Ken Loach: The Hollywood Interview

Filmmaker Ken Loach.


KEN LOACH: FOR THE PEOPLE
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the June 2001 issue of Venice Magazine.

Long known for his films that are the antithesis of the American, $100 million summer blockbuster, Ken Loach might well be considered the father of modern socialist cinema. Heavily influenced by the Italian neo-realists like Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio de Sica, Loach's films take a gritty, cinema-verité look at everyday life among the working classes. Born June 17, 1936 in Nuneaton, England to a working class family (his father was a factory worker), Loach was part of the first generation granted scholarships to major English universities. Upon being accepted at Oxford, Loach originally intended to study law, then fell in love with the theater and became president of the university's Experimental Theater Club. After graduation, Loach toured as an actor with a repertory company.

Loach's big break came in 1960, when he went to work for the BBC, working his way up to director of the popular police drama "Z-Cars," (which also launched other notables such as Ridley Scott), then joined forced with producer Tony Garnett for the now-legendary "Wednesday Play" series, a ground-breaking anthology series that generated enormous controversy because of its blatant socialist overtones. The most famous of these, Loach's Cathy Come Home (1965) created such a stir, that it caused the British government to change its homelessness aid laws. Loach made his feature debut with Poor Cow in 1967, the story of a promiscuous and luckless young woman (portrayed by Loach's discovery Carol White) and her misfortunes (the film gained some recent notoriety when clips from it were used as flashbacks in Steven Soderbergh's The Limey). Loach followed this with Kes (1969), a touching, straightforward story about a working class boy and his pet falcon. After Family Life (aka Wednesday's Child) in 1971, Loach's films, while garnering some critical acclaim, faired poorly at the box office, not to mention their liberal leanings were not appreciated by the increasingly conservative government and British society.

Loach spent the next 15 years working in television, telling tales of the working class and the oppressed that begged for radical change. Some were so controversial and inflammatory to the powers that be, (such as his documentary series on a 1984 British miner's strike), they were never broadcast.

Loach made a spectacular comeback in the 1990s, with a series of award-winning feature films firmly establishing him in the pantheon of great European directors (his films have always been more popular in mainland Europe than in his native country or the U.S.). Hidden Agenda, a drama about the conflict in Northern Ireland, won the Special Jury Prize at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival. Riff-Raff won the Felix award for Best European Film of 1992; Raining Stones won the Cannes Special Jury Prize for 1993, and Land and Freedom won the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize and the Ecumenical Jury Prize at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival, and was a substantial box-office hit in Spain where it sparked intense debate about its subject matter (the Spanish Civil War). My Name is Joe (1998) won numerous accolades, including three British Academy Awards, and Best Actor at Cannes for star Peter Mullan.

Loach's latest is his first film set in the United States. Bread and Roses is based on a true story about a janitor's strike that shook Southern California (and all but shut down Century City) during the 1990's. Newcomer Pilar Padilla (excellent) plays a Mexican immigrant who finds work cleaning posh Century City high-rises, only to find that the management is exploiting her and her fellow workers almost as badly as they had been in the native countries which they fled. Adrien Brody delivers another stellar performance as the union organizer who also captures Padilla's heart during their struggle. The Lion's Gate release is currently playing in theaters, and will give you pause the next time you see those "invisible" people who clean up after you when you leave the office at 6 P.M.

Ken Loach sat down with Venice recently to discuss his career as one of cinema's greatest voices of conscience.

Tell us about the genesis of Bread and Roses.
Ken Loach: The writer, Paul Laverty, was here in '94, met many of the janitors and just got to talking, went to some meetings with them, and heard their stories. We were working on another project at the time and he phoned me up and told me about this, and we both agreed it would make a wonderful story.

How did you find working in the States compared to Europe?
Many unexpected things, really. In Europe I guess we try to be light on our feet, very quick and responsive to what's happening. Here, that was quite difficult. Maybe it's just Los Angeles, but the whole process just seems more cumbersome. I was lucky enough to have a smashing crew, who made my life much easier. For example, there's a sequence where the two characters hop on a motorbike and drive through the campus of a university. Back home, we'd just put a cameraman on a bike and do it! Here, we had to have a stunt coordinator. We had to close lanes of traffic, with three cars hemming them in...much more complicated. Ten minutes work that wound up taking us hours.

How did you go about doing your research?
We came out a couple years before we shot and made first contact with the (janitor's union) and from there the contacts just continued. We spent time in their homes, at work with them, going to marches, just generally joining in. Plus we auditioned a huge number of janitors to be in the film. There's three actual janitors amongst our group in the film. Having "real people" in the cast keeps everyone on their toes.

Pilar Padilla is a real find.
She's lovely. She's know in Mexico a bit, but we wanted someone who wasn't touched by L.A. by being an actor here, which is a pretty grueling experience, I think. So we went to Mexico and auditioned a lot of people there. Pilar didn't have much English then, so we discounted her initially, then she came back and read with another actress and we found ourselves watching Pilar, instead of the one we were supposed to watch! (laughs) So that was it.

