Renowned Film Director Ken Loach talks at the Raindance Film Festival 2016
Ken Loach, awarded the Raindance Auteur Award yesterday, is one of a rare breed who captures life and its rough edges on film in a way that leaves so many of us wanting more. A campaigner for fair treatment for the oppressed or undermined, some of his films address issues head on which initially a small minority might shun. He has looked at homelessness – Cathy Come Home, the Irish War of Independence – The Wind that Shakes the Barley (which is one of two of his films which was awarded the Palme d’Or) and his new film yet to be released which everyone is talking about I Daniel Blake won his second Palme d’Or. Loach has a wife and five children. Married in 1962 after studying law at St Peter’s Oxford he initially forged his intense passion for film through watching Italian cinema as well as Eastern European and Czeck and French new wave movies. He still sees that showing films such as his genre is more relaxed in France than it is in the UK and other parts of Europe. Loach notes that Hollywood’s taste for formulaic films filters down to a sorry lack of interest in the more nitty gritty feel real factor material which the best filmmakers in the UK can readily produce and is keen that new filmmakers do follow their passion for stories that resonate and he says “you’ve just gotta do what burns you up. You’ve just gotta make the film you can’t not make!”.
Loach notes that “Our cinema as an industry encourages directors to look across the Atlantic. We should look nearer home for our stories”, and as we are all aware, British Film has been on the up and up for the past 20 years and looking at film whether on TV or in the cinema, his view is “We need to democratise all channels and take away manipulative and beaurocratic people at the top”.
Loach’s films have something of a common theme as a whole which could be categorised thus: “You can only choose something which makes a visceral connection to the people” and My Name is Joe with Peter Mullan (1998) is just such a case. The title of the film is an echo of the ritualised greeting at AA meetings and the actor Peter Mullan spent some several weeks in Glasgow’s meaner streets to get himself ready for the role. Loach does not believe in the caravan and the private car for his stars. He likes them to muck in and feel real with the rest of the crew.
When making the memorably angst ridden Kes from A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines, the chief actors for the parts were found locally from the comprehensive, and declared that the food on set was much better than school dinners. The lead star of Kes, David, is the boy with a “tethered” future mapped out of “unskilled labour” (going down the coal mines). Metaphors were not referred to in the first days of the film but now you see the young boy as the “compromised” being whilst Kes the kestrel is flying high and apparently care free. The making of Kes came about through the help of Tony Richardson who had just made Tom Jones and came on board with the project. Richardson helped show Loach the way forward in the vitally important area of raising finance.
Loach has not exactly courted controversy during his many years of film making (he turned 80 in June this year) but he has had controversy affect him due to the essence of his stories when addressing serious issues which lift the lid on unpleasantness and pressing points which affect us all. With The Wind that Shakes the Barley, the British Army were not content with the way they were portrayed in the story, and some of the documentaries Loach has made have not been shown due to their serious and unsettling content.
Moving swiftly on, Loach discovered that a hand held camera 16 mil on the shoulder was a great way to make shots look more real and gave the impression to the viewer of intimacy as though films were almost part of their own room – “like a human eye in the corner of a room”.
Look out for I Daniel Blake on release soon. Witnessing this highly experienced man who is something of an auteur had an essence of being in the company of someone who has a way of making everyone seem more important than himself. Loach is humble and intellectual and my guess is his choice of subject matter at times has led to people trying to make his life somewhat more difficult than he is happy to comment on. He has also worked in television as well as film and his legacy of films is hugely important to the British and world cinema market. Let’s hope therefore that after I Daniel Blake there WILL be even more to contemplate!
Penny Nair Price