Ken Loach interview: I hope ‘I, Daniel Blake’ connects with people because we need to fight back

Loach was supposed to be in retirement before making his Palme d’Or winning ‘I, Daniel Blake’, about government benefit cuts

A middle-aged widower, Daniel Blake (Dave Johns) hangs out with single mum, Katie (Hayley Squires) when he can't get benefits after a heart attack (Joss Barratt/Sixteen Films)

Ken Loach is late. It’s the morning after the London premiere of his Palme d’Or-winning film, I, Daniel Blake, and the 80-year-old filmmaker has refused the offer of a taxi to our Mayfair rendez-vous, preferring instead to take the tube. But unlike with the characters in his new film, it was not public services that let him down: “I left my phone at home, so had to return to get it.”

So the two-time Cannes top-prize winner sits down out of breath. I say he must feel sprightly compared with 86-year-old Clint Eastwood. “Oh Jesus!” Loach exclaims. I half expected a diatribe to arrive about the Trump-supporting film star and director, but instead the British director says of such age-related comparisons: “I wish they would stop really. They keep setting the bar too high. The worst one was Manoel de Oliveira.” The Portuguese filmmaker made his last feature film aged 104, and a short film a year before his death aged 107.

Loach, who was supposed to be in retirement before making I, Daniel Blake, doesn’t seem to want to make many more films, although he is ruling nothing out. “No, I don’t know,” he says. “You are grateful for each one that you can make. I will get to the end of this and then have a think again.”

The new film, ‘I, Daniel Blake’, could be Ken Loach’s last film (Rex Features) (Rex)

I, Daniel Blake is quintessential Ken Loach. In it, widower Daniel Blake, played by stand-up comic Dave Johns, is a carpenter who is relying on benefits to survive after suffering a heart attack in the North-east. Yet, instead of the state providing him with a basic living standard, he is thrust into a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare, designed to ensure that his disability benefit payments and Jobseekers Allowance are benefits that are almost unobtainable. He befriends a single mother, Katie, played by newcomer Hayley Squires, who has been reallocated from London to a council flat in Newcastle where the cost of living may be cheaper, but her reliance on food banks to survive is just as great.

There is little subtlety in the polemical film, but Loach’s criticism is a passionate and direct response to policies he believes are aimed at demeaning the worst off. If this is to be Loach’s last feature film, it’s a perfect bookend to a career that ignited when he made the BBC television play Cathy Come Home, in the year that England won the World Cup. He is a director who has been essaying more than 50 years of hurt.

Cathy Come Home was watched by more than 12 million people on a Wednesday night, and dealt with themes of homelessness, a mother’s right to keep her child and unemployment. Two of the UK’s biggest housing groups, Crisis and Shelter, were formed soon after the broadcast. So even before Loach had made his first feature film for cinema, Poor Cow in 1967, he had established himself as an impact filmmaker, a trend that continues today.

Single mum Katie (Hayley Squires) and Daniel (Dave Johns) have to get food at a food bank (Joss Barratt)

Loach enthuses that his Palme d’Or win was a victory for everyone involved in the film. He glows as he recalls the previous night’s London premiere, “They were there last night – campaigners for the homeless and campaigners for the disabled, people in that situation who were saying this is what we are going through every day of our lives and that is our humiliation. To see them being well treated at a big cinema in Leicester Square was very nice.”

Nice is not a word he would use about any government since Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979. He left the Labour Party when he became disillusioned by what he saw as the big business agenda, privatising health policies and illegal war of the Blair-Brown axis. He says the treatment of the poor by governments has become so much worse over the past decades. “I think what has changed now is that the Government know what they are doing,” he says. “Iain Duncan Smith and his regime, they wanted to make the poor suffer and then humiliated them by telling them that their poverty was their own fault and, to demonstrate that, if you’re not up to mark then you’re sanctioned and the money stops. How does he think people will live? They know the cruelty of it. I think what’s different now is that knowing suffering that they are imposing on people.”

Getting ready for Daniel Blake's (Dave Johns) benefits claim appeal with Kate (Hayley Squires) (Joss Barratt)

I ask if he thinks there is a change in attitude with Prime Minster Theresa May recently announcing that they will scrap the retesting of chronically ill and disabled benefit claimants. Loach spits out his response: “I mean, how stupid do you have to be to keep checking people who cannot get better? But certainly people in Daniel Blake’s case would still have to be assessed, because there is a hope that he will improve. He is being monitored all the time. Why can’t they believe the word of the doctors? They build all that bureaucracy with the intention of catching people. This is despite knowing that most people who appeal will win the appeal, so it’s a procedure to humiliate them.”

He then slips out his hope for I, Daniel Blake: “I suppose why you hope it connects to people is that we need to fight back.”

A month after the Palme d’Or win came the Brexit vote. While at Cannes, I wasn’t sure that I, Daniel Blake was my favourite film of the festival, but the vote to leave the European Union convinced me that the right film had won the top prize. In many ways, the prize confirmed it as one of the most topical and relevant films of the year because it captured the mood of anger, from the filmmakers to the protagonists on screen. I ask Loach if he thinks that we can find reasons for Brexit in his film.

“I think there is an element of that. People, particularly outside London, feel alienated, that nobody listens to them. In the North-east a lot of the old industries have died, shipbuilding and the mines went long ago, nothing has been put in its place and so people are on this precarious work – a day here, a day there, casual labour, agency work, zero-hour contracts, outsourcing and these so-called self-employed, most of whom are on the minimum wage or less.”

Ken Loach (left) with Dave Johns on set of his new film, I, Daniel Blake (Joss Barratt)

People are searching for security? “Yes, and of course they voted for less security, this is the irony. But I can understand why.”

It would come as no surprise to anyone who has followed his career that Loach sees salvation in Jeremy Corbyn. Unprompted, he launches into a defence of the Labour leader and an attack on the media portrayal of him. “Jeremy Corbyn has plenty to say, but the problem is making that communication when all the media – until you get to the Morning Star – will not give him the space, particularly where there are smear stories. There has been no more principled opposition to racism than Jeremy Corbyn: he was getting arrested for protesting against Apartheid when the rest of them were doing deals and calling Nelson Mandela a terrorist.”

The other sense that this really may be Loach’s swansong was his decision to allow a film to be made about his life and work, featuring his surviving children and covering subjects such as the death of his five-year-old son in a car accident and a fallow period when the director made a made a documentary for a fast-food chain to make ends meet.

Mention of this film makes Loach more reticent: “Well, I was asked really, and people were keen to do it. The woman who made it, Louise Osmond, is a very good filmmaker and a very sensitive and generous person and she was very thoughtful, but I think that’s it, I’ve done it now.” When I ask about the documentary from another angle, he again ends his sentence with: “I’ve done it now.” And that’s what we should fear, that Loach thinks he’s done all he cinematically can, now.

‘I, Daniel Blake’ is out now