KEN LOACH has established himself as the world's 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 and Raining Stones. His new film Ladybird, Ladybird is released this month. He is currently editing his next film, Land and Freedom about the Spanish Civil War. Phil Hearse spoke to him. In the mid-1980s you had a lean time of it, unable to get commissions either for television or cinema. This was obviously linked to the political reaction of the Thatcher years. But in ideological terms this has hardly changed. How, then, do you explain the widespread critical acclaim you are now getting? • At the start of the 1980s. 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 documentary. Feature films, once you've worked on the script, got the money together and actually made the film can take three or four years.
But I thought it was necessary to make an intervention at the time by making documentaries - not wait for several years. But the documentaries I made, like Which side are you on? about the miners' strike or Questions of Leadership about the unions, was 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 touched got elbowed.
The turning point really was a telephone call from David Putnam asking whether I would be prepared to do a film about the Stalker Affair. That turned into Hidden Agenda.
That then won the prize at Cannes; and international recognition then gives people confidence at home. But I'm not under any illusions. Things could easily swing back, and I could find it difficult to get work again. What are the political benchmarks which determine your choice of topic. How do you describe yourself politically? • l'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 hualities in the performance. tending to be what they're not. lywood film. made a documentary instead. tary the mediation of fiction. man 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 personThus the people you choose may not be experienced film actors. Social class is important, so that people are not preExperience 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. How do you respond to the accusation that your films are just agitprop and political polemic? • 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 HolI think there was a danger of descending to polemic in some of the films, where perhaps I should have That's why I made Questions of Leadership about the unions as documen- so that people could put a political analysis very directly, without 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. But 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 judgement how long we can let this scene run, because if it goes on for 20 minutes the audience will have left the cinema. We'll have to make sure that polemic doesn't take over the film, but in a sense the politics is the film. You've been known for taking a very outspoken position on Ireland. For example 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 feel about the IRA ceasefire? • I haven't studied and discussed it FEATURE enough to make a firm judgement. What's interesting is the continued hypocrisy of the media coverage.
On the day after the ceasefire, when a Catholic was shot dead by Loyalist terrorists in Belfast, the press 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? But of course on Ireland, as everything else, Tony Blair has nothing to offer.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 69, September 24 1994, Page 14