British director KEN LOACH has established himself as the leading socialist film maker working in the English language. Since 1991 he has twice won major prizes at the Cannes film festival, for Hidden Agenda, about Ireland, and Raining Stones, about a working-class community in Manchester. This year he was awarded a special prize at the Milan film festival. His new film Ladybird, Ladybird will shortly open in Sydney in January. PHIL HEARSE spoke to him in London, where he is editing his next film, Land and Freedom, about the Spanish Civil War.
In the mid-1980s you had a lean time of it, unable to get commissions for either television or cinema. This was obviously linked to the political reaction of the Thatcher years. But in ideological terms, this reaction has hardly changed. How do you explain the widespread critical acclaim you are now getting?
At the start of the 1980s, when Thatcher was in her prime, I don't think I came up with the right ideas for fictional films. It was a time of huge attacks on the left, when being a socialist film maker was not very fashionable.
I thought the best way to respond to that period, of mass unemployment and huge attacks by the right, was to make documentaries. Feature films, once you've worked on the script, got the money together and actually made the film, can take three or four years.
It seemed necessary to make an intervention at the time by making documentaries — not waiting for several years. But the films I made like Which Side Are You On? about the miners' strike or Questions of Leadership about the unions, were effectively censored.
When you're involved in lots of things which are banned, then the word goes out that you're not safe. It seemed for a year or two that everything I touched got elbowed.
The turning point was a telephone call from David Putnam, asking whether I would be prepared to do a film about the Stalker Affair [the sabotaging of a police inquiry into the RUC "shoot to kill" policy in Northern Ireland]. That turned into Hidden Agenda. Putnam wasn't involved in the film, but he got the project started.
Hidden Agenda won the prize at Cannes; and international recognition then gives people confidence at home. That helped with further commissions. But I'm not under any illusions. Things could easily swing back, and I could find it difficult to get commissions again.
What are the political benchmarks which determine your choice of topic. How do you describe yourself politically?
I'd say I was a socialist, if the Labour Party hadn't devalued the term. For me as a film maker, if I define political allegiances much more specifically, then it can be used as a weapon against me. But I guess it's pretty clear where my sympathies lie.
The topics for the films generally arise from a conversation with a writer. It's a matter of finding a story which is valid in itself, but then has a significance and reverberation beyond its own limits.
The subjects which have drawn me are those which relate personal and emotional life to a wider background — a class background and an economic background. I've tried to show how people's personal lives don't exist in a vacuum from these things.
To put it crudely, it's matter of human interest put in a social framework.
You use a lot of non-professional performers in your films. Why? Hasn't this brought you into conflict with the actors' union Equity?
Not at all. We're one of the few companies left which are still working on Equity contracts. If you're making a serious film, not just a commercial enterprise, the people you have in the film are there because of who they are and the performance they can give, and that relates closely to their own experience. They reveal their own personalities in the performance. Thus the people you choose may not be experienced actors.
Social class is important, so that people are not pretending to be what they're not. Experience is important, so that performers can relate to the story and bring their own three-dimensional personality into the story. So the people you choose may not be professional actors; but of course they have to be able to act, to make a fictional story credible.
Most of the people I've worked with have been performers, but often from clubs — singers, stand-up comics or whatever.
How do you respond to the accusation that your films are just agitprop and political polemic?
It's complex. Probably there has been a temptation in the past to use characters as mouthpieces to get across a certain viewpoint. However, the accusation that actors are just "observed functions", to go through a certain plot development without any real character depth, is much more true of the average Hollywood film!
There was a danger of descending to polemic in some of the films, where perhaps I should have made a documentary instead. That's why I made Questions of Leadership as a documentary, so that people could put a political analysis very directly, without the mediation of fiction.
On the other hand, it's OK for political characters to be in fictional movies — why shouldn't they be? In that case, these fictional people argue politics, because that's who they are. There is an idea among film critics that people in movies shouldn't be political, that there's no place for political argument in film.
Why shouldn't fictional characters argue politics? It's interesting and absorbing, and people don't have to lose their personality to make a political argument.
The scene we're cutting at the moment from Land and Freedom is a passionate political argument in a very dramatic situation during the Spanish Civil War. The Republican militia have just taken a village and the people of that village are discussing whether to collectivise the land.
It's very appropriate that people involved in a civil war because of politics should be able to actually discuss politics in the film. On the other hand, it's going to be a matter of fine judgment how long we can let this scene run.
At the time of the Warrington bombings, when two children were killed by IRA bombs, you went on television to denounce the hypocrisy of the media coverage. How do you feel about the IRA cease-fire?
I haven't studied and discussed it enough to make a firm judgment. What's interesting is the continued hypocrisy of the media coverage. On the day after the cease-fire, when a Catholic was shot dead by Loyalist terrorists in Belfast, the headlines were all about the controversy surrounding the transfer of four Republican prisoners to prisons in Northern Ireland from Britain, not about the shooting. Now by any objective criterion, what was the real story that day?
There have been two Loyalist bombs since the cease-fire, including one at the Sinn Fein offices which could have killed many innocent people, but I've yet to hear a government minister come out and condemn it. And on this, as everything else, Labour Party leader Tony Blair has nothing to offer.
As someone who's worked in television for more than 20 years, how do you think the current spate of privatisation and deregulation is going to affect things? Isn't the semi-destruction of public service broadcasting going to make it impossible to get critical material on TV? Hasn't the quality of drama nose-dived, when drama is something you get from America in the form of a comic soap opera? Doesn't this intersect with an overall drift to the right in theatre and television?
Your view is a bit nostalgic. I don't believe there was a golden age in television, either for drama or critical documentary. A lot of the 1960s drama looks pretty creaky now.
They've always been pretty unsophisticated about what they banned. I remember in the 1970s we made a play called Rank and File, a thinly disguised drama on the Pilkington's glass factory strike, and we put a little quote from Trotsky at the end of it which caused a storm — it had to be removed.
It ebbs and flows a bit, but I don't think the situation for critical material has got materially worse. The main pressure has always been from the right, and there never was a time of easy access for left-wing or critical views. But of course with deregulation and staff cutbacks, professional standards have got much worse. In the end management doesn't care about standards, as long as they make a profit.
As for the drift to the right in theatre and television, I think that in the early 1980s Thatcherism cast a spell over everyone, but now things are beginning to swing back again. The liberal establishment, now and again, has to let something through to pretend that it allows for all opinions.