Self-criticism comes naturally to the conscience of British cinema

KEN Loach has dedicated his career to striving for change, but thinks he could have done better.

‘Inevitably, you make so many mistakes, mistake after mistake,’ says director Ken Loach o

KEN Loach may be the most modest, self-critical man I have ever interviewed. Of his 2010 film Route Irish, he says: “Not sure I got it right.” Of 1986’s Fatherland: “Interesting script, I just don’t think I did it well.” Of 1967’s Poor Cow: “I didn’t do that very well.”

Of his entire career: “Inevitably, you make so many mistakes, mistake after mistake.”

At one point, I say to him he ought to stop saying such things. He shrugs: “Well, you know.”

Filmmakers aren’t supposed to talk like this; people are paid to make them sound upbeat. But Loach, in his films as in life, tells the truth as he sees it, and, in spite of what he says, it works. Here he is at 77, the undisputed conscience of British cinema, the man whose politics never wavered, whose commitment to realism never faltered, and who never sold out. Well, he almost did, once — in the late 1980s, when his documentaries had been left unscreened and nobody would give him money to make a film.

“That was a dark period,” he says, “when I did commercials for a few years, just because it was either that or leave the industry. It was just to survive. I can’t remember what they were for, but I do recall doing a lot of stuff in kitchens, just to make them more realistic. They were quite fun, and the people I worked with were fine. But there was always the one question you can’t ask — is this true? Where is the research? Fortunately, I wasn’t very good at making commercials.”

We are sitting in an anonymous office in London. Loach is a slender, rather wispy-looking man with a nervously polite air that contrasts sharply with his burning political belief. There is something saintly about this austere combination of gentleness and fierce conviction. It would be hard to imagine him directing a film but for a certain introspective intensity that reveals his self-­deprecation as a symptom of perfectionism. Like his films’ heroes, he believes things can be better and will fight to make them so.

They certainly got better in the 1990s. He won six prizes at Cannes and, in 2006, the Palme d’Or for The Wind that Shakes the Barley. His latest film, Jimmy’s Hall, was in contention this year for the Palme d’Or. It has been reported that this may be his last film. “It was quite a big-scale job by our standards. I will try to do something else, maybe documentaries or something that’s not on that scale.”

Jimmy’s Hall is about James Gralton, a communist who emigrated from Ireland to the US and returned after the end of the Irish Civil War. In his home town in County Leitrim, he built a hall for dances, discussions and general socialising, and ran into opposition from the Free State authorities and the Catholic Church. The film is the story of this sad and ­futile conflict, and, like all Loach’s stories, it is told with a ferocious simplicity.

Jimmy, played by Barry Ward, will be recognisable to Loach-watchers: a tough, tender, passionate, reflective man in a state of constant struggle in life and politics. All Loach’s heroes — and heroines — have, like the man himself, an almost unbearable sense of injustice. In fact, all such characters may be seen as grown-up versions of Billy Casper, the boy hero of what is probably still his greatest film, Kes (1969). Billy, unjustly written off by the education system, finds himself in his relationship to a kestrel, a symbol of a higher and freer life, or, as Loach puts it, of hope.

Loach’s impact on British film and television can hardly be overstated. In TV, his harsh, engaged, realist style infected not just plays, but gritty series such as The Sweeney, Minder and Cracker and comedy shows such as Till Death Us Do Part. His combination of humour and political conviction has influenced the style of Mike Leigh and much younger directors. His style of tightly scripted drama, filmed and acted so intensely that it looks improvised or real, became standard practice for at least two generations of British filmmakers. And his use of available light, even at the expense of clarity and focus, has been revolutionary.

“The wrong light,” he says, “can invalidate a performance.”

The young Loach was not obviously destined for radical politics. He was born in Nuneaton, and his father was a lower-middle-class Tory. “He wasn’t political in the sense of being active. He was an electrician at a machine tool factory, and he became a foreman, so he tended to see things from a management point of view.”

His son, for a time, did the respectable thing, finally studying law at Oxford. Unfortunately, by then he had been bitten by the drama bug — he passed out while watching Titus Andronicus at Stratford. At Oxford he also felt the hot breath of class politics. “It was the first time I saw real wealth. There had been all kinds of middle and working-class people in Nuneaton, but nothing like you would see at the old universities … Then you realise what wealth is.”

Yet it was not until he arrived at the BBC in the 1960s that his intuitions and enthusiasms coalesced around a clear political program. He joined the Labour Party and campaigned for Harold Wilson in 1964. “We thought the party was going to change the world, but it wasn’t. Wilson and the Labour Party revealed their true colours. That led to all kinds of questions about the nature of society.”

His dissidence had no home in conventional politics, but it did find searing expression in the plays he did at the BBC in the mid-60s: Up the Junction, In Two Minds and Cathy Come Home. The last of these is regarded by many, with some justification, as the greatest TV play ever made, and it did what no party-bound politician could have done: it changed housing policy in Britain and inspired the foundation of the charity Crisis.

Things started to go wrong in the 70s. Asked in 1969 by Save the Children to make a documentary film, Loach produced something so radical that the charity tried to get the negative destroyed. With Margaret Thatcher in power, the 80s should have been a golden age for him. But, as he notes, it was a time when the establishment was genuinely scared, and the resulting crackdown hit him hard. He made a documentary series for Channel 4 called Questions of Leadership that criticised the pallid response of union leaders to the Tories. It was never shown. The South Bank Show commissioned Which Side Are You On? about the poems and songs of the miners’ strike, but that wasn’t shown ­either. “You lose doubly,” he says. “You lose because your work isn’t seen, and you lose because you spend your time fighting.”

So he ended up making ads until the 90s arrived and, thanks to David Puttnam, his career and his funding were revived.

Perhaps he was also helped by a resurgence in capitalist confidence, because, as he observes: “When the ruling classes are confident, they are liberal.”

At the heart of the man is a double sense of the high virtue of decency and his acute awareness that most of human experience is lived by those billions without a voice, without power and without money. He still believes change can come from a new, organised working-class movement, and now backs a fledgling party called Left Unity.

His politics may be utopian and, in the light of the 20th-century experience in Russia and China, dangerous. But after the iniquities exposed by the global crash, what honest person can say he hasn’t at least got a point? Anyway, artists can dream, and Loach is a saintly dreamer of decency, justice and the life of the people.

The Sunday Times