Electronic Telegraph
Saturday 1 February 1997 Issue 617
There's more to movies than popcorn
He's feted on the Continent, courted by Hollywood, but in
Britain the director Ken Loach can't shake off the 'dour
Marxist' label. He talks to David Gritten
WHEN most world-class film directors enter a room, they
do so with a flourish, milking the effect of their
presence for all it's worth. This is not Ken Loach's
style. After I have sat shivering for five minutes,
waiting in a bare, shabby room above London's Denmark
Street, Loach puts a tentative nose round the door,
surveys me warily over his glasses, and, smiling meekly,
sidles over to shake hands.
For the next hour he sips a mug of tea, talking in hushed
tones, as if normal decibel levels might be an affront.
He dresses nondescriptly - a tweed jacket, an overall
impression of earth tones. It is like meeting a kindly
history teacher who has one eye on retirement.
Yet this modest man's peers queue up to extol his
virtues. Alan Parker calls Loach's film Cathy Come Home
"the single most important reason I wanted to become a
director". Stephen Frears says he is "a genius". The
great Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski (who died last
year) said he would emerge from retirement only to work
with Loach, the one director who could make him laugh and
cry in a single scene. In short Loach, 60, is one of the
few British masters in cinema history.
But his reputation here brings to mind Tony Hancock's
plaintive cry in the Radio Ham sketch: "I've got friends
all over the world! All over the world! None in this
country, but all over the world." Loach is feted as a
director's director the length and breadth of Europe, and
four of his last five films (Hidden Agenda, Riff-Raff,
Raining Stones and Land and Freedom) won prizes at the
Cannes Film Festival in the past seven years. But these
same films are overlooked by British cinemas: distributed
narrowly, they are rarely seen outside our largest
cities.
His new work, Carla's Song (released in England February 1997), is
typical: "Our new distributors, PolyGram, have about 40
prints," says Loach. "It's not massive coverage of the
country, but at least we're in with a shout." Yet the
most dire piece of Hollywood production-line trash is
routinely released to more than 250 British screens. "I
feel the frustration of all this," Loach says. "But I've
come to think it goes with the territory."
For 30 years he has made unashamedly Leftist films,
blending real people and actors in a gritty, low-key
style best described as downbeat realism - indeed there
are those who dismiss his oeuvre as Marxist propaganda.
But, as Loach says, British audiences might respond
warmly if they ever saw the films: "Cinema owners have
fixed ideas. There's an expectation, especially in
multiplexes, of a certain kind of film, the popcorn, the
noise level . . . they've turned cinema into one
particular kind of experience."
He could change this at a stroke by succumbing to
Hollywood's blandishments, and direct prestigious films
with large budgets and big stars. (Francis Ford Coppola
used to deluge Loach with scripts, imploring him to
practise his craft in America.)
"It's a different way of working, with all sorts of
implications I don't like," Loach says. "For me, part of
the trick is keeping the scale of a film appropriate. And
if you keep it European, you have freedom in casting.
Casting is crucial to me, and if a film's unbalanced by
the presence of so-called international stars, you may as
well forget the film.
"There's another thing. I can't think of a single
European director who has gone to Hollywood and done
better work than they did in Europe."
So he ploughs his furrow. Topics covered by his films
include poverty in Manchester (Raining Stones), a
child-custody battle between social workers and a
loud-mouthed mother of six (Ladybird, Ladybird), class
warfare on a London building site (Riff-Raff), and the
Spanish Civil War (Land and Freedom).
These are as earnest and thoughtful as they sound, yet
all are also laced with fun and dour humour. His latest,
Carla's Song, sounds in outline like a parody of a
typical Loach film: set in 1987, it is about George, a
disaffected Glasgow bus driver (Robert Carlyle, from
Trainspotting and Hamish Macbeth) who befriends Carla
(Oyanka Cabezas), a young Nicaraguan dancer on the run
from brutal Contra rebels back home. They fall in love,
and George persuades her to return to her homeland with
him and resolve their fears. But why Nicaragua? And why
now? "It's important to rescue the past and tell that
story," says Loach. "Important to share the trauma that
the people of Nicaragua went through, and acknowledge
it."
Passages in Carla's Songjustify the plaudits of Loach's
fans - especially regarding his way with actors. In one
scene Carla explains the importance of the Sandinista
government to her people - and Cabezas, visibly moved,
fills up with tears, unable to complete her sentence. It
is a moment that transcends mere acting.
Yet cinema owners are right in one respect: Carla's Song
(which cost a mere £3 million) will not shift much
popcorn and cola, which, after all, is where their widest
profit margins reside. Independence Day, Mission:
Impossible - now those are popcorn and cola films.
Such considerations have never sidetracked Loach; his shy
manner masks a stubborn streak, and he seems immune to
the ebb and flow of political fashion. He was born in
Nuneaton, in Warwickshire, and after National Service
read law at Oxford, before joining the BBC as a trainee
director. He worked on Z Cars and Play for Today.
He soon made a name with Up the Junction,Cathy Come Home
(which sparked a national debate on homelessness and led
to Shelter's formation), Poor Cow and the successful Kes
- all in a dizzying five-year spell. Yet it would be 20
years before he enjoyed another such run, and in the
1980s he fell on hard times. Reduced to directing
commercials, he didn't even have an office, and could be
seen around Soho forlornly trying to rekindle his career
from phone boxes.
In 1990, the production company Parallax gave him the
office in Denmark Street - a base from which to launch
his recent admired work. Between making fierce partisan
films, Loach lives a quiet, blameless life in Bath.
Despite British indifference, he'll soldier on,
developing two more scripts from Paul Laverty (who wrote
Carla's Song) and two more from long-time collaborator
Jim Allen. Meanwhile, Loach is sustained by accolades
from abroad: "It's a pressure just to live up to all that
- and make sure your next film doesn't blow it."
Self-effacing to the last. More on Carla's Song Back to Carlyle main page
