Come out fighting

It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes - but was savaged here. Ken Loach tells Stuart Jeffries what he thinks of critics of his film about Irish republicanism
Ken Loach
An unlikely hate figure ... Ken Loach. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe Guardian

The man the Times reckoned is worse than Leni Riefenstahl removes his glasses and winces. The air conditioning at the Soho office of his film production company has been playing the very devil with Ken Loach's arthritis, but that's not what's causing him pain. It's the drubbing he's received from sections of the British press for The Wind That Shakes the Barley, his Palme d'Or-winning film about the Irish war of independence, starring Cillian Murphy. While the Times compared him with Hitler's favourite film director, the Daily Mail inquired: "Why DOES Ken Loach loathe his country so much?" and the Sun seethed: "Top Cannes film is most pro-IRA ever (and, yes, it did get a Lotto grant)."

Hilariously, the Sun omitted this outrage in its Irish edition, where news that Loach's film had triumphed was greeted with the headline: "Cillian's IRA men give Brits a tanning in Cannes." No matter. Loach had brazenly used British money to make a film that, in the words of Tory MP Michael Gove, portrays the British Black and Tans as "sub-human mercenaries burning thatched cottages, torturing by using pliers to rip out toenails and committing extreme violence against women".

In the film's production notes, producer Rebecca O'Brien recalled that her and Loach's previous picture about Ireland, Hidden Agenda, the 1990 thriller about the alleged British shoot-to-kill policy in Ulster, was described by a Tory MP as the "IRA entry" at Cannes. This time, she said, they were hoping for a more sophisticated response.

It hasn't happened. The nadir came with Simon Heffer's piece for the Daily Telegraph. (Unless you discount, as you should, Jeremy Clarkson, who wrote: "If you rearrange the letters TTWA, does it spell Ken Loach?") Heffer fumed: "He hates this country, yet leeches off it, using public funds to make his repulsive films. And no, I haven't seen it, any more than I need to read Mein Kampf to know what a louse Hitler was."

Loach is an unlikely hate figure. He is a gentle-voiced pensioner from the Midlands who turns 70 today. "Why do they say I hate my country?" he says. "And what does that even mean? Am I supposed to hate my town, am I supposed to hate all English people, or my government? And if I do hate my government, does that mean I hate my country? It's a democratic duty to criticise the government."

Are you a patriot? Loach lifts his head from his hands and puts on his glasses. "I support England in the World Cup - irrationally. I support Warwickshire cricket club. So I'm a regional partisan and a patriot."

Patriot or not, the socialist, Respect party-supporting film-maker has infuriated the right. "I know from these attacks that we've really hit home. It is personally abusive, but I know where these people are coming from. It shows that if you attack their notion of the British empire as a charitable institution, then they foam at the mouth and bite the carpet."

And then the quiet man turns up the volume. "These people who write this are the breeding ground for fascism. They're xenophobic and they believe it's their empire, right or wrong. These are the people who give comfort to fascism."

How so? "Because they want to silence me. These people want to kill the film." Somebody, at least, is doing a very good job of trying to kill the film in Britain. Loach says that there are about 40 prints of the film here. "In France, there are 300." To be fair, there is surely a bigger market for anti-Brit diatribes across the Channel, especially as the director has suggested the film may be taken as a metaphor for the Iraq war.

What's most exasperating about the attacks on Loach is that they hinder more sensible reflection on Loach's work at the very moment when it is being internationally celebrated as never before.

Loach's film contrasts markedly with another film about this period, Neil Jordan's Michael Collins, a 1996 biopic that - like Spike Lee's Malcolm X or Oliver Stone's JFK - found tragedy in the death of the great man who might have redeemed his people. Politically and aesthetically, Loach is temperamentally incapable of such a film. "I think history is made by movements and by economics rather than great individuals, but particular people can have a significant effect."

What does he think of Jordan's film? "I don't want to have a go at Neil. It's hard enough to do a film about the subject without me wading in. The only point politically where we might be different is that Neil referred to the democratic justification for accepting the Treaty [the document that led to the partition of Ireland in 1921]. But that election was under what the British called the threat of immediate and terrible war so it was a very flawed election. There was hardly a mandate for the treaty."

