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1 of 17 4/22/09 3:43 AM
Cineaste: The Politics of Everyday Life: An Interview with... http://lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/LoachInterview.html
Loach's more recent output has proved more uneven, even though
Land and Freedom (1995), Carla's Song (1996), and My Name Is Joe
(1998) are all peppered with vibrant, privileged moments. Land and
Freedom is probably the closest approximation of the revolutionary
fervor of the Spanish Revolution of the Thirties that will ever be
committed to film. Before Carla's Song becomes bogged down by an
unwieldy romance set against the backdrop of the Nicaraguan
Revolution, it is enlivened by a spirited romp through the streets of
Glasgow in which Robert Carlyle shines in the role of an
antiauthoritarian bus conductor. My Name Is Joe's focus on drugs and
crime frequently recalls genre films which have mined similar material
with more panache, but the plucky hero's humor and perseverance
nearly makes us forget the convoluted, overly schematic plot.
Cineaste spoke to Loach in Spring 1998 during his publicity tour for
Carla's Song. My Name Is Joe had its American premiere at the 1998
New York Film Festival and will be commercially released by Artisan
Entertainment in February 1999.
- Richard Porton
Ken Loach: Yes. You can't do a film about British cities now without
dealing with drugs; it's a major feature of people's lives. But it's not
basically a film about drugs at all. One of the peripheral characters has
a drug problem, which becomes a mechanism in the plot. We were
very anxious not to fall into the standard cliches. We just went back to
primary sources, really. There were no film references for us, we just
did basic research on how people support their habits, its effects on
families, and so forth.
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Cineaste: The Politics of Everyday Life: An Interview with... http://lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/LoachInterview.html
Cineaste: It's well-known that drugs are a big problem in the big
Scottish cities - Glasgow and Edinburgh. What kind of research did
you conduct?
What strikes you is just the amount of energy, talent, and imagination
which is around and is completely unused. Almost all these people
have no work whatsoever. The unemployment rate is very high,
particularly among young people. They have no prospects of any
work. Then when you get to talk to them, you find they're full of ideas,
full of spirit. The tragedy of the situation strikes you in a very concrete
way, just in the process of trying to cast a film.
Loach: Oh, yeah. If you want to make money, there's only one realistic
way of doing it and that's through entering the local industry which
3 of 17 4/22/09 3:43 AM
Cineaste: The Politics of Everyday Life: An Interview with... http://lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/LoachInterview.html
Cineaste: Was the football team that Joe coaches based on an actual
Loach: No, there are lots and lots of those. There's actually a football
league for the unemployed. We just imagined the team, and the teams
they play are made up of unemployed young men.
Cineaste: Since you usually like to receive input from the actors you
cast, what was Peter Mullan's contribution in shaping his role as Joe?
Loach: Obviously, Paul [Laverty] wrote the script and it was finished
when Peter was cast. But in the way that we approached it, there was
plenty of space for Peter to bring his whole personality to the role of
Joe. It's not a conscious process of asking him what he can contribute,
it's just a matter of allowing him to reveal who he is in some respects
and then molding Joe around him. It was a question of drawing Peter
into the process and finding parts of him that responded to Joe. He
absolutely has has Glasgow in his bones, he's a lad from a local
working-class family. Everybody from that area knows all about
alcoholism, everybody has tales of people who have been through it.
Cineaste: Since drinking is such a large part of the fabric of daily life
in Britain, alcoholism becomes an especially difficult problem to
overcome.
4 of 17 4/22/09 3:43 AM
Cineaste: The Politics of Everyday Life: An Interview with... http://lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/LoachInterview.html
horrible. And to think that it's encouraged by the State! These are
people with nothing, they don't have a pot to piss in. When someone is
actually spying on you, it just makes you furious. Fortunately, he has a
paint pot with him, so he can go wreak some havoc on this car.
Cineaste: Since the film was designed as a love story, scenes like this
inject some political reality into the plot.
Loach: She's got a lot to lose, Joe's got nothing to lose. She's a single
woman in her mid- to late-thirties. She's been in the shadow of her
father all her life, she has a steady job and nice home. Then,
suddenly, she discovers that she's pregnant. Is she going to keep the
child and stay with the father in his world? Does she want to bring a
kid up in a situation where drugs are not merely a job, but something
he's drawn into? I can certainly sympathize with her, what with friends
saying, 'Look what you're getting into.' People are very vulnerable
when they're in that state of turmoil. It's just like a quagmire, when you
feel your feet start to sink, you think that you'll never get out. She's a
cautious, sensible woman.
