English filmmaker Ken Loach is 87 and has been directing for almost 60 years. He has decided that his latest feature, The Old Oak, about Syrian war refugees resettling in a dying English town, will be his last. “Every one of these takes at least two or three years to make, and if I decided to make another one, I’d be 90 when it came out,” he tells Vulture. “I think it’s better to just go out with this one.”
Written by Paul Laverty, Loach’s go-to screenwriter over the past quarter-century, The Old Oak feels like a summation of his filmography. His movies focus on working-class and poor people struggling to survive the chaos and violence of war, the ruthlessness of capitalism, and the tensions of demographic change. Whether he’s telling the story of a poor father trying to buy his daughter a communion dress (Raining Stones), a struggling single mother and an ex-carpenter recovering from a heart attack (I, Daniel Blake), or violent men finding peace through honest work (The Angels’ Share), the point of view is always ground level, rooted in everyday details and conundrums. Those elements come into focus in The Old Oak’s story about pub owner TJ Ballantyne (Dave Turner). A political progressive, TJ finds himself at odds with his most loyal customers, native-born white men who, like TJ, come from a long line of union miners and seize on the refugees as scapegoats for economic problems that have been strangling their dying town for 40 years.
Loach talked to Vulture about all the themes that have obsessed him since he started making movies in the late 1960s. He delved into the lingering effects of Margaret Thatcher on the United Kingdom’s economy, the shattered dreams of the New Left, the difficulty of building workers’ coalitions, and the reason why he never puts a camera anywhere that a person wouldn’t be.
How did The Old Oak enter your life?
Through Paul Laverty: writer, friend, comrade. We see the world through the same eyes and laugh together, get angry together. And we’ve done two films in the Northeast of England, which is a very special region. Special because it has its own dialect and its own words, and a very marked, very distinctive, very strong character based on old industries which have gone: shipbuilding, steel, and coal mining. All gone. Nothing in its place. So all the consequences of the neoliberal economic program, you can see there, very visibly. And nowhere more visibly than in the old mining-pit villages, because they’re in the countryside. It’s a pit, with a pithead, and the cottages around it, and then trees and fields. And when a pit closes, as they all have closed, there’s nothing. No work. Shops close, local infrastructure collapses. Committee centers close. Churches close. Fewer doctors. Some people leave.
Paul heard about the arrival in these areas of refugees from the Syrian War. The local communities knew very little about the refugees, and the local authorities knew very little about them as well, from the very beginning of their arrival. They were left to deal with it all, with little warning and little funding. The question was, can these two communities find a way of working together, or will there be mutual antagonism?
The film seems to be sympathetic toward the white residents of the town, up to a point, despite the bigotry that some of them express toward the newcomers.
Yes. I think that’s very important, because racism comes from somewhere. There’s often a justice in their discontent at the beginning. They have been abandoned, governments have not recognized that they need support, neither the far right nor the center right. So that abandonment leaves them angry and bitter and discontented and alienated. They say, “Look, we have got nothing. Why do we have to share what little we have when refugees could just as easily be sent to richer areas, middle-class areas, bourgeois areas. Why us?” But then it transforms into “We don’t like them, we don’t like their food, go away.” And that turns into racism.
But alongside that are the old traditions of the miners: solidarity, mutual support, community, living and supporting each other, and internationalism — during the big strike, which we refer to in the film, they traveled for support. They welcomed people from across the world who came and stayed with them and gave them hospitality. So within very recent memory, there’s an example of how those two currents struggle to make a connection.
What’s the relationship between racism and right-wing politics?
There are people who are motivated to use the alienation and the bitterness and the anger of people like the residents of this town to encourage racism, because if the working class are fighting each other, they don’t look upwards to realize why they’re poor. They will look downwards, to those who are even poorer than they are, and say, “It’s their fault. They’re taking your job, they’re taking your space to see the doctor, they’re taking your places in the schools,” without asking why those schools are abandoned in the first place or why we don’t have any work anyway. So it’s a useful tool for the right wing. And our press is racist over here. Very discreet, in a very British way, but racist. Our politicians are racist. There are clear racists in Parliament. And there are all these far-right groups who hold meetings and get big crowds.
Why aren’t there characters in The Old Oak representing those kinds of agitators?
We thought about having that in the film, but then we thought, No, let’s just see it develop. Let’s see the soil in which racism grows and just see it emerge. I think that’s better than having some outside person saying, “Come on!” and encouraging racism.