Collins was the political leader most instrumental in ensuring Irish acceptance of the treaty and Jordan's film might be taken as an apology for it. Loach's film surely opposes Collins' stance. It deals not just with British soldiers versus Irish republicans, but later with the fractures that this treaty caused in the republican movement. It is a film that might well provoke more political agonising there than here, since it suggests that the result of Collins' compromise and the crushing of opposition to it resulted in an Ireland dominated for many decades by a reactionary church.

Loach has written: "Like the Spanish civil war, what happened in Ireland in 1920-22 was a pivotal moment." Are you drawn to such moments when the romantic hopes of the people you admire, the Trotskyists of Catalonia, the republicans of Cork, rise only to be tragically dashed? "I'm not sure about the word romantic, but certainly their optimism for creating a better society draws me." Loach says he makes two kind of films. "Both are about the struggle of people against power, in Milan Kundera's fine phrase. The first are contemporary ones about people who are trapped and struggling to get out with no true perspective on their situation." Such films, no doubt, include his 1966 TV drama Cathy Come Home, as well as Riff Raff, Raining Stones, Ladybird, Ladybird and Sweet Sixteen.

What about the second kind of film? "Then you have historical films about these moments like the Irish war in which people go through a process that politicises them." In that list would be Land and Freedom, Carla's Song (set in Sandinista Nicaragua) and The Wind That Shakes the Barley. "When people go through an event like the Irish war of independence they are politicised and then, if you'll forgive the old-fashioned phrase, they see the class forces that are at work."

The worry is that these kinds of films inevitably create characters who share Loach's politics. Several critics have seized on the film's opening scene, in which Black and Tans attack some men for playing a traditional Irish game of hurling. "The Irish," wrote Derek Malcolm in the London Evening Standard, "are thus characterised as innocents, the Black and Tans as sadistic villains. You know which side the film is on right from the start." Loach retorts: "I think Derek ought to think about if he was playing cricket and the Nazis came over and broke up his game."

Maybe, but there is a deeper problem: we are always sure whose side Loach is on and the dramatic journeys he takes us on are ultimately not engaging because we know where they are headed. I'm reminded of what Madame de Stael said of Coleridge: "Avec M Coleridge, c'est tout à fait un monologue." And with Loach, too.

In his new film, the drama ultimately focuses on two brothers - one recommending pragmatic acceptance of the treaty, the other (played by Murphy) urging principled rejection. The filial rivalry ends in death. But what seem like political debates between them about the treaty always seem biased towards those who won't bend the knee to compromise with Britain. Loach rejects this analysis: "We try to show them as men of integrity. There's not one who embraces betrayal. They're both scarred and damaged by the war." But the debate never leaves you in any doubt as to which side Loach and his screenwriter, Paul Laverty, are on - which hobbles the drama. Loach disputes that, praising Laverty: "He's a brilliant writer at getting the nuances of characters."

Loach also disputes the frequently made claim that his film goes easy on the IRA. "We show the volunteers shooting soldiers who aren't ready to fight. We also show them shooting hostages." Nor does he accept the film is anti-British. Indeed, one surprise is that it isn't so anti-army as rightwing columnists said it would be. There is a powerful scene in which an officer tells a captured volunteer how difficult it is for British troops to come to Ireland after the horrors of the trenches. Loach says: "There's a very interesting story to be told from the point of view of working-class lads who were supposedly coming back to a land fit for heroes, but who were offered money to go to Ireland and pursue the only trade they knew, which was soldiering." This film, though, doesn't tell it, nor (quite properly) will Loach allow that the earlier sufferings of British soldiers can mitigate their role in Ireland.

The film is tragic. The dreams of a socialist republic die and, in the prescient words of a British landlord we see executed by volunteers, Ireland becomes "a priest-infected backwater". The film's contention is that Ireland would only be free of England if it became a socialist republic. That never happened. How then can Loach explain the Republic's current vibrancy? "The whole Celtic tiger thing can be overstated. In fact the disparity between rich and poor is widening."

His socialist hopes remains unabashed, even though he knows the socialist republic in an undivided Ireland won't arrive soon. "One thing that the British could do if they are serious about governing Northern Ireland is abolish sectarian schools," says Loach when we discuss Ireland's future. "But Blair keeps putting money into faith schools. How mad is that!" As he speaks, there is, behind those crypto-Trotskyist glasses, a glint betokening political ardour. You don't get that much in Britain any more. It is a good thing to see.

· The Wind That Shakes the Barley is released on Friday 23 June