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Ken Loach stays busy filming a scene for his latest
drama Bread and Roses.
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The tag is familiar and matter-of-fact: British director Ken Loach is a social realist. The pigeonholing continues with Loach's latest drama, Bread and Roses. In the film, a young Mexican immigrant (Pilar Padilla) joins a union activist (Adrien Brody) to help organize a city-wide janitor strike in Los Angeles. Bread and Roses confirms Loach's penchant for stories about everyday people. He remains the consummate political filmmaker. But that doesn't mean the 64-year-old director approves of his leftist label.
"I think it's fairly unhelpful, because it means when people come see the film, they tend to see it through the label, really," Loach says, speaking recently from a Los Angeles hotel. "They think they know what they're going to see before they see it."
For the past 30 years, long-time fans have created a cult around Loach's filmmaking. They celebrate his working-class dramas and realist settings. Newfound audiences continue to be drawn to his political reputation.
But Loach doesn't try his hand at different genres like some Steven Spielberg. He remains committed to the same social dramas he's always told. What's important to remember is that few filmmakers make everyday dramas as well as Loach.
"You kind of hope people will just go along prepared to engage with what's happening on the screen, meet the people in the story and try to share the experiences that they have," Loach says. "And maybe in the case of a film like Bread and Roses, they'll have some sense of solidarity with the people in it."
Bread and Roses is a film about human rights. It's also a call for unionization. Loach's hope is that moviegoers will connect with Brody's union organizer and Padilla's immigrant janitor. Loach even believes Bread and Roses can make a political impact on its audiences.
"You want people to say either, 'That's what it's like where I work,' or 'I know somebody in that situation' or 'I can see the exploitation they're suffering,' " Loach says. "You hope people who are in a similar situation will look at their own position again and will have some reflection on their own situation. You want people to make connections, really."
The context of Bread and Roses is distinctly American. Its story (written by Paul Laverty, Loach's long-time collaborator) speaks directly to immigration policies between the United States and Mexico. There is a great deal of emphasis placed on the film's Los Angeles setting. In a way, Bread and Roses seems a world apart from Loach's trademark stories set in British blue-collar communities. But Loach sees universal themes that connect a film like Bread and Roses with British-based dramas like Kes (1969) and Ladybird, Ladybird (1994). The goal is to tell a story everyone can understand.
"I think there are lots of people where I come from who understand the position the janitors are in," Loach says. "I mean this is very common where people have no kind of collective representation and they are just ripped off, really. I mean there are a lot of people like that who are immigrants and new arrivals or whatever who don't speak English very well or are not part of the dominant culture. The question is whether you dare or not put your head above the carpet. Whether you just feel it's too dangerous to take any kind of stand, or whether you think you're doing all right because where you've come to is much better than where you come from. So you don't want to rock the boat, or maybe you should really stick up for what you think you're entitled to."
After studying law at Oxford, Loach worked in the theater before taking a directing job at the BBC. Funding was in short supply when his filmmaking career began in the late 1960s. The advent of Channel 4 and television funding allowed Loach to make movies that spoke about the British experience instead of trying to imitate the latest Hollywood trend. Inspired by Italian neorealist dramas like The Bicycle Thief and Rocco and His Brothers, Loach quickly earned a reputation for telling humanistic stories about working-class families. Other British filmmakers like Mike Leigh and Alan Clarke began to tell similar stories. Before long Loach's brand of British social drama earned both critical and audience acclaim. To some extant, the "Ken Loach" film continues to be the trademark of the British film industry.
A world of possible story ideas swirls around Loach and his creative collaborators. Still, the veteran director continues to be inspired by the tales that occur at his feet. For Loach, one's passion for storytelling thrives on personal, human contact. A social-realist couldn't have it any other way.
"What gets your juices going are all the stories that you hear and the people you meet," Loach says. "I think it's a response to the actual life around you, rather than films, or writings, or photographs, or whatever. It's actually meeting the actual people or experiencing the actual situation. There is something second hand if you use other films as a starting point. I hate it when people say we'd like this film to be like such and such film. It's one sort of film kind of spliced onto another film. I think you have to respond directly to life itself and not a mediated version of it." ©
