Ken Loach interview: "I want people to be angry"
For five decades, Ken Loach has used cinema as a tool to expose social injustices within society. With his latest, I, Daniel Blake, Loach turns his attention to the UK's humiliating welfare system. It's a barnstormer, and his best film in years
In the corner of a bright hotel bar on a warm Sunday morning in Liverpool, two men are talking politics. The word “Thatcher” is being spat around like it’s poison on their tongues. It’s not an unusual conversation to hear in Liverpool, perhaps the UK’s most politically radical city, but the fact it’s a former Doctor Who and a member of The Fellowship of the Ring having the heated debate pricks up our ears.
Paul McGann and Sean Bean aren’t the hotel’s only celeb guests. The Skinny is here to speak to Ken Loach, the director of such passionate and humane films as Kes, Raining Stones and Looking for Eric; the winner of two Palme d’Or awards (for The Wind that Shakes the Barley and his latest film, I, Daniel Blake); a tireless champion of the British working-class; and a constant thorn in the sides of various right-wing UK governments.
The filmmaker, like the city of Liverpool as a whole, is in a buoyant mood. The date is 25 September. The previous day, Jeremy Corbyn won a convincing victory in Labour’s bitter leadership battle against the Blairite factions of his party. For Loach, a dyed in the wool socialist, it’s a moment of hope.
“If you and I were sitting here a year earlier, just before Jeremy Corbyn was elected, we’d be holding our heads in our hands,” says the softly spoken, but steely director. “But actually, amazingly, out of the blue, comes this surge of political commitment, which no one expected was there. It’s like an underground oil well. Drill down a little bit and suddenly it’s spouted out.”
Today is a busy one for Loach. As well as promoting I, Daniel Blake, which screened to two sold-out audiences the night before, he’s due to march with protesters against the upcoming closure of Liverpool Women’s Hospital, give a speech at a Momentum rally, and then there’s a #JC4PM (that’s Jeremy Corbyn for Prime Minister) event in the evening. Despite rumours of retirement that have been floating around for years, the 80-year-old – who still manages roughly a film a year – is showing no signs of slowing down. “[My retirement] is just one of these silly things that is in the ether. I’m just like the footballers – I take each game as it comes.”
While he’s never stopped working, there were signs that Loach may have mellowed in the last few years; lost his edge even. His most recent films, which include whisky-heist caper The Angels' Share and overly sentimental period film Jimmy’s Hall, have leaned towards whimsy. There’s no such complaint with the righteous and heartbreaking I, Daniel Blake, which deservedly won Cannes’ top prize back in May.
Part of the film’s appeal is its simplicity. It follows a widowed joiner, Daniel Blake (Dave Johns), who’s recently had a heart attack. His doctor tells him not to go back to work for a while. The ‘health care professional’ at his local Jobcentre in Newcastle, however, has other ideas. “Paul Laverty [Loach’s screenwriter since the mid-90s] and I kept hearing these stories and passing them on to each other,” he says. “Stories of people being forced to work when they’re ill. Or these stupid, arbitrary sanctions. The poverty and the ill health it causes. The government consciously making its citizens ill and suicidal. So we thought we should just explore this.”
In other Loach films focused on the trials and tribulations of characters on the breadline, say My Name is Joe or Sweet Sixteen, melodramatic and crime elements often muddied the water of the film’s politics. Here the focus on Daniel’s struggles is laser-like. “It is so horrific what the government is knowingly doing,” says Loach. “So we wanted to do something really pared down, very economic, absolutely crystal clear, but not lacking in complexity, because the characters are quite complex underneath. So you want to give full value to the complexity of the characters and how it affects them. But do it with a kind of raw simplicity because it is so strong.”
Ken Loach accepting his second Palme d'Or, Cannes 2016
Raw is the word. Daniel, a hardworking and proud man, has been grafting all his life until his illness. Now he finds his life hanging by a string when a mountain of forms he can’t fill in and bureaucrats he can’t get hold of on the phone means he’s forced to continue looking for jobs he can’t accept, or else face withdrawal of government support. The situation for Katie (played by Hayley Squires), the young single mother of two whom Daniel befriends, is even more dire. In one of the film’s most powerful scenes, we see her delirious with hunger cramming cold spaghetti hoops into her mouth at a food bank, tears of shame in her eyes. The technique is blunt but powerful.
This isn’t to suggest I, Daniel Blake is a work of dour miserablism, as Loach’s work is sometimes characterised in the press. It’s a furious work, but it’s full of warmth and humour. “The comedy isn’t artificial,” notes Loach. “Go to any working class area and people are laughing, there’s always jokes. I mean, Ricky Tomlinson [who starred in Loach’s Riff-Raff and Raining Stones] was there last night, clearly very kind and generous about the film, but he stands up and makes a joke, a joke of support. And the whole cinema laughs. Comedy is implicit in everyday life, so it would be quite artificial to take it out.”
There’s a pitch black comedy that runs through the film too: the governmental jargon and bureaucratic language that we’re all familiar with from day-to-day life is shown to reach Python-esque levels of absurdity in the work and pensions sector. “It is Orwellian language, isn’t it?” says Loach. “It’s these euphemisms, that either hide or say the opposite of what they mean.” In the scenes set within Daniel and Katy’s Jobcentre Plus, the absurdity of the language becomes maddening. Particularly infuriating is the Jobcentre’s manager, whose pleasant manner barely disguises his malice. “The man we cast, the man who ushers Katie out of the job centre, in real life he’s a policeman,” reveals Loach, “and he played it to perfection. He has the language of control while being apparently polite. ‘I need you to leave for me now,’ rather than just, ‘Get out.’ It’s very passive aggressive. The aggression and the threat is there, but is done in this falsely polite way.”
Cathy Come Home, 1966
There’s no such subterfuge with Loach, who, like his films, is pleasingly straight shooting. When we ask if he’s shown the film to anyone in government (we’d love to be a fly on the wall at an IDS screening), his disgust is palpable. “I don’t want to show it to them. They are the enemy to be beaten. They know what they are doing is wrong, we don’t have to persuade them,” he says, before uttering an almost inaudible, “Bastards.”
We play devil’s advocate, and suggest that, no matter your political persuasion, any right-thinking person would see this system doesn’t work. If anything, all its bureaucracy is a waste of taxpayers’ money. Loach isn’t convinced. “There’s an ideological reason for the way that they behave: it’s because poverty has to be laid at the door of the poor,” he says. “If you’re unemployed, it’s your own fault, your CV wasn’t good enough. But in fact the truth is the jobs aren’t there. Or if the jobs are there they’re zero hours, or they’re agency work where you get days at a time; casual labour, low wages. The security of work has gone for a large swathe of the working class. So because that’s their system, which is causing it, they want you to believe poverty is your own fault. There’s a logic to it from their point of view.”
The general public, however, can be convinced. It’s happened before with Loach, most notably with his searing 1966 teleplay Cathy Come Home, a docudrama about a young mother struggling to keep a house over her family’s head during the 60s housing crisis. The public outcry after its first broadcast shamed Harold Wilson’s government into housing reforms and help the charity Shelter grow to become a force for social change. While Loach concedes I Daniel, Blake is unlikely to reach the mass audience of Cathy... (“You have to remember, back then we only had two and a half channels”), he hopes the film's simple message will resonate.
“I hope the film will say, 'This is intolerable!' I hope people will feel solidarity with the characters and, if the film works, be distressed. But I also want people to be angry at the way we are and have been lead to live. Food banks are intolerable. The whole system of sanctioning is intolerable. We can’t treat people like this.”
I, Daniel Blake is released 21 Oct by Entertainment One