Ken Loach

LWLies: I’ve just seen Looking For Eric and, unexpectedly, I left the cinema in a very good mood. Did you set out to make a ‘feel-good’ film in any way?

Ken Loach: No, I don’t think those are the sort of questions we ask, really. It just began with the idea of working with Eric. We were put in touch by a French producer called Pascal Caucheteux and we met and despite being very awestruck by meeting this legendary figure…

LWLies: Him by you or you by him…?

Loach: Us by him. And Paul Laverty [the screenwriter] and I thought, ‘What film can we make that will really do justice to him?’ There were a number of traps that we tried to avoid and then, of course, a film has always got to be about something. Just saying, Let’s do a film with so-and-so,’ is never a good enough reason to do a film. We had to think what film can we make that will have a real substance at its core, that includes Eric or a character like Eric… So, anyway, Paul wrote a script and this is it.

LWLies: There are parts of the film which celebrate football as a form of escapism. Is that something to celebrate about cinema as well? Or do you make a distinction?

Loach: It’s a good point. I don’t get that feeling very often in cinema. I think it’s a rare feeling that, in the cinema. Maybe that’s to do with my age. I used to feel it a lot more when I was younger and that may just be to do with me rather than the films.

LWLies: Do you ever go to see big glossy Hollywood films?

Loach: No! I just get irritated by them. Maybe that’s my loss, but I don’t. If you win at football, if your team wins, that does keep you going to the next game, it really does. And I can’t remember the last time I had that feeling in a cinema. I remember enjoying films but not that sense of exhilaration.

LWLies: What about that escapism and letting it take you out of your everyday life?

Loach: Yes, well I guess that works. But I think, personally, I get that from music more. I think cinema can do it, I just don’t think it does do it very often. It doesn’t for me.

LWLies: Especially now, during a recession, it seems relevant to ask whether the role of cinema in bad times is to give an escape or to reflect what people are going through…

Loach: I think that trivialises cinema. It depends if you take cinema seriously. If you take it seriously like a book or like poetry or visual arts or certainly writing, the point of cinema, or one of the points of cinema, can be to reflect on why things are bad. They are not acts of God. You want to be able to understand why things are bad because then you go out strengthened. You have some sense of an understanding. Understanding gives you strength. If you’re just bemused by why things are bad and all that cinema does is distract your attention, then it’s a pretty useless medium. You might as well have a lobotomy really. What’s the difference? I think cinema should, cinema can, give you an insight into why things are bad.

LWLies: What was your idea of Cantona before the film and what is it now you’ve worked with him?

Loach: I only really knew him as this legendary footballer who was a brilliant performer, y’know – original and imaginative and cheeky. There was a real cheek in what he did and his ability to communicate across a crowd so that 70,000 people would have a sense of his personality. Very few players can do that, I think, which is why he’s held in such great affection. And then meeting him now, he’s a very quiet, quite diffident man, but still with a very magnetic presence.

LWLies: That dialogue with Eric Bishop, did that come from conversations Cantona had had with Paul Laverty?

Loach: Yes. I mean they’re a distillation of things he said.

LWLies: Do you get the feeling that Cantona plays up to his persona?

Loach: Yes. He’s got a sense of humour about who he’s seen as. Yeah. But Paul met him for a couple of days and then kind of distilled what Eric said into the dialogue so that it sat well with him.

LWLies: How do you direct Eric Cantona being Eric Cantona? Because he’s the expert, obviously.

Loach: Same as anybody else. Same as anybody else.

LWLies: Tell me about that.

Loach: Well I don’t direct people in the sense of telling them how to do things. You just put them in a situation with the dialogue and make certain that everything around it propels actors into a certain path. I would never say to them, ‘I want you to say it like this.’ We might talk about it a little bit, but it should be self-evident without analysing it. Directing should be completely hidden.

LWLies: So you must have to spend hours and hours getting to know your actors.

Loach: Not really. The audition process is that. You usually see people six or seven times before you cast them, so by the end of that time you know them quite well. But talking about it in a self-conscious way I think is very destructive.

LWLies: How much of your decision to make this film was based on the fact that having Cantona in it would help with funding and publicity?

Loach: Not at all. Nothing. That didn’t come into it really. I’ve got the least commercial sense of anybody in the industry, so I never get excited at that level. No the excitement of making it is to work with him and to work with Paul on a subject like this.

