Ken Loach: ‘Ireland has always been wonderful... even though the police in the North chased us out’

Back in 2014 Ken Loach was looking forward to retirement. He had just made Jimmy’s Hall, about the only Irishman ever to be deported from Ireland for political offences, and was certain it would be his last film. Earlier this year, however, his third feature since then premiered at Cannes, where he also, in 2016, won his second Palme d’Or, for I, Daniel Blake. Today, sitting in the quiet upstairs room of a London pub, he seems sure once more that he is at the end of his film-making career.

“I can’t see myself getting around to it again,” he says. “I’m 87 now. That’s not a bad age to get to and still be functioning. I wouldn’t mind something small, but not a feature film. I was away from home effectively for a year for this last one. It is isolating. I have to be realistic. My wife, Lesley, is 84. It would feel selfish in a simple, domestic way to spend another year away.”

If The Old Oak, which comes out later this month, really is his final film, his departure will be a huge loss. No film-maker has done more to dramatise the struggle for a basic standard of living that so many people in Britain have faced. And, from his earliest television dramas, no film-maker has made more of an impact. His depiction of a backstreet abortion in Up the Junction, which he made as a BBC Wednesday Play in 1965, hastened in the UK’s Abortion Act of 1967. Cathy Come Home’s portrait, in 1966, of a young family facing homelessness helped generate support for Shelter, the newly founded homeless charity. The late New York Times critic Vincent Canby once suggested that Loach’s movies “may one day provide a more accurate record of a nation’s collective unconscious than the work of any other single director”.

“I don’t think of my films as campaigning films,” Loach says. “I don’t think I ever did. If you view them as activist films you diminish the whole project. It’s like a novel. You’ve got to reflect the contradictions and the difficulties and uncertainties. Activist films are schematic: ‘Here’s the analysis.’ The joy of film, of any art, is the complexity and the mystery. It’s what you don’t know. It’s not the like heroic tractor driver of Stalinist art. It’s poor, frail human beings stumbling through situations. That’s what we try to capture.”

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As well as his groundbreaking films about Britain, Loach has made three of the most significant historical chronicles of Ireland in Jimmy’s Hall, Hidden Agenda and The Wind That Shakes the Barley. He has been interested in Ireland since learning about Home Rule at school. He has also turned his attention to the plight of underpaid janitorial workers in Los Angeles, in Bread and Roses; to the effects of the Contras war in Nicaragua, in Carla’s Song; and to the Spanish Civil War, in Land and Freedom.

“Nicaragua was a tough place in terms of location,” he says. “But the welcome was great. Nothing was too much trouble for people. It was a lovely experience in tough circumstances. Conversely, Los Angeles was very hard. It’s a most unfriendly place, and because they are the capital of filmmaking they don’t want some European-minded Englishman coming along and telling them what to do. If you suggested a different way of doing something the response was, he must be wrong. There was a real cultural clash. Ireland has always been wonderful. I’ve done three films there. And I made a documentary there ages ago called Time to Go, before Hidden Agenda, which did incur the wrath of some people in the North of a unionist persuasion. They were all a joy to make. Even though the police in Northern Ireland chased us out.”

Following on from I, Daniel Blake and Sorry We Missed You, The Old Oak is Loach’s third consecutive film set in northeast England. The most upbeat of the unofficial trilogy, it concerns TJ Bannatyne (played by Dave Turner), a pub landlord who struggles to keep his doors open in a once-thriving mining community in Co Durham. Many of the regulars are dismayed when a busload of Syrian refugees arrive to occupy houses that have been snapped up by property vultures. Bannatyne, however, strikes up a friendship with Yara (Elba Mari), a young Syrian photographer who takes an interest in the village’s proud militant past.

It is, among other things, a considered picture of two wounded communities.

“Places like Newcastle and County Durham were known for coal mining and shipbuilding and steel,” says the film-maker. “And those industries all went within a decade. The pits were closed for political reasons. And we collapsed into a gig economy where work doesn’t have status or skill or a sense of unity. The old traditions of solidarity and union struggle have given way to a new country of insecurity, get what you can.

“This is set in an old mining community, and among the older generation there’s still that tradition of solidarity and internationalism. They are politically aware and have a sense of political obligation. They have an innate wish to be good neighbours, unlike the post-Thatcher Ukip consciousness that says to protect our borders and repel invaders, and that immigrants are to blame for all our problems.