We shot a lot more scenes detailing her back story, but didn't put them
in the film, because we felt that it made it a bit trite. There's a hint of it
when they're looking at family photographs and she remarks that her
mother died when she was young and we learn that her father was
obviously a strong character. We shot a scene where she was talking
about how she looked after him at home for a long time and finally had
to put him in a home, which made her feel a bit guilty.
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Cineaste: The Politics of Everyday Life: An Interview with... http://lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/LoachInterview.html
by telling her all this, she gets him between the ribs by saying, "Joe,
are you going to hit me, too?"
Loach: Political optimism comes from the long term, the hope that
class forces will change and that there will be a dynamic situation. In
personal terms, the characters are in the here and now, which is very
shitty and very dark. There's a great capacity to cope, as well as
humor, which exists between people, but the objective circumstances
are pretty shitty.
Loach: I don't know. I don't think about it, and it doesn't enter into my
process of working. You just start with trying to find a good story and
how you're going to tell it. I suppose I'm not an 'unrealist.'
Cineaste: But were you impressed by the Italian neorealist films when
you saw them?
Loach: Oh, yes. They were very important for me. Not so much at the
time, but thinking back, I realize that they made an impression on me.
There were also other important influences. When I was at the BBC
and we started to do 16mm hand-held stuff in the streets, what we had
in mind were documentaries. There's also a very famous theater
director in Britain, not so well-known now I guess, called Joan
Littlewood. She had a whole tradition of working-class theater and her
work was a big influence. Not directly, because it's not cinema, but the
6 of 17 4/22/09 3:43 AM
Cineaste: The Politics of Everyday Life: An Interview with... http://lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/LoachInterview.html
Loach: I do think it's important that people play things for the moment.
You should play a scene so you don't anticipate what's going to
happen. I quite like the actors just getting though the experience of the
film. So you perhaps give them the script in sections, just what they
need to know at that particular time.
Loach: I've always done bits of comedy, it's very false to remove it.
You can't be in this hotel and not have a sense of comedy, you'd put
your head in the gas oven otherwise. Comedy is everywhere. I feel it's
always been there, although sometimes you work with writers who
have a stronger sense of comedy than others. The guy who wrote
Riff-aff, Bill Jesse, was a very funny man. As is Barry Hines, who
wrote a film we did ages ago, Kes.
Loach: Because it's where most drama happens in our lives, isn't it?
That's where we learn everything. All of the tension, drama, and
comedy that is contained in those relationships is incredible. A lot of
classic dramas center on families. It's the raw material for drama quite
often, isn't it? Even though families are the springboard for everything
we do, we could be glib and say that families are political entities with
a small p. Of course, they're not exact mirrors of the world outside, but
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Cineaste: The Politics of Everyday Life: An Interview with... http://lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/LoachInterview.html
they launch you into the world and form you, so you can't imagine a
character without a family. Before we start filming, we work out a little
family plan for everybody, because then you know what's projected
you into a particular situation.
Loach: It was from David and also from the producer, Tony Garnett,
who was very up on all that. I had read it, of course, and it just seemed
to make sense in terms of what you know of your own family and other
people's families and what you experience with your parents. Not to
say that they were necessarily like the families in Laing's case studies.
But there's always an element you can relate to, where you can say
that one thing writ large would have produced another thing.
Cineaste: Like Raining Stones, many of your films take place in the
north of England - a region that can be considered somewhat
marginalized, the periphery as opposed to the center.
Loach: Yeah. I'm from the Midlands, which is closer to the North than
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Cineaste: The Politics of Everyday Life: An Interview with... http://lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/LoachInterview.html
Cineaste: In this regard, you don't iron out regional accents, which
tend to be obliterated in mainstream British and American films.
RiffRaff was even subtitled in this country.
Loach: Yeah. If you ask people to speak differently, you lose more
than the voice. Everything about them changes. If I asked you not to
speak with an American accent, your whole personality would change.
That's how you are. My hunch is that it's better to use subtitles than
not, even if that limits the films to an art-house circuit.
Loach: Yes. That's a film about grief and how it can leave a person
very damaged, and about someone who is very damaged as a child.
When do you start blaming them? When they're young, clearly they
have our pity and understanding. Suddenly, they become the villain,
and this underscores our ambivalence concerning some people.
Loach: Yes, but it's a very difficult situation. It was a great film to work
on, because the actress, Crissy Rock, would just take your breath
away during the filming.
Loach: First, you don't want to treat them any differently than
professionals. In casting, it's best to try little things out, do little
improvisations, see who you think is going to touch an audience. A
kind of natural eloquence is quite important. Some people will speak
and the words don't take off, they've become very pedestrian. Again,
it's a class thing. Working-class men and women will often speak with
a remarkable eloquence and rhythm and Crissy absolutely has that.
