At 84, iconic British film director Ken Loach isn’t retiring, and he isn’t losing the anger. Interview by
Steve Kilgallon.
Ihadn’t cried at the cinema since I was an undiscerning 11-year-old, and that scene in Ghost when a disembodied Patrick Swayze helps Demi Moore with some hands-on pottery instruction proved strangely moving.
But I couldn’t help the tears when I saw Ken Loach’s film I, Daniel Blake last spring.
In this tale of a single mother and a middle-aged man battling to retain their dignity against an unfeeling, byzantine British welfare state that seems determined to break them, at one point the desperate mother finds herself at a foodbank, so hungry she can’t stop herself from gorging on the free food. I turned to my partner and she was crying too.
Is that level of connection a result for Loach?
‘‘We hope it is more than that,’’ the director says calmly, on the phone from London.
‘‘It should be trying to understand what is going on. You have to be moved by it to begin to try to see the bigger picture: that it is an intentional course of action by the state, knowing the consequences when they cut people’s essentials... what is shocking is a government knowingly driving people to hunger. That’s shocking.’’
Before its release last year, Loach had bleakly predicted that his film would have no impact. Now, he reports brightly, it did. ‘‘Daniel Blake passed briefly into the language as representing all the people who were denied basic sustenance, the basic means of life,’’ he says. It’s still alive in Britain two years on – having more than 700 extra screenings in community centres nationwide as a fundraiser, which delights him.
The picture it painted of austerity Britain under a Conservative government was not universally popular. A Telegraph editorial accused him of creating a false image of Britain as a ‘‘dark, miserable land run by toffs and rapacious bankers who subjugate the downtrodden masses and heroic workers beneath the jackboot of oppression’’.
It’s hardly unfamiliar criticism for Loach. For more than 50 years he’s been making highly politicised, campaigning films about British society. For example, it was also in the Telegraph in 2006 that Simon Heffer fulminated at such a ‘‘bigoted Marxist’’ winning the Palme D’Or for The Wind that Shakes the Barley – despite not having seen the film.
For Loach, it’s no surprise: it’s easier to attack his work as false than consider the issues it raises.
‘‘They would have to admit the system is wrong. They can’t admit the system produces poverty, so it has to be the poor who are to blame.’’
What matters more to him – making an impact, or making a good film? ‘‘They are indivisible, really,’’ Loach says. ‘‘If the film works, it touches people. But it also enables you to bring hope, to bring ambition, to enable people to see the world they live in that bit more clearly. For it to work as a film, it needs to be a story you want to watch, but then afterwards, you hope that people say it helped them see a little more clearly.’’
This month, the Rialto channel will screen both I, Daniel Blake – which won Loach his second Palme D’Or, at the Cannes Festival last year – but also a 2016 documentary, Versus: The Life and Films of Ken Loach.
The latter serves as something of a testimonial film, based on Loach’s since-retracted declaration of retirement at the age of 84. That was, he says now, ‘‘a silly thing to say’’.
He’s reluctant to talk about what he has coming next, but says: ‘‘I’m really pleased to see I am not in the obituaries each morning... you can’t plan decades ahead, that’s for sure.’’
New Zealand audiences may be less familiar with his work than British viewers. Good entry points to the Loach canon would be Kes (1969), a dark but touching tale of a misfit boy who finds solace in training a kestrel, which was once voted the ninth best British film of all time, or Raining Stones (1993), about an unemployed man trying to find the money to buy a dress for his daughter’s First Communion, or Simon Heffer’s favourite, The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006), the Irish War of Independence film.
Some have drawn a connection between Loach’s first major work, Cathy Come Home (1966) and Daniel Blake, probably because they neatly bookend his career so far.
Cathy addressed homelessness, unemployment and child welfare; more than 12 million people watched it one Wednesday night and two major