Picture politics
Ken Loach is a prolific film director who is prepared to put in a lot of time and effort when it comes to practising his craft. But the rest he finds more difficult, to judge from his flat voice and weary expression when we met late on a hot summer afternoon after he had spent the whole day being interviewed about his new film, Ae Fond Kiss (just released in France).
"Promoting a film requires as much energy as making one, so I have to be careful not to use it all up, particularly as I always like to move straight on to the next movie," he explained. "And then making a film is a pragmatic pro-cess. The decisions you take are chiefly material - and risky. They largely depend on circumstances. It's something I'm wary of talking about, as I wouldn't want to think up rational justifications for my instincts."
From the start of his career, Loach's instincts have been to demand a better world. His oeuvre is, above all, concerned with social change. "I've been influenced as much by Zola and Dickens as by Italian Neorealism. I love the cinema because it enables one to get closer to people and watch them live. It's also a good way of sparking debate."
Loach was born in the Midlands in 1936, the year that Popular Front governments came to power in both France and Spain. He read law at Oxford. His already keen political awareness led him to work in the theatre and move in leftwing activist circles. The television producer Tony Garnett got him to make films for the BBC, and his low-budget "Wednesday Play" docudramas caused a sensation with their screenplays based on a clinical observation of real life.
One of the films in that series, Cathy Come Home (1966), described how a couple crippled by debts are evicted from their home. It provoked controversy at national level. Loach later said of his team on the film: "We were social democrats when we made that film and would-be Marxists when we finished it. We realised the inability of social democrats to do anything constructive."
Cathy Come Home directly contributed to political change. It played a key role in the setting up of Shelter, a movement that aimed to provide a roof for homeless families, and influenced a political debate that resulted in a change in the law in 1977.
After an experience like that, it would have been understandable if the young Loach had come to believe he could improve society. Yet he insists: "I never said to myself that my films could change things. With Cathy Come Home, something exceptional happened that was impossible to predict or reproduce. After that I simply went on doing my job. A movie isn't a political movement, a party or even an article. It's just a film. At best it can add its voice to public outrage."
Margaret Thatcher's years as prime minister (1979-90) were a bad time for Loach: he had difficulty in getting his films distributed or shown on television. But since the beginning of the 90s he has been making movie after movie and can rely on a bedrock of "faithful spectators". "I'm aware that without the support of European filmgoers I'd have ceased to come up with funding for my movies a long time ago."
It is "instinct" again that, in his view, explains his special relationship with the public. When he turns his attention away from the fate of the B-ritish working class to focus on disillusioned revolutionaries ( Carla's Song , 1996) or the Spanish Civil War ( Land and Freedom , 1995), audiences continue to be interested - probably because "those films simply talk about real people".
Loach's working methods leave room for the unexpected, for "intrusions of reality". "To my mind the worst thing of all is the storyboard," he says with a shudder. "I find it cramps my style to determine in advance what's going to take place before the camera. Anything that sets in stone is bad. What counts is exploration."
While Loach was shooting My Name Is Joe (1998) - "A film about an alcoholic who doesn't drink", he says with a grin - he realised that he had not fully explored one of the characters: "There was a lad in the football team who interested me. He became Liam in Sweet Sixteen [2002]."
After that grim chronicle about a solitary teenager, Ae Fond Kiss comes across as a more light-hearted movie. It is a very complicated love story between a Muslim Scot of Pakistani origin and a Catholic Irishwoman. "Paul Laverty, who works with me, writes very precise screenplays. Subsequently there has to be some room for manoeuvre for the actors, so they can reveal themselves and the characters they play. In Ae Fond Kiss the actors took over the movie. They gave it a degree of optimism, and I was delighted: they weren't just marionettes."
Very few filmmakers have such a modest notion of their own role as Loach. In fact it was only when he started talking to me about politics, not the cinema, that he forgot how tired he was after all those hours of promoting the movie and holding forth on "communities that don't know each other well enough".
He described how he joined the club of politically committed filmmakers, such as the Italian Nanni Moretti: "I was asked if I'd like to be on a leftwing list for the European elections [in June]. I couldn't refuse. We got almost 5% in London, which isn't bad. But an anti-European, xenophobic section of the right also did very well at those elections. Those people would like to make the Channel wider if they could. That's not really surprising when you look at the Sun or the Daily Mail, which are filled day after day with racist remarks and innuendo about how Europe is too bureaucratic to be honest."
Loach likes Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 , which won the top Cannes award this year: "It was a political prize, whatever Tarantino's claims to the contrary, and that could prove very useful." In 2002, in his contribution to the collective movie, 11"09'01 , Loach gave his own view of September 11. He has not returned to the subject since, but deals indirectly with its repercussions as they affect the Muslim male lead in Ae Fond Kiss .
"Laverty was struck by the upsurge in racist violence in the United States just after September 11, and in particular by the death of a young Sikh in Arizona. The way our western societies look at Muslims is problematic."
Loach shares Moore's view of President George Bush, but Ae Fond Kiss does not focus on his British ally, Tony Blair, whose policies fill Loach with indignation: "Britain is in an extraordinary situation: a supposedly centre-left party has been implementing a hardline neoliberal policy involving privatisations. Blair supports America's policy and a war based on lies. And who are the Labour party's main allies? [The Italian prime minister Silvio] Berlusconi and Bush. That has left a vacuum on the left, which is tragic."
Loach became convinced of one thing when canvassing at the European elections: "The left has to do some hard thinking if it is to take advantage of the present hostility towards the Labour party." Meanwhile Loach is off to shoot a new film in Rome: "It is, after all, my job."
Ae Fond Kiss will be released in Britain on September 3