9 of 17 4/22/09 3:43 AM
Cineaste: The Politics of Everyday Life: An Interview with... http://lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/LoachInterview.html
She can just turn a phrase brilliantly, and in a way that she's totally
unaware of.
Just to judge in more general terms, if the cinema is any kind of force
for social change, then it's a force for the bad, because most films are
about one guy with a gun solving a problem. The ideology of the
cinema, of mainstream films, is a very right-wing ideology. One hopes
to God that the cinema can have no effect whatsoever, because, if it
does, we're all screwed! [laughs]. Of course, maybe my films can have
a small sort of impact with one or two people, now and then.
10 of 17 4/22/09 3:43 AM
Cineaste: The Politics of Everyday Life: An Interview with... http://lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/LoachInterview.html
sum up your feelings about the Thatcher years. In a way, it's a utopian
ending, since it's difficult to believe that this group of guys would
actually have rebelled against the boss in quite so blatant a fashion.
Loach: There were some cases of sabotage about that time, which is
why we chose to include it in the script. I don't quite know what the
motivations were, though. This sort of thing had happened, so we felt
we could use it, without it seeming too fantastic. It was just a cry of
rage really, nothing else. It expressed the overall rage of being ripped
off, spurred on by the one guy being killed because of the building site
being so badly managed. These guys weren't political in any way, so
what else could they do but burn the place down?
Loach: Yes. The original film was written by Jim Allen at a time when
the dock workers were immensely powerful - hence the title. The
documentary was about how the last real dock workers were sacked
and how their tasks were now being taken by agency workers, without
skills, without the tradition and long history of the dockers. The recent
film is addressed to what we are reduced to. It was a small film shot in
16mm. It may not be a good film, but the people are so amazing and
heroic.
11 of 17 4/22/09 3:43 AM
Cineaste: The Politics of Everyday Life: An Interview with... http://lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/LoachInterview.html
situation. The dispute was very significant very graphic. You couldn't
have been in an industry which showed the problem more starkly than
this. Cineaste: Were you intent on trying to avoid some of the
censorship problems you encountered making the previous television
films about the miners?
Loach: Yes. We might not have had quite the same problem anyway,
because they feel that this is not a hot issue anymore. In the
mid-1980s, the unions were much stronger and there was a possibility
that the workers Wouldn't be defeated. They felt that it was a more
volatile situation. Now they feel that organized labor is so completely
defeated that you could afford to be liberal in what you show.
Cineaste: In other words, there are no Arthur Scargills(*) for the news
media to demonize?
Loach: Well, they feel under no threat, so they can be much more
tolerant. You're free to speak so long as you're not a serious threat. I
think that the labor movement has to be reinvented; they have to start
at the bottom again with the grass roots. It's a mark of how much the
right wing has triumphed that people just associate strikes with
inconvenience. For example, the French lorry drivers went on strike
recently and the issues were connected to what affects all lorry drivers
- how long you've got to be in the cab, safety issues, and so on. In all
the coverage in Britain on the main radio program, the inconvenience
was the only thing stressed - the stuff that would go rotting in the
lorries, the roads blockaded, and how will people get home, and so
forth. There was nothing about how long other people have to stay in
a cab to earn a living and the safety checks in all of our vehicles. The
whole question of feeling solidarity with workers is dealt with by
pushing it completely off the agenda.
I've been obsessed with this for years, and it's interesting how
broadcasters manipulate the agenda - they do it not with the questions
they ask, but what is implicit in the question. Then, as an audience
member, you share the assumption of the interviewer, without
questioning it. In Britain, you can have quite a hostile interview with a
right-wing politician and you can think that television is being quite
tough, but in fact the basis of the questions are also quite right-wing.
Chomsky describes it attitudes of a social worker in Ken Loach as
"manufacturing consent," that's how we're all brought to the point of
agreement without realizing it.
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Cineaste: The Politics of Everyday Life: An Interview with... http://lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/LoachInterview.html
Cineaste: There has certainly been a lot written recently about internal
divisions within the ranks of the Sandinistas, which were present from
the beginning - there were three different tendencies. But it's also
understandable that you would want to focus on the U.S.'s illegal and
immoral support of the Contras.
Cineaste: Is that why you included the scenes with the Witness for
Peace delegation?
Loach: Yes, we had very good experiences with them, and the people
in the film are real people we encountered in Managua.
Cineaste: Was the Scott Glenn character - the ex C.I.A. agent who
becomes pro-Sandinista - based on an actual figure?
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Cineaste: The Politics of Everyday Life: An Interview with... http://lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/LoachInterview.html
was influenced by our discussions with him. Scott also met him; he
wasn't the model for the character, but his experiences were relevant.
