Screenwriters From England

"The Saracen approached them and lifted the woman’s robe in order to examine her more closely. Underneath, he saw that her cotton shirt was crumpled and ripped and her jeans had lost the buttons at the fly. He couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to her on the trip—the outlaws who abducted her might have been devout Muslims but they were also men. Her tattered shirt barely covered her belly, and the Saracen, being a doctor, guessed from the sight of it that she was about four months pregnant. A different man—a less religious and a more humane man—might have been affected by it. But not the Saracen—the prisoners weren’t people to him, they were a gift from God."

"If only—but it has been my unfortunate experience that you can’t rely on divine intervention and that fate favors the bad as often as the good."

"With each step his desperation grew—maybe every scrap of gossip he had heard, every assumption he had made added up to nothing more than a grand delusion. Like a fool, he had believed what he wanted to believe—"

"By this stage I had switched my patronage to AA—as Tolstoy might have said, drug addicts are all alike whereas every alcoholic is crazy in his own way. This led to far more interesting meetings and I had decided that if you were going to spend your life on the wagon, you might as well be entertained."

"Apart from opium poppies and hemp plants, kidnappings for ransom had become about the only growth industry in Afghanistan."

"I had read about it, of course, but I had never actually seen the machinery of a totalitarian state in full flight. For anyone who values privacy and freedom it’s a terrifying thing to behold."

"Crime intelligence reports from any police force in Europe would tell you that half of Albania was involved in the murder-for-hire business."

"I had got up in the morning and, by the time I was ready for bed it was a different planet—the world doesn’t change in front of your eyes; it changes behind your back."

"The driver thought I was crazy—but then his religion thinks stoning a woman to death for adultery is reasonable, so I figured we were about even."

"I have heard people say love is weak, but they’re wrong—love is strong. In nearly everyone it trumps all other things—patriotism and ambition, religion and upbringing. And of every kind of love—the epic and the small, the noble and the base—the one that a parent has for their child is the greatest of them all. That was the lesson I learned that day, and I’ll be forever grateful I did—some years later, deep in the ruins called the Theater of Death, it salvaged everything."

"He came toward me and I realized I was being given the singular honor denied to so many dictators and mass murderers—I was going to be thrown out of a Swiss bank."

"Edmund Burke said the problem with war is that it usually consumes the very things that you’re fighting for—justice, decency, humanity—and I couldn’t help but think of how many times I had violated our nation’s deepest values in order to protect them."

"We will never know exactly what the zoologist was accused of or what defense he offered because Saudi judicial proceedings, conducted in secret, aren’t concerned with time consuming niceties like witnesses, lawyers, juries, or even evidence. The system relies entirely on signed confessions obtained by the police. It’s strange how methods of torture are one of the few things that cross all racial, religious, and cultural boundaries—poor militia in Rwanda who worship ghosts use pretty much the same methods as rich Catholics supervising state security in Columbia. As a result, the Muslim cops who took the zoologist into a cell in a Jeddah prison had nothing new to offer—just a heavy-duty truck battery with special clips for the genitals and nipples."

"I’ve always been pretty much on the outside of any side you can find."

"Not everybody knows this—or cares probably—but the first law of forensic science is Locard’s Exchange Principle, and it says “Every contact between a perpetrator and a crime scene leaves a trace.”"

"The killer had obviously grasped one important concept, a thing that eludes most people who decide on her line of work—nobody’s ever been arrested for a murder; they have only ever been arrested for not planning it properly."

"Set amid rolling acres of lavender, the complex of seven luxurious homes, swimming pools and lavish stables was surrounded by a twelve-foot wall patrolled by what we believed to be Albanians armed with Skorpion machine pistols. This was strange, given that the family was in the wholesale florist business. Maybe flower theft was a bigger problem in northern Greece than most people realized."

"I know this woman. We all do—the type anyway. You see them in the huge new Prada store in Milan, queuing outside the clubs in Soho, sipping skinny lattes in the hot cafés on the Avenue Montaigne—young women who mistake People magazine for news and a Japanese symbol on their backs as a sign of rebellion."

"Despite its huge wealth, vast oil reserves, and love of high-tech American ornaments, nothing really works in Saudi Arabia."

"“Twenty-five years ago he was executed.” It shocked me. “Executed?” I said. “For what?” The director scanned a couple of documents and found the one he was looking for. “The usual—corruption on earth.” “I’m sorry, but what exactly does ‘corruption on earth’ mean?” He laughed. “Pretty much whatever we want.” Nearly all of his team found it funny too. “In this case,” he continued, “it meant that he criticized the royal family and advocated its removal.”"

"DNA doesn’t lie."

"I will not speak about Ken Loach because he's a man of love. He has been an extraordinary father, and is a compassionate, wonderful, loving, brilliant grandfather to three Jewish boys. ["Then Levey looks [interviewer Kate Maltby] straight in the eye"] But I will reiterate, as a rule of thumb, maybe don’t say antisemitic things, if you’re worried about that being a slur. It's probably best to keep shtoom. [...] If you’re worried about people continually calling you antisemitic, maybe don’t say antisemitic things?"

"The family took the rightwing Daily Express, and Loach would read it cover to cover, never questioning its values. As far as he was concerned, it simply reflected the world. "I adopted the Tories like you adopt a team," he says, embarrassed. How long did he adopt them for? "Probably until I was 19, when I went into the RAF.""

