Getting political

Loach is the proudly socialist director whose sympathy for the downtrodden is apparent in such recent international hits as Ladybird, Ladybird, Raining Stones, and Riff-Raff. He's been making such films for 27 years, but only in the 1990s have his movies received such worldwide acclaim. "I've just been lucky, really. I shall be unlucky again. In the early '80s, when we were suffering the full Thatcher onslaught, I didn't have the right stories. I was doing documentaries that got themselves banned from television. Then, in the late '80s, we did a film about Ireland [Hidden Agenda] that worked. It caused a scandal at Cannes, and that got us back onto the pages of the press. Since then, I've just had lucky collaborations with writers and actors. We made three or four films in the early 1990s in Britain that were reasonably successful, financially and critically. That increased our prospect of raising money in Europe."

After years of kitchen-sink pictures about British working-class heroes and heroines, he was ready for an epic about the battle by leftist volunteers from around the world against Francisco Franco's 1936 fascist coup, a topic that had long stirred him. "If you've been interested in politics for a long time, it's one of the first stories you hear about. It's one of those crucial moments, one of those, to use a cliché, `defining moments.' You could see where fascism came from and who supported it -- the church, the landowners, the army. Normally it's hard to disentangle all the different strands. But there, there was a blinding light shone on it. Nobody can say the Communist Party was a revolutionary party after 1936. Nobody can say the Western democracies had a principled objection to fascism after 1936. The United States blocked oil supplies going to the republic. They've done it in South America ever since."

Does he agree with the one of his Spanish actors who told the BBC that a Spanish director couldn't have made Land and Freedom? "One of the things you get if you see the story from outside is the basic simplicity of what happened. If you're very close to it, you might feel it's a bit obvious. If you're outside it, what's so impressive is that there was a moment when ordinary people seized power in their communities. It was a glorious, revolutionary moment. Then it was sabotaged."

For the sake of realism, Loach used a polyglot cast of actors from around the world and gave them militia training. To keep the actors spontaneous, he always shoots his films in sequence and feeds his performers day by day only those pages of the screenplay they'll need for that day's shooting. He explains, "It's important that the performance isn't premeditated, that you play a scene with all the possibilities open. The hardest thing to act is surprise, so why make it difficult by telling them what the surprise is?

"Shooting in sequence is vital, absolutely crucial. It's not that much more expensive. That's one of these myths that accountants and production managers develop. It's all bollocks. We shot in Spain for just six weeks."

Still, Land was his most expensive film to date. "Yes, until the Nicaragua film. It cost [[sterling]]2.6 million, about $4 million."

The Nicaragua film, which Loach expects to finish editing in July, is called Carla's Song, and it's about a Scottish bus driver who meets a refugee woman in Nicaragua during the 1980s struggles between the communist Sandinista government and the US-backed contra fighters. The analogy to the Spanish Civil War is apparent.

"Nicaragua is full of international volunteers." Loach points out. "Obviously, all political leaders and the press and everybody tied into that political consensus want to argue against this in an insidious way, saying that people are lethargic, cynical, and bored by politics, but it's not true."