We thought it was important to have some way of dealing with the
'enemy,' although that's a rather crude way of putting it. We've all had
second thoughts about the structure of the film. Scott is a very nice
guy; he was very committed and really put himself on the line as an
actor. He was very touched by what he saw in Nicaragua.
Cineaste: Did you, as in Land and Freedom, cast many of the local
residents as extras in Carla's Song?
Loach: Oh, yes. Among the Nicaraguans, there's only one actor. The
rest are just people, extraordinary people. The woman who plays
Carla's mother, for example, had been in the Sandinista army and was
then working on community projects. Almost all the people we met had
relatives killed during the war. There was a feeling of being very close
to the carnage. For example, the scene on top of the bus was not
even like a reenactment. People were just talking about the revolution;
the only sense in which it was a reenactment was that people were
talking about the present, whereas these events had occurred in the
past. The boundaries of what was real and what was invented for the
film were very loose. In a way, this made it difficult to keep a tight rein
on the film's structure. It was nice to be open to whatever came our
way, but the problem with that approach is that you're liable to lose the
shape of the film.
Cineaste: Did you consider altering the film in any way after starting
shooting in Nicaragua?
Loach: Yes, it has to do with how your perception of the film's balance
changes when you start to shoot. There was one case, with the
hospital after the village has been ambushed, that came about after
we viewed a desperately primitive hospital. The location was so
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Cineaste: The Politics of Everyday Life: An Interview with... http://lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/LoachInterview.html
Cineaste: The army had their own video production unit and made
videos about their skirmishes with the Contras.
Loach: Yes. Paul was there for two and a half years and when Ortega
came to Britain, he supervised the tour for the press. They were quite
radical in their approach to the media. But the irony was that the
propaganda battle was entirely won by the U.S., because they had the
power.
Loach: Yes, internationalism at the rank and file level. But, of course,
this didn't work as well in Nicaragua as it did in the Spanish Civil War.
It's interesting that people say that there are no great causes left. Why
be an idealist now? And then something like Nicaragua comes along.
It is bizarre when people make these statements about the dearth of
great causes, because it means that they're blind to the past.
Cineaste: After making many films in Britain, did films like Land and
Freedom and Carla's Song come about because you wanted a
change of pace and geography?
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Cineaste: The Politics of Everyday Life: An Interview with... http://lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/LoachInterview.html
Loach: No, not really. These were just scripts that came through the
post. It was coincidental. I think, though, that it refreshes you to come
back to your home territory after you've been abroad. The film we just
did in Glasgow, which Paul also wrote, My Name is Joe, was probably
easier to do to some extent because he had worked outside the
country. He came back with renewed energy to look at the British
scene.
Cineaste: Since so many of your films have dealt with the British
working class, do you see connections between their struggles and
the situation in the Third World chronicled in Carla's Song?
Loach: Well, it's all part of the same context; they're all pieces in the
same jigsaw. It certainly relates. We've become more and more of a
global economy with one superpower putting its finger in every pie.
The plight of the working class in Britain relates to what American
capital is doing, and furthermore has a relationship with what's going
on in Nicaragua. You can trace a cause and effect, even if it does
seem rather random and arbitrary at times.
Cineaste: Robert Carlyle was reportedly surprised that you cast him,
because he assumed that you usually didn't cast actors in more than
one of your films.
Loach: It was very difficult for her. It worked well in that she was quite
closed at first, but once she got back to Nicaragua and could use her
own language, then it comes out. When you can't use your own
language, it reduces your whole means of expression.
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Cineaste: The Politics of Everyday Life: An Interview with... http://lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/LoachInterview.html
Loach: Yes, although there aren't many cinemas there and they're
programmed from Miami. We showed it in the village we filmed in
during the rainy season; the projector was wired up in the back of the
van, and sparks were flying up. We thought that people would go
when it rained, but everyone stayed. It was very moving. During the
English bits, there was a commentary so people could understand
what was going on. It was amazing, because during the open-air
screening, there was the village up there on the screen and you were
surrounded by the village.
For the people watching it, the story of the film wasn't important. It was
the fact of the film that was important. The fact that Nicaraguans were
speaking their language in their own country convinced them that films
could be made about their own problems. They don't have to be about
aliens from another world, they can be about us. Films should be
about us; they shouldn't just be a commodity, which comes in and
exploits us. Aside from whether Carla's Song is any good or not, it was
such a graphic illustration of how the invention of cinema has been
taken away from us and how we've all become mere consumers.
Copyright (C) 1996 by the Library, University of California, Berkeley. All rights reserved.
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Last update 3/22/1999 (gh)
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