It’s June 2022, a week of rail workers’ strikes are under way and refugees are in the news whether arriving from Ukraine or via boats across the channel despite the threat of transportation to Rwanda. Ken Loach and his old compadres, writer Paul Laverty and producer Rebecca O’Brien, could not have chosen a more pertinent time for shooting their latest film, The Old Oak, which premieres at the Cannes film festival this month.
The story is set in an anonymous former mining town decades after the pit closures. Shops are boarded up, money is scarce, divisions over the 1984 miners’ strike linger. There is still a pub, the eponymous Old Oak, run by a former miner, TJ Ballantyne, played by Dave Turner, but it is on its last legs, kept afloat by a ragbag of disgruntled and opinionated regulars. Into town comes a group of Syrian refugees to be rehoused, including a self-confident young woman, Yara (played by the Syrian actor Ebla Mari) who likes taking photos of what she encounters. Some locals object, not wanting any “fucking ragheads” to be “dumped on us”. Others try to make them welcome.
The pub in the former pit town of Murton near Durham that has been transformed into the Old Oak used to be called The Victoria. A notice on the wall from its real past which has been retained for the shoot catches the eye: ‘Welcome. House rules: Fighting, drugs, wilful damage to property: minimum one year ban. Unprovoked attacks: Lifetime ban.’
If it’s nearly last orders in the pub it is also a last film for Loach, one of Britain’s most prolific and most political of directors.
He reached the age of 86 during the filming which led to the choir in Durham Cathedral singing an impromptu ‘Happy Birthday to You’ in mid-shoot, to his embarrassment and to the affectionate entertainment of cast and crew.
A career in film was not his original plan, he explains when we meet in his tiny Soho office earlier this year as the editing nears completion. “I quite fancied the law, having no lawyer friends or relatives, but having read the biographies of the Edwardian barristers and advocates Marshall Hall and Norman Birkett, and thought ‘ah, that’s the life for me’. I got into university, [St Peter’s College, Oxford] and even started eating dinners at Gray’s Inn in order to take the bar exams and qualify, but then thought ‘this is not for me’. I got hooked on plays and just carried that on.
“My father, who was an electrical engineer in a machine tool factory in Coventry, was disappointed because he had put a lot of store in that. He came from a family of 10 who were miners and was a clever man. He did an apprenticeship in the pits as an electrician, came out and got a factory job. He had passed the scholarship to go to grammar school in 1916 but his mother wouldn’t let him go because she couldn’t afford the uniform and that bugged him all his life. So he was determined I would be educated. It was a common story.”
This is the third in a series of films made by Loach in the north- east, following I, Daniel Blake (2016) and Sorry We Missed You (2019). “There was a sense of completing a little sequence of films because the first two had been so tragic in a way – tragic is perhaps too grand a word – but we had seen really bad things happen in the benefits system and the gig economy and the new area of exploitation. One of the poorest areas in the country accepting more than its fair share of Syrian refugees crystallised so much.”
In February the film became even more grimly topical. A far-right mob chanting “get them out” rioted outside a hotel in Knowsley, Merseyside, that housed asylum seekers. “It endorsed it in a way you wouldn’t want it endorsed – there is a nasty, dangerous element that, when times are hard for everyone, looks for scapegoats and so the most desperate people imaginable are suddenly to be blamed.”
Now The Old Oak, which was shot in Easington, Horden and Murton is off to Cannes, where Loach previously won the Palme d’Or with The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) and again with I, Daniel Blake.
“I can’t see getting round the course again. This was quite a tough one to do. My short-term memory is fading and my eyesight is not what it was, and then there’s all the natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” A rueful smile. “It’s a hard job to give up.”
As has always been his way, many of his cast are not professional actors. Dave Turner, who plays TJ, was a firefighter for 30 years and the regional chair of the Fire Brigades Union when he first met Loach as he was preparing to shoot I, Daniel Blake. “He had shown Paul [Laverty] around when we were doing the research,” says Loach.
“He had a very simple and eloquent way with words. I think language is undervalued in films. It’s often something that working-class people have that is lost in middle-class people because often they are so determined to add a qualification or speak in longer sentences. A simple, plain language, particularly if it’s identifiable to a region or culture, as the north-east, there’s a real richness to that and it’s undervalued in cinema.” Turner recalls his puzzlement when he was first offered a part. ”I went for a chat in the Labour club in Newcastle and had a 45-minute meeting with Ken,” he says. “It didn’t occur to me that I was auditioning – I was that naive. I was more aware of Ken’s political views than his films. Three films that traumatised me as a child were Bambi, The Wizard of Oz and Kes [Loach’s 1969 film]. That film broke my heart and I’ve never been able to watch the whole of it since – although I’ve watched the Brian Glover football scene a number of times.
“Ken doesn’t know this but the day before filming I nearly walked away,” says Turner. “I didn’t think I could do it. I didn’t want to be the bloke who ruined his last film.” He is grateful to the make-up artist, Anita Brolly, who would reassure him every morning. “I couldn’t have done it without that and the support of the cast, particularly Ebla and Clare [Rogerson, another very convincing first-time actor, who works for the charity Citizens UK, and plays the part of a local woman, Laura].
Turner admired the way Ebla Mari worked and had wanted to show her around some of the north-east. “I was informed very politely but in no uncertain way that they didn’t want me and Ebla to become friendly at this stage. It was explained to me that if there was familiarity between us that could be seen on film.”
Says Loach: “If they had become too close it could have intervened. You needed a certain distance and reserve early on. Later on they did become good friends and you can see that when they have a scene together in the cathedral.”
It is a first film for Mari, who was recommended by the Palestinian film-maker Annemarie Jacir. Her acting was mainly in the theatre, which she studied at university in Haifa, Israel: “I am Syrian but I have never been to Syria. I was born in the Golan Heights which was occupied by Israel in 1967 and is technically not in Syria.”
How had she found making the film? “It was so emotional and deep and beautiful and inspiring. Maybe it’s obvious to say all those things but everyone was so accepting. It was my first time meeting Syrians, it was connecting back to my roots that I am not allowed to experience in my real life.” The many other Syrians in the film have their own experiences of war. Yazan Al Shteiwi, who plays the teenager Bashir, carries a shrapnel head wound.
This is writer Paul Laverty’s fourteenth film with Loach. “The battle for the heart and soul of the Old Oak asks a vital question for our country,” is how he summarises it from his home in Edinburgh. “Can we come together to build the impossible?”
Poor Cow, starring Carol White and Terence Stamp, was Loach’s first feature film back in 1967. Its haunting soundtrack song, Be Not Too Hard, was written by Donovan and Christopher Logue and in a way the lyrics have become the unspoken theme for many of his films.
Now, 27 films later, he tells another story of the harshness of life but also of people coming together and trying to build the impossible. It is a stirring and fitting farewell to a remarkable, brave and uncompromising career.
• The Old Oak is released in the UK and Ireland on 29 September 2023