“These communities, which have received more refugees than any other area, have been abandoned. There hasn’t been investment. There’s a germ of truth that is distorted into xenophobia and racism. We know the right-wing press has fanned those flames. When we tried to tell our story we had to incorporate all those different elements: the people who say, ‘Why do we have refugees coming here when we have nothing?’, the people who appreciate the humanity of the situation, and everyone in between.”

A warm, witty and softly spoken man, Loach is nothing like a firebrand in person. He’s wary of the way he is often characterised. He dislikes the term “kitchen sink realism”, with its classist underpinnings. Neither, despite his many accolades from Cannes and Berlin, does he subscribe to auteur theory. He always says “we” and “us” when he is talking about his work. It’s a team effort, Loach insists. His later career and resurgence were enabled by funding from Channel 4 and by the producers Sally Hibbin and Rebecca O’Brien.

The screenwriter Paul Laverty, a former lawyer, has collaborated on 14 features with Loach since 1996. Each project is grassroots-driven, requiring months of community-based research. Loach and Laverty spent time at West End food bank in Newcastle to research I, Daniel Blake. They interviewed delivery drivers to expose the many pitfalls and unrealistic targets that characterise the gig economy for Sorry We Missed You.

“I think we make stories of how we live now,” says Loach. “Or we visit critical moments in the past, like the Irish War of Independence. Because they shed light on where we are now.”

[ Sorry We Missed You: One of Ken Loach’s best films ]

The director once remarked, “I’ve spent as much time defending my films as I have making them.” He’s not wrong. Hidden Agenda, his thrilling 1990 dramatisation of the John Stalker affair – when the senior British policeman was suspended before he could complete his report on the shoot-to-kill policy allegedly adopted by some members of the security services in Northern Ireland – was dismissed by a Conservative MP, Ivor Stanbrook, as “the IRA entry” at Cannes.

The journalist Simon Heffer, writing in the Daily Telegraph, called The Wind That Shakes the Barley a “poisonous film about the war between the IRA and the inevitably wicked British”, adding that he hadn’t seen it and didn’t need to “any more than I need to read Mein Kampf to know what a louse Hitler was”. A truly radical film, the British MP Michael Gove wrote in the London Times, would be “one which bothered to tell the truth about the British Army”, including “the bravery of the men under fire in Ulster”.

Loach is certainly still riling people. In 2021 he was thrown out of the British Labour Party because of his membership of a group set up in response to what it claimed were politically motivated allegations of anti-Semitism in the party. Jeremy Corbyn, who was the party’s leader between 2015 and 2020, now sits as an independent MP after he disagreed with the findings of a subsequent investigation.

“They invent rules and say they’ve expelled you because of the rules they’ve just invented,” says Loach, who made a documentary about Corbyn in the run-up to the UK general election of 2017. “It was like getting out of an abusive relationship. What a relief I could breathe the air again. I’d supported the organisation Labour Against the Witch-hunt. Which wasn’t illegal when I supported it. But they made it illegal. I think Corbyn was perceived as a threat to the deep, vested interests in the state. If he’d been elected they would have tried to find a way to remove him.

[ Cannes film festival 2023: return of the old guard royalty of Loach, Wenders and Scorsese. Then there’s Johnny Depp ]

“The press had vested interests. The Guardian represent the interests of social democrats. So they endorsed Starmer just like they endorsed Blair. They led the hostility against Jeremy. And they led the abuse against those of us who support the Palestinian cause. The BBC and the media know the steps. The bottom line is they need a safe alternative to the Tories.”

Does he see a way forward for the British Labour Party – or, indeed, for social and economic equality?

“It’s very complicated now. I don’t think we can get organised in the short term in terms of a new party, because the trade unions are not backing one. And certainly not the Labour Party. Because most of the good people I know have left. I think we can only unite around the principles, not around an electoral organisation. We nearly won the election with the principles of the 2017 manifesto with Jeremy Corbyn as leader. There are still good activists and groups. It’ll be a patchwork. But there will be good independent and Labour or Green candidates that stand by or elaborate the Corbyn principles.”

The Old Oak opens in cinemas on Friday September 29th