LWLies: And what about the glamour of it all? I read in the press notes about you lording it up with Cantona in the VIP box at Man U. Did hanging out with a celebrity reinforce your anti-celebrity ideas or were you seduced by it?

Loach: No, because he doesn’t behave like that. Apart from everybody singing his name and treating him like that, he doesn’t ask for any of that and I certainly wouldn’t be able to give it anyway. But no he just dealt with it like you would, I’m sure. You’re just nice to people and sign what’s put in front of you and smile and drift away.

LWLies: I wouldn’t . I’d develop a very big head.

Loach: Well. I think he was very nice to people and then left really.

LWLies: One of the things that people compliment you on is your consistency, the fact that you’re still making films about the same sorts of people and subjects. I wondered if you considered it an achievement that you hadn’t decamped to Hollywood or whether there was never any temptation anyway?

Loach: Well I think it’s boring really, the little I know of the American industry makes it sound like the last place you’d want to go and work. I just don’t find it attractive. I don’t find the work they do interesting. I find it predictable. It’s like if you’re interested in food you wouldn’t go to a hamburger chain. I just find mainstream Hollywood production uninteresting… And nobody’s waved a lot of notes in my face anyway.

LWLies: You always cast from the locale where your film is set. For the sake of argument, what would be wrong about hiring a really excellent RADA actor who did a great Mancunian accent?

Loach: Some actors who have been to RADA are good and have retained their identity, but I think the reason to get someone who really is from, in this case Manchester – or Glasgow, where we’ve done a lot of work – is that they don’t have to think about how they speak, it is actually part of them and you learn the rhythm of language where you grew up. It isn’t just a question of phonetics, of the sound of words. It’s how the language is used, the rhythm of the language and the way of thinking that the language dictates. It’s much more than imitating the sound. The language is part of the culture of the place and so being from there, and knowing that, and not having to consider how you’re speaking is much better than having to work and self-consciously try and make the right sound.

LWLies: So when people talk about ‘the craft of acting’ and spending many years studying the method etc., you just think, ‘Bollocks to that’?

Loach: No, not at all. This is film acting of a particular kind. If you want to work in the theatre then you do need some training and you need to work out how an actor works, because in the theatre you need to work out with everyone else the line of the performance and the triggers to the different emotional moments and the different changes of mood of the character. You’ve got to work that out in rehearsal with the text, so that you can play the whole thing from beginning to end in one evening and then do it again the same the next night and the next night. In film you don’t have to do that. Certainly not the way we work. You just have to make one moment absolutely credible and believe in it totally and that’s different, you don’t need the theatre technique to do that.

LWLies: But what about the kind of method acting technique that De Niro or someone like that would use?

Loach: Well I think there’s a germ of truth in it, but it’s often caricatured and turned into something else.

LWLies: I know you withhold scripts and play tricks on actors, as it were, to generate a certain sort of response. I wondered how actors generally respond to that?

Loach: Well by the time we’ve cast them, they know that’s how we’re going to do it and if they didn’t want to respond to that, we wouldn’t cast them so – touch wood – I’ve never had a bad experience.

LWLies: They don’t ever feel tricked in any way?

Loach: No, no. Because that’s just built into the process and we’ve talked about that before we do it. You’ve got to find people who will enjoy that. I mean most people do. I can’t remember the last time somebody ducked out. They might have thirty years ago, a kind of older actor might not have responded to it, but now everybody just enjoys it really. At least, they are kind enough to say they do.

LWLies: How has your process developed over the years?

Loach: It’s just learning by mistakes, y’know. You look at what you’re recording and then say, ‘Well, that isn’t as good as it could have been. What would make it better?’

LWLies: Did you withhold the script from the actors on Cathy Come Home, for example?

Loach: I think we did, yeah. We certainly did on Kes. We did this film called Kes and the Kestrel is killed and we had to smuggle a dead Kestrel into where he [actor David Bradley, who played Billy] would find it and he didn’t know it was going to be there. He probably guessed.

LWLies: I read an account of that. Was he angry because he thought you had killed it?

Loach: Yeah, I mean, I told him afterwards. But at the time… He was a very nice guy. I think surprise is the hardest thing to act. Things like the police raid in Looking For Eric, they didn’t know that was going to happen.