You made a four-part documentary in 1980 called A Question of Leadership, about how Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s policies impacted trade unions. You’re still dealing with some of the same issues in this final film, which centers on a staunch union man whose father, a miner, died in 1982. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the persistence of labor issues in your filmography, and how it feels seeing the same issues reappear over the decades, but with the details changed.
The working class has immense power. The working class can turn off the switch and nothing moves, nothing is made, nothing is sold, the economy has stopped completely. But they’re taught that they don’t have any power — that the power is with the money, it’s with the stock markets, it’s with the banks. But wealth is created by the working class. We don’t need the exploiters; the exploiters need someone to exploit for their profits. The great problem is that all the political parties drift to the right, or else they are excluded, or lies are told about them. The absence of leadership that can take the working class into political power is one of the big conundrums of the last century.
The vast majority of main characters in your films are working class or poor, whether it’s a miner’s son in Kes, or an unemployed man in Raining Stones, or in your previous film, Sorry We Missed You, a family headed by a delivery driver and a home-care nurse, both of whom seem to work every waking moment of their lives.
I just find those sorts of characters much more interesting. I also find, just from a work point of view, that in order to tell the stories we want to tell, you have to work with characters you like. Characters you feel an empathy with and people whose company you enjoy, you can share a joke with. They’ll suffer terribly, but in the end you know you’ll share a joke or that something will happen and there’ll be a smile. The roundness of their characters is what I think we all enjoy — those of us who make the films. A number of people would just say to us, “Why not tell a story about the ruling class? Let’s see what they’re up to.” But I couldn’t do it.
It’s not as if the rest of the entertainment industry doesn’t have that covered!
[Laughs] No, you’re right.
In fact, I wonder: Given the inherent dramatic power of seeing people struggle economically for themselves and their families, why don’t more movies tell those sorts of stories?
I don’t know. I think most filmmakers don’t … it doesn’t attract them somehow. I mean, semi-commercial filmmakers.
Is that what you are? Semi-commercial?
We’re very, very cheap. We make tiny, tiny films in terms of finance. I think doing commercial films takes you into another realm. You know, we travel on buses, we jump on an ordinary train. Certain film people travel around in their cars or with a driver, and when they’re shooting, they have a caravan. What do you want a caravan for? Just knock around with the sparks. You’re part of the same world, you know? Sit around with the people who are called “extras” in the business. Terrible name: We’d never call them that. It’s sort of insulting somehow. I mean, in the last few films Paul has really led on this, because I find traveling not so easy now, but all our lives, we’ve just spent time with people. You know, stand in the crowd at a football game and be part of the gang.
Another key thing for us — for me, for my generation — was the politics of the ’60s and the New Left. The essential principle we learned is that there is a class conflict at the heart of society between those who sell their labor and those who exploit it. It’s irreconcilable, and that is the struggle. That is the struggle. You are on one side or the other, whether you want to be or not.
And yet you have to operate within the capitalist system that you’re critiquing and do fundraising and so on, which must feel a bit odd in some ways.
Yes, of course. But we’ve been very lucky, over the last 30 years in particular, in that we’ve gotten some very good European co-producers, and the films are presold. There’s a core audience for them. It’s not huge, but there is a core audience. Based on that core audience, that is the budget we get to spend.
What’s the budget, more or less?
For many years it was anywhere between £2–3 million, now it’s between £3–4 million. They’ve gotten more expensive over the decades. I think the last film before this one cost just over £4 million, which is about 5 million dollars, I suppose? We shoot for six weeks. Obviously, you get full union rates. You can’t undercut the union rates! You wouldn’t be much of a lefty if you did! [Laughs] Many of the team are people who have worked with us for 30 years. So you have to pay accordingly, and you can’t replace any of them, because they’re brilliant. So it’s not done on the cheap, and we acknowledge that. But the money is all on the screen, you know?
Even when your films include actors that some moviegoers know, like Frances McDormand and Brian Cox in the legal thriller Hidden Agenda, or Cillian Murphy in The Wind That Shakes the Barley, they’re not stars — at least not at the moment when they’re working with you. Did you ever wish you’d reeled in somebody who was a big international star so you could get a commensurately big budget?
