and in prison and he wants to buy her a caravan for after her release. Won Laverty an award at Cannes.

‘The relationship with a writer is always the key to understanding a new place, whether it was Jim Allen in Middleton or Paul in Glasgow. I met people in Scotland through Paul. I think it’s just common sense. If you meet people, not trying to dig around but just as an ordinary person who wants to hear their story, I think then people will talk. It’s the same as with any journalist: if you go to listen with some humility, then people will talk to you. It helps the way I work too: we draw people into the process and there are always local people working with us.’

Ae Fond Kiss (2004)
The third of Loach and Laverty’s modern Scottish stories, this dealt with a new subject for Loach: an interracial romance between an Irish teacher (Eva Birthistle) in Glasgow and a Scottish lad (Atta Yaqub) from an Asian family.

‘Wherever possible we try to recruit a crew local to the shoot. It’s not very nice when people from a certain place are in a film but everybody around them is talking a different language or dialect. In Nicaragua, we had a lot of Spanish crew, so at least they spoke the same language. Also, this way you constantly have to validate what you do, because the people around you know what’s really happening there. If you set up something false, someone will tell you and they’ll react against it. That’s a very good check.’

The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006)
Tells of the failure of the Irish left to secure full independence from Britain in 1921. Won Loach the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year.

‘Both this and “Land and Freedom” present moments when there were real possibilities for the left. In Ireland after 1916 there was the Declaration of Independence and the social programme of the first Dáil. In Europe too it was on the cards. The British government was very frightened that there would be a socialist revolution on the other side of the Irish Sea. It was a moment of possibility and a legitimate struggle for independence from the British empire. Before this, Ireland was a colony; afterwards, it had a measure of independence.’

‘The Ken Loach Collection Volumes One & Two’ will be released on Sept 3. Loach’s new film, ‘It’s A Free World’, has a special preview (plus a Q&A with Loach and Paul Laverty) at BFI Southbank on Sept 13, before a screening on Channel 4 on September 27 and its DVD release on October 1.