LWLies: How would you describe the popular perception of Ken Loach films? Particularly the perception of people who haven’t seen any.

Loach: I don’t know. I’m not sure there is a perception really. I don’t know. I have no idea. I think the trouble is sometimes reviewers and film writers overuse certain words. I mean I’ll be really pleased never to read the word ‘gritty’ again. It doesn’t help that. You want an audience to come in without preconceptions and just enjoy what’s there, so it’s just boring that you’re given a stereotypical image.

LWLies: Does it worry you that because you’re seen as a left-wing film director all the people who go to see your films will agree with you and you’ll end up preaching to the converted?

Loach: Well I mean if they all do, then we’d probably do rather better politically than we are doing. I don’t know I think that’s just inevitable really. I mean the thing is the people that tend to go to see independent films or non-mainstream Hollywood films will tend to be more radical anyway, so it’s almost a self-selecting group.

LWLies: Are you interested in getting your stuff on TV and to a wider audience for that reason?

Loach: Yes. I mean I began in television and all films are seen on television anyway at some point, even if it’s through DVD, you see it on the set. It’s all one industry, really.

LWLies: One of the things I always got from your films was the idea that these apparently insignificant lives are important enough and interesting enough to be on screen, just as much as any other ones. I wondered if you thought that by casting a celebrity and adding to the Cantona cult in a way, you were undermining that philosophy a bit?

Loach: Well I hope it worked the other way, by showing Cantona as someone very human and fallible who can take the mickey out of himself, it made him seem human rather than turning him into a celebrity. It made him human really.

LWLies: While still celebrating his magnetism…

Loach: Yes, because I mean he is…as a player he was stunning.

LWLies: Looking For Eric is unusual for one of your films because it has a magical element. Were you worried about that disrupting the realism?

Loach: Obviously there are no special effects and it just seemed, again, far more human that he’s just there on a cut, rather than appearing through walls and all that. I just liked the idea of doing it in a very simple way, you know a very traditionally cinematic way. On a cut, rather than CGI.

LWLies: I believe Cantona was a big fan of yours prior to making the film, and you’re known to be very popular in France. I wondered if you had any theories on your popularity over there?

Loach: I don’t know, I’ve just been lucky really. I didn’t know Eric had seen the films at all so that was quite nice.

LWLies: Did you talk about your previous work with him?

Loach: Not a lot, I just wanted to talk about football. No, he was…why do we do well in France? Well I think in a way it’s two things; first of all they’ve got a different cinema tradition there and in Italy and the kind of films we do are more in their film tradition, almost, than in ours. They’re in our literature tradition, but not so much in our film tradition. If you think of the Italian Neo-realists, Eastern European films and French films, I think the kind of things we do just correspond to that tradition much more than our own which is so pro-American. So there’s that, and I think also the fact that the stories in our films are kind of quite familiar to people in Europe, the situations and characters – but it’s in another language, so it’s a bit exotic. It’s familiar, but it’s exotic.

LWLies: Are there any filmmakers working at the moment who you feel a connection with? Or just admire?

Loach: Yeah. I like the Dardenne brothers’ films… I think there are a few others, but I’m not good at remembering names.

LWLies: Are you a cinema buff?

Loach: No, I don’t go very often. I think when you’ve been doing it a long time it’s the ones when you were young that stay with you. It’s the same with everything, music everything. It’s the music you heard when you were a kid that stays with you. For me it was the ’60s. The Czech films of the ’60s were what I really found most exciting.

LWLies: And is there anyone working now who you feel a kind of kinship with?

Loach: Yeah, I’m friends with quite a lot of filmmakers. Mike Leigh… But we do very different work. We’re good pals. And others.

LWLies: Do you argue about cinema technique with Mike Leigh?

Loach: No, no, no. You might gossip, but you would never challenge each other. Because everybody’s got their own process and everybody’s got their own way and things that interest them and things they want to express and that’s how it should be really.

LWLies: What did you like about Steve Evets [who plays Eric Bishop in Looking For Eric]?

Loach: Steve, well he was very true in everything. In the auditions he was just very true and he makes you smile, but you feel for him as well and he was just very genuine and I thought the audience would care for him. He touches people, but he doesn’t force anything.