I didn’t want that, really. The bigger the name attached to the movie, the less freedom you generally have. You need to have freedom. The only limits on films like ours are your imagination and organizing ability and discipline. I mean, I’m touching wood, but we stick to the schedule. Maybe half a day, maybe excess of one day, but by and large we start when we said we were going to start and we finish on what we figured would be the last day. The last day on this one was a hell of a day, but we got it done.
What did the day entail, and why was it hard?
The last day we shot was the last scene in the movie, the one set in the street where the characters all come out because there’s been a death in the family. We began shooting it mid-afternoon and we had to finish by 8 p.m. because the light was gonna be gone. And it rained in the middle! [Laughs] And so it was a hell of a day. Because you don’t have a safety valve of being able to add days, everyone’s focus is as sharp as a razor. There’s no rescheduling. There’s no, “Never mind, we’ll come back tomorrow.” No! It’s now! That pressure hangs on what you do, it hangs on your commitment, and it focuses your concentration.
How do you keep everyone motivated?
Just before we went out, I told everyone, “The center of this film is what you do now. The fact that you care.” And we were amazing! An incredible thing we got in those three or four hours was with the actress Ebla Mari, who is a wonderful woman, very strong woman. Her family had been through absolute traumas in Syria. They’d lost everything. Many people who left Syria have family members who have been tortured, treated horrendously. Many have lost close family members, relatives who died or were killed. And I thought, Ebla has seen everything. She’ll be there, but it [the scene] won’t touch her. But there’s one shot we got where she’s weeping, and I thought, That’s a gift to us, because for her to allow herself to be vulnerable, well … To us, it’s only a film, but she’s experiencing real life. There’s such generosity in that. I found it really touching.
You’ve often worked with nonprofessional actors, and in some cases — notably Dave Turner, one of the stars of this film, a former firefighter who was an adviser on I, Daniel Blake — they eventually did become professionals after spending time with you. What’s your system with those kinds of performers?
First, there’s quite a long process of auditioning. So when you ask someone to act who isn’t a professional actor, we’re not taking a chance, because we’ve done little improvisations with them and we’ve seen them commit with that level of emotional engagement, and focus, and use of language, and belief, and ability to communicate. You have to go through all that and try them out with the people they will be acting with, so you know there’ll be a chemistry, an accord, a connection there. You have to do all that before they’re cast. And then because all the preparation’s been improvised, they bring a sense of improvisation to the film even though 95 percent of what is onscreen is what Paul’s written in the script. That’s always the tricky part of the balance for me: trying to make Paul’s words sound like their words.
Do documentary values influence your fiction films?
Not at all. It’s the other way around. I started in fiction and I’ve done comparatively few documentaries. I’ve always done fiction, really.
Then where does the documentary feeling in your movies come from?
Trial and error. Our films are about finding a way of enabling people to be spontaneous while at the same time absorbing the language and the words that Paul has written. You may develop bits that work and certain ways of doing things, but you have to be careful, because the moment it seems false or learned or rehearsed, you’ve lost it. It’s got to feel like this is just happening at this moment. The struggle to be articulate is very important, particularly amongst working-class people, because that’s what you’re watching, that’s what engages you, that struggle of what’s going on behind the eyes. You have to believe in that, in the idea of them finding the words, you know? The moment you look at them and say, “Well, that’s a speech, they learned that,” you’ll never be able to use that moment.
There are a lot of filmmakers who are more, shall we say, visually oriented, by which I mean the camera is more acrobatic, the shots are more complex, the sequencing more intricate. You keep it simple. What’s the philosophy behind that?
To begin at the beginning, you want to tell stories about the working class. Why? Because they are the revolutionary class, to use the old language of politics. That’s where the power is. They are the most important class. We need the audience, which I hope is mainly working-class people anyway, to see and understand and maybe have a sense of This is my situation; I am like that, and share compassion and solidarity, and get angry when the characters are angry, and understand why. The best way to do all that, I think, is for the camera to be like an observer, in the corner of the room. The viewer is there with the characters. They’re just in the corner of the room. Like a sympathetic friend, you know? Not an anthropologist looking down from afar. The characters are not in a glass case, pinned to a board like a bug, you know? They’re us. You understand them. But you do that as a human presence. You can’t do that if the camera’s on the floor. You don’t do it if the camera’s up on the ceiling. Whose point of view is that?
What’s an example of an everyday sort of scene that is often filmed in a way that takes you out of the story?