Adrien Brody is really emerging as a major talent, also.
Yes. We wanted someone with a bit of mischief about him, not someone who came off as very self-righteous and "the voice of the film," because that's the danger with that part. We wanted somebody who got into trouble, who did things he shouldn't have done, like flirting with one of the janitors. He's a guy just out of college, with a sort of youthful naiveté. It sort of dirtied him down a bit, made him more real.

All of your films have an improvisational quality. How much dialogue is scripted and how much is improvised?
We work around the script, but the script is always the key. The lines give the actors the tools they need, but then you've got to make it spontaneous. If you look at the script before we've finished the film, and then afterwards, you'll find that we stick pretty close to the original dialogue.

What's the difference, do you think, between making a film which is politically charged and a film that's propaganda?
I don't know. I suppose what you try and do, I'm not saying you succeed, is just to be a sympathetic observer. And also show that this exists in a context, not in a vacuum, and just observe it in a kind of cool and sympathetic way, without winding up in melodrama. That's the aim, anyway.

You grew up working class, then went to Oxford to study law. What was that like?
I was fortunate enough to be part of the first generation that could be awarded a grant to study at university. That was a huge breakthrough for us. It was like being a kid in a sweetshop, just wonderful. It was very beguiling, like walking into paradise, going from being a kid in an industrial town to being at Oxford. There were a whole group of us there who had done our National Service first, so we were like 20, 21, and had gotten over the idea of being in school. We just wanted to have a great time. Work was the last thing you thought about. I had secretly harbored the idea of being an actor, so that's how I got started doing theater. A lot of the people I worked with went on to do big things, like Dudley Moore.

When did your political ideology start to form?
Not at university. When I worked at the BBC in the mid-60's there were a whole group of us who became political together through the process of our work. We did a series called "The Wednesday Play," which was on right after the news. The point of the series was to do contemporary fiction. We wanted to switch from shooting things on a set indoors, which was more theatrical, to shooting 16mm hand-held on the street. And that was the whole politicizing process, really, because that's when the "new left" was really born, a child much more of Trotsky than the Communist party was. A lot of the writers we worked with were older and I learned a lot from them. Very heady days for people in their late 20's.

You did three films (Up the Junction, Cathy Come Home, Poor Cow) with Carol White who was a big star in the 60's and then sort of faded away to a tragic end. Tell us about her.
She was a really sweet working class girl from west London. She was married to a musician named Mike King who was part of a group called The King Brothers. They had two little boys. I think after she got a lot of film offers and gained some notoriety, because she had a very sexy, irrepressible and fun quality, I think her feet left the ground. People were always telling her that she was going to be a huge star and her head was turned by it. She went from being a very attractive working class girl with a scarf around her head to having people wanting to make her hair glossy and giving her make-up and poor Carol, you could see that it was all changing her. Then somebody wanted to take her Hollywood, thinking she'd be a trophy for them. So she came to Hollywood, her marriage broke up, because she felt she should move on, which was very sad for Mike and for their boys. I really lost touch with her after that. I know she had various involvements and so forth, but I think she was just very vulnerable and very easy to exploit. People would see she was good, but they didn't understand why she was good. They thought she'd still be good if they dressed her up in other kind of clothes and hair-do's and putting on another kind of accent, and of course, she wasn't. She was good as who she was. Her talent was being who she was. She ended up dying in a Miami motel, from liver failure I think, still in her 40's. It was very sad.

After making a critical splash with your first few features, you returned to television for several years.
Well, they didn't make enough to pay the usherettes, is what we were told. (laughs) And there was no money for films in Britain that just reflected English stories. Everything had to be trans-Atlantic. So I made television films, really through the 80's.

How were your films received during the Thatcher years?
This is another mistake I made, really. Thatcher came to power in '79, and there was an immediate onslaught against the working class. She saw it as her mission to reinvigorate British capitalism, which meant make labor cheap, which meant people would make profits, then there would be more investments, and the whole ghastly engine would start up again. She withdrew subsidies from a lot of factories, so the industries collapsed, and a lot of people were out of work. She passed laws against unions to stop them from organizing. She just put them in a straight jacket. I did a series of four documentaries about this, which said that the trade union leaders could have organized opposition to this, but refused to do it, and in doing so, became complicit with the Thatcherites. We got some of the leaders on camera and really hammered them with tough questions. Then the television station withdrew them and refused to show them. They said "We don't want to hear this. We're not going to show it." So it was two years' work down the drain, really. After doing a couple more documentaries which had very sparse showings on television, I was unemployed for a time.

What happened then?
Then David Putnam, who was then running Columbia Pictures, gave me a commission to make a film in Ireland called Hidden Agenda. We were just getting a script together when he was ousted from Columbia. By then it was the end of the 80's, and Channel 4 by that time was putting money into smaller British films, and I managed to get film about building laborers done, and from then on, it's been about one a year.

Any advice for first-time directors?
Don't take advice. You have to make up your own mind what to do from the beginning. Don't follow the industry ritual. Follow your own voice. The industry practice, I think, is very damaging, very sterile.