Versus: The Life and Films of Ken Loach Page #5

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And they were reassured.

All day long, convoys of troops have been arriving as this takeover

by 10,000 Merseyside dockers enters its second day.

And eventually, of course, the Army was brought in.

They were betrayed by their so-called friends and leaders

and ended up in court and were sent to jail.

This theory of social revolution becomes as dangerous

as a loaded pistol in the hands of a criminal.

Officer, arrest those two men.

I think Ken's politics gelled in that early work with Jim and me,

and when he got it, he got it.

And...

you won't shift him now.

Obviously, we use the hallway, we use this room, the kitchen,

the bathroom, the stairs.

'If you make films about people's lives, politics is essential.'

When she collapses, we'll probably take some stuff round here...

If you're making a film about a family, what determines those lives?

And then at some point,

she'll make her way round the bed

and then we'll cut to him on that shot.

The starting point is, where do we live?

What work do you do?

How does that affect your relationship?

Do you go on holiday? What did your parents do?

What was your upbringing?

They're all this result of political struggle over generations.

So, in a way, you can't walk away from it.

The present situation is not the fault of the miners.

We are the victims of an industry that has been ruined

by private ownership, and this private ownership

is also ruining the country.

We would've gone on working together,

but things were closing down.

The regime at the BBC made it plain that we weren't welcome.

The British film industry...

There was certainly no place for the kinds of films that we wanted to do.

There was a period when he couldn't find the money for his films,

and neither could anyone else.

And what happened was that my generation,

we all went to the United States and we were able to make films about

American life in a way that Ken absolutely was not prepared to do.

Family Life - in England, they said it didn't take enough

to pay the usherettes.

Black Jack - that opened in a soft porn cinema in Leeds.

What it was doing up there, God knows.

With that track record,

there was no chance of getting a feature film made.

It was as though a time was over,

a period of one's life was over.

Ken was also in a state of some...

..difficulty.

It was very...

personal.

It certainly changes you.

I mean, anyone who loses a child will be changed with it forever.

Before that, you know what a kind of happiness is,

and after that you never do.

And there's a stone in your stomach that never goes away, really.

So...

We were driving along the M1 on a Sunday.

A car on an inside lane

had a defective...

Was defective in some way.

A wheel came off, the car drove into us, it pushed us into a bridge,

the upright of a bridge.

My wife, Lesley, was...

Fought for her life for six weeks and survived.

Her grandmother was killed.

Our eldest son,

who was seven, survived, and I survived.

Our second son, who was five, was killed.

And that's...

..how that happened, really.

And...

Well, it...

Well, it changes you.

- MARGARET THATCHER:

- We will not disguise our purpose,

nor betray our principles.

We will do what must be done.

We will tell the people the truth,

and the people will be our judge.

I was struggling.

And there was this sudden desperate mood in the country.

Day after day, factories were going to the wall.

Mass unemployment.

And this was raging.

I didn't know how to respond.

So, I tried documentaries,

but with disastrous consequences.

Three cheers for the destruction of Maggie's government.

Hip-hip!

Central Television proposed this series of films by Ken Loach,

wonderful film-maker, about the British trade union movement.

Hooray. Commissioned immediately.

In the press, all you would read about were union barons

encouraging their members to strike.

The reverse was the case.

People at the shop-floor level were ready to fight Thatcher,

but the trade union leaders were doing a deal.

That is the biggest load of codswallop that I have ever heard.

Because we obtained, for...

The films arrived. Unfortunately, each one said,

"The leaders of the trade union movement had betrayed the workers.

"The leaders of the trade union movement had betrayed the workers,"

and film number three said,

"The leaders of the trade union movement had betrayed the workers."

How can those at the bottom...

how can the working class actually control the leaders?

The chairman of Channel 4 thought,

"This is a left wing rant, I'm not having it."

And they stopped them.

But the way they did it is very interesting,

because they did it in a very British way.

They didn't say, you know... Like, if it was in Poland or somewhere,

they'd say, "OK, you're sent to... Go to the salt mine."

They didn't say that.

They said, "Let's think about this.

"Let's provide a little balance."

I don't mind dealing with the questions. What I don't want to be

is tricked into saying something, then you're going to marry it

to something somebody else says.

It was quite clear that the trade union leaders knew

what was going on, they knew what Ken was up to,

and they did everything they possibly could to ban the films.

I think, as far as I'm concerned, you've not been fair with me.

And if you want to put this on the camera, you can.

At which point, the chair of the channel announced that he had taken

unilateral action and he'd sent the films back to Central

as untransmittable.

End of story.

The miners' strike was the pivotal event of our post-war history,

and everybody knew what was at stake -

it was the success of the Thatcher project, or its defeat.

I tried the usual channels to make a film about it, without success.

Everybody said no.

Who am I to ask them why

this pit must live,

that pit must die?

Ken came and said, "Look, a lot of good work's being done here,

"there's a lot of poetry and songs coming out of the strike,

"and I'd like to do a film about that."

And I said, "What a great idea.

"Let's do it."

These treble lines of blue

that escort the scabs through the gates...

I think he thought he'd made an arts film.

There was a pause again when we'd made it, and they said,

"I don't think we're going to be able to show this."

ITV companies in those days, 15 of them,

every so often had to rebid for the right to broadcast.

And the power of withholding the franchise was being murmured about

and being invoked.

I said, "Well, that's what they're writing about.

"If you listen, this is what their poems are about,

"this is what their songs are about,

"about police brutality."

"Can't show that."

We are talking about people who are losing their franchises,

ie, an entire company's future.

And they saw this looming, because Ken had been banned over there,

as some of them thought, for good reasons.

I mean, it was like that at that stage...

I don't think that's good enough.

I mean, you either believe...

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