Car scenes. Often the camera is sitting on the bonnet of the car. Who the hell is sitting on the bonnet to take that shot? It’s not realistic. When I began, once or twice I was like, “You need to put a rig on the car for the camera,” so that you’re looking through the windshield and you see the person in the passenger seat and the person in the driver’s seat, and the camera’s outside and the car’s driving along. But then I thought, This is silly. No wonder it’s a gimmick. That’s not a human position. So where’s the human position? In the back seat. You want to see their eyes? Fine, use a driving mirror or get around the side just behind the driver’s head. A stupid camera position can destroy the reality of the performance you’re observing.
If you were to distill “How to make films the Ken Loach way,” what would be the most important rules?
Camera at eye level. Natural light. Lens like a human eye. No great wide-angle lens and no extreme telephoto effects. Don’t intervene in an actor’s space, you know? Respect their space. Within those parameters, light is critical because it can tell viewers whether you’re gonna treat somebody like a suspect in a hostile interview or whether you’re gonna engage with someone sympathetically. I’ve learned a lot just looking at old paintings. First thing when you look for a location is “Where’s the light?” It isn’t about the place. If the light doesn’t work, we needn’t see any more of the scene. It’s not only useful for lighting performers, it’s just immensely beautiful for shots. And then you consider the balance of people in the frame, the balance of architecture, the rhythm of cutting. Bad cutting can destroy a sense of reality.
What is bad cutting?
Cutting that tells you what’s next. You can have good shots, realistic performances, a beautiful script, and interaction that’s great, but if the camera knows who’s going to speak next, you’re finished. The camera can never seem to know who’s going to speak next because you’re pretending this is all happening for the first time, and that person hasn’t spoken yet! So there’s got to be a reason to cut. Sorry that I’m going on and on about this!
No, no, it’s great. I’m interested in your process!
When I began filmmaking, I always thought you should cut just before a character speaks. Then I thought, That’s daft. When you’re part of a crowd, like we so often are in this film because so many scenes are set in a pub, I don’t know who’s going to speak next! So don’t telegraph it. Maybe you cut to the person speaking after somebody else looks at them. Or maybe you cut to somebody, and it’s like you’re expectantly waiting for them to speak, but then they look at somebody else as they speak. Wherever you eye would go if you were in that room is where you generally want to cut.
What’s the difference between a technically competent film and one that seems to have a life force?
Everything. I mean, in most films, every craft is practiced at a high level. They’re all brilliant, everyone involved. But too often, they all work individually. They are not driven by a common understanding of a central aesthetic. That’s what’s important, I think.
You’re not generally described in these terms, but I think you have one of the most recognizable styles in cinema.
How funny. Well, I don’t know if that’s good or bad! I think the point of any artistic job is that it has to be coherent. And filmmaking is collective because so many trades are involved. That means the director’s job is like a choir conductor: You’ve got all these voices, but they’re going to need to sing in harmony. That’s a big part of the director’s job. Design is critical as well. Once you have a splash of red in one place on the screen, your eye goes there. I’ve worked with wonderful designers, and the greatest compliment I can pay them is to say that their work doesn’t look designed. When a character walks into a house in one of our films, I don’t want people to think about the design, I want them to think, Somebody just walked into a house.
It seems as if you have both an aesthetic and political philosophy, and they’re intertwined.
One grew out of the other. You know the old saying, “Content dictates form”? It’s a simple thing, but I think it’s true.
You’ve never been afraid of bleakness, but The Old Oak is not a bleak film. The final scenes feel very hopeful, especially coming on the heels of Sorry We Missed You, which was devastating at the end. Why didn’t you make your final film a punch in the heart? Leave people haunted and disturbed?
Because I think hope is political, really. It’s not “cross your fingers” or sending a letter to Father Christmas. Hope means I can see a way forward, I can see where the strength is to take us there, so there’s something to work for. If we don’t have some confidence in something, then the planet is doomed! [Laughs] That sense of hope is very important. But you have to justify it. You justify it with solidarity. The majority of the working class in that mining village, by and large, believes, “Yes, we are the same as the people who have come here from elsewhere. We share the same objectives, the same needs. We share everything, really. All we need to do to achieve our requirements is to stand together.” It’s a simple adage from the miners’ strike: You eat together, you sing together. The questions that are much more difficult are, “How do you organize this? Where is the leadership?” But you have to begin with solidarity.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. The Old Oak is now playing in theaters nationally in select markets. A retrospective of over 20 films by Loach runs at Film Forum from Friday, April 19, through Thursday, May 2.