Citizen Ken 

By Santanu Bhattacherjee

“People don’t live in a vacuum, they live in a world determined by political and economic decisions that affect them down to the most private, the most inner part of their lives” KEN L.

Ken Loach is unassuming. His work has a richness and complexity, so often absent in modern movies, that marks a strongly humanist outlook on life and society – and yet, the films are shot in a guileless, almost documentary style allowing the audience to engage with the story and characters without any overt directorial signposting. He is the kind of artisan who brings an incredible amount of craft to their work; the kind that if you notice what they are doing, if any heavy-handedness intrudes, are not doing their job properly.

“The criterion always is to carry the story forward or reveal the character and just explore the content rather than just explore the narrative line.

“One thing is to cast people who have something in common, at least, with the part they’re playing and then they reveal themselves and they bring that depth into the films. That’s a key element and so that you try to suggest a hinterland beyond the film. It’s just a question of finding people who will have that depth and be able to reveal it and, if it works, brings a sense of a life beyond the film. That’s what you try for.”



Work of such depth is not made in isolation and Loach’s method of working relies heavily on collaborating with writers who share his humanist and political sensibilities. The writers (including Nell Dunn, Jeremy Sanford, Jim Allen and Paul Laverty) bring a strong sense of character, place and humour to the projects.

“I’ve been very lucky and worked with a few writers for a long time. The writer I’m working with the moment, Paul Laverty, and I and Rebecca [O’Brien, Loach’s producer] will talk about what’s come out of the films we’ve done in the past, the last film, and then just talk around different ideas until one really seems the one that has to be made. It comes from long conversations with the writer. The writer is the most important person in the process, often more important than the director.”

His work comes from a long tradition of social realist cinema that, arguably, began in the forties with Italian Neorealism, continuing through aspects of the French nouvelle vague, through to the British new wave of the sixties which included the work of directors like Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson and John Schlesinger who dealt explicitly with the dissatisfaction and social problems within Britain. Beginning his career in television, Loach made a name for himself with the hugely innovative Cathy Come Home (1966) before moving into cinema with Poor Cow (1967) and particularly with Kes (1969) which for many remains his signature film. He continued to alternate his work between television and cinema throughout the seventies until he found himself marginalised during the eighties because his political viewpoint did not chime with the right-wing ideologies of Thatcherism. Although he was met with direct censorship, Loach refused to give up on his ideals.

“Films do, whether you want them to or not, interpret the world because you’re taking a picture of people and places. You are interpreting the world whether you want to or not, and if you’re going to interpret it then your interpretation should be, at least, coherent. Obviously, a film can be anything, a film is like prose, but if it’s to have any merit then I think that there must be some ideas that are reflected in what you do and then you have to test the validity of those ideas.”

Loach’s resurgence in the nineties, brought about by Channel 4 funding and producers Sally Hibbin and Rebecca O’Brien, has produced headline cinema; from Hidden Agenda through Riff-Raff, Land And Freedom, My Name Is Joe, and Bread And Roses, to last year’s Ae Fond Kiss; Loach’s films have garnered international prizes, critical accolades and commercial success. The uncompromising nature and integrity of his work has been bolstered by the integrity of the working relationships he has developed. And, although his films seem at odds with commercial cinema, his immediate future seems assured.

“All the films we’ve done have either made money or broken even and they are commercial enterprises, otherwise we wouldn’t survive. What we spend to make the film is linked to what we can get back either through the box office or sales to television or whatever. They are commercial projects and the budgets reflect what will be recouped.

“The people we have been working with, we’ve been working with a long time so it’s a well established pattern of finance, if we did two or three and they’d all lost heavily, well, we’d struggle. We’d be in trouble.”

The consistently high quality threshold that he maintains has helped him become one of World cinema’s respected elder statesman coupled with the bravery that sees him make films that are more complex than the norm. Generally, cinema is about winning, someone always has to win; there are obstacles in our hero’s path and they are overcome in a series of increasingly dramatic events culminating in an uplifting ending and a return to some kind of status quo (hopefully, not the denim-clad longhairs) leaving the audience little changed by the experience. Loach’s films are better than that because he knows that the world isn’t about winning or losing but the life that happens in between, that cinema can intelligently reflect and comment upon what is real rather than just being an expensive palliative.

“We try to explore just the way people live together and the interaction between social circumstances and private lives and the effects of politics on the way people live. It all interacts with the other; people don’t live in a vacuum, they live in a world determined by political and economic decisions that affects them down to the most private, the most inner part of their lives.”

Important British cinema is being made by relatively few people nowadays, the industry preferring either feel-good fare or variations on a gangster theme. Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and Michael Winterbottom are the only British directors who consistently garner international praise and have refused the temptation to ‘go Hollywood’ – hopefully, to be joined by Shane Meadows and Lynne Ramsay – and while Ken Loach and Mike Leigh are often bracketed together, Loach’s projects are more political and immediate whereas Leigh’s fables tend to explore emotional ground more explicitly.

“I’ve known Mike a long time, he’s a friend – yes, I always enjoy his films. I think we do quite different films and present people in a different light. Although the films are often placed in a similar social milieu or similar locations, we’re interested in making different kinds of films; different kinds of statements. I think the similarity is more apparent than real.”



Ken Loach is in a World class of directors who continue to show that cinema can still have important things to say in an era when Hollywood, the dominant cinema in the world, seems to be ingesting itself in its quest for fatuousness.
“Writers have to write what they feel compelled to write and the same is true for filmmakers. I think European filmmakers, by and large, take a more complete view: their films reflect a more complete view of the world they experience.
“Because the American industrial cinema is so driven by formula, by how to maximise their profits, they turn film into hamburger. It’s equivalent to McDonalds, instead of being equivalent to a series of restaurants. Everything is geared to exploiting the markets rather than to making a relevant communication. So inevitably that has an impact on the kinds of films that it produces.
“I think that Asian cinema produces very complex films. Southern American cinema is very interesting and some of the most progressive films are coming from Southern America. So maybe North America should learn from Southern America for once.”

Ken is currently in post-production on his new film, The Wind That Shakes The Barley starring Cillian Murphy, looking at the Irish struggle for independence and the lead-up to the civil war of 1922.

“We’ve just finished the first cut and we’re just starting to go through and throw a lot of the stuff out. So, we’re just at quite a good stage of this … but when you’re close to it, it’s sometimes hard to say whether it’s any good or not. It may be a load of old rollocks. You never know.”
Unassuming. As ever.