"When Loach selects his actors, whether professional or not, there are certain givens. He will not cast against class: "You carry your class with you in how you talk, how you behave, how you pick up a fork. You can't really act it, and you can't act a dialect." But he stresses that while a professional's training can be a handicap, equally there are parts usually when they are precisely scripted and information has to be revealed in a certain way that could not be handled by non-actors. Loach has used many good non-professionals, but Crissy Rock is phenomenal. He says he auditioned 300 people for the part, two-thirds professionals, but she was the best. Watching the film, you have to believe him."

"Inspired by the Italian neo-realists, who also used non-professionals, Loach says that his biggest influence is probably the sixties Czech cinema of Jiri Menzel, Milos Forman and Ivan Passer. "It just allowed something to unfold and had a quality of observation: the sense of tuning, unhurried rhythm, framing of the shots, and relaxed humour." He also sensed a democracy in the film-making. "Maybe it was just because they were shot in eastern Europe in black and white, but you felt that the people were very proletarian. It was a bit like saying working-class people are worthy subjects of a film. There wasn't the sense that you needed vast production values, you didn't have to wind everything up with a lot of art direction or a lot of music; you just had to have confidence in the people front of the camera.""

"[[w:Sydney Newman|[Sydney] Newman]] and [[w:James MacTaggart|[James] MacTaggart]] saw no problem with running a new wave of Paddy Chayefskyan problem plays out of the electronic studio, but [[w:Tony Garnett|[Tony] Garnett]] and Ken Loach were soon rejecting this whole classical notion of "the play"’. They had seen the future of television drama, and it was A bout de souffle mated with World in Action. While MacTaggart was away, they booked up as much off-base filming as they could for a television version of Nell Dunn's book, Up the Junction, a mouthy compendium of South London lower-class lore. "At that time, you were allowed about four days filming |with cumbersome 35mm equipment] just to show a car pulling up or driving away," says Loach. "So we used those four days to whizz round and shoot half the script with a hand-held 16mm camera - about 35 to 40 minutes of screen time." The remaining studio scenes were dubbed from tape on to film so that the whole thing could be collaged together in the cutting room, with Loach deploying all manner of neo-Godardian time leaps and wild-track effects."

"The whole antisemitism issue has been substantially revealed as a campaign that is not based on fact. It's based on political determination to do a number of things, to remove people from the left, to protect the state of Israel, which many people, many Jewish people in the Labour Party, oppose, oppose this campaign."

"Labour HQ finally decided I'm not fit to be a member of their party, as I will not disown those already expelled. Well, I am proud to stand with the good friends and comrades victimised by the purge. There is indeed a witch-hunt. Starmer and his clique will never lead a party of the people. We are many, they are few. Solidarity."

"If Loach could make a film without a camera he would. He wants the actors to just be themselves so that everything looks as though it has just happened."

"I'm a great friend of Ken's, and Perdition does not change that, [...] [b]ut when I think of the man who made Kes which tells us more movingly about the disinherited than any other film I've seen, I wonder what has happened. Poor Cow, Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home were all films of great humanity and were probably political films in their own way, but the compassion conquered all. He seems to be moving away from that and becoming more politically motivated and less interesting. It's a great pity."

"Jo Coburn: There was a fringe meeting yesterday that we talked about at the beginning of the show where there was a discussion about the Holocaust, did it happen or didn't it ... would you say that was unacceptable? Loach: I think history is for us all to discuss, wouldn't you? Coburn: Say that again, sorry, I missed that. Loach: History is for all of us to discuss. All history is our common heritage to discuss and analyze. The founding of the state of Israel, for example, based on ethnic cleansing is there for us all to discuss. The role of Israel now is there for us to discuss. So don't try to subvert that by false stories of anti-Semitism."

"Left Unity was formed a few months ago to work towards such co-operation. The task is considerable. We are used to working and campaigning within our own small organisations. The proliferation of radical newspapers is witness to that. But the need is urgent. If we don't act together, the poverty, exploitation and alienation will get worse."

"Unless we get Labour MPs who believe in that manifesto last year we won't get in power. If they've been going to the demonstration against him outside Westminster... those are the ones we need to kick out."

"People talk about Thatcherism all the time [...] I felt it was important to record the memories of those almost written out of history who upheld the spirit of '45. Today, the market penetrates everywhere. It's time to put back on the agenda the importance of public ownership and public good, the value of working together collaboratively, not in competition."

"[N]othing has been a greater instigator of antisemitism than the self-proclaimed Jewish state itself... Until we deal with that, until that is acknowledged, then racism, I'm afraid, will be with us."

"If you have a society where a large section believe they are not part of the political discourse, that is a situation for trouble. The Labour election of 1945 was a tremendous victory for democratic ownership of the economy. We need to remember and learn from the lessons."

"You cannot work with people who have come to undermine the biggest challenge we've had - we've never had a leader like Corbyn before in the whole history of the Labour Party ... and that's why the dirty tricks are going to come out."

""The aim is to destabilise Jeremy's leadership," Loach said, apparently unaware that suggesting Jews make allegations about antisemitism for their political or personal benefit is, in fact, one of the oldest antisemitic tropes there is."

"[On film executive Nat Cohen, then responsible (according to his rivals) for about 50% of film production in the UK] I found Nat very kind and helpful. [...] [A] lot of things went wrong in those films and I realise it now. I saw this but he didn't say a word and allowed me to finish. That's on a personal level. On a different level I find Nat's position in the film industry very disturbing. He has too much control over it. Do you know how he works? Every morning he studies the box office receipts and sees which films are making money and concentrates on those. So, slowly, the spectrum is becoming narrower and narrower."

"You can't treat mental health on an assembly line, which is the way it is now organised."

"[Screenings of Loach's work suffered during this period] You are only part of a process of communication with a lot of people who have no chance to be heard at all. [...] The suppression of that is much more important than the problems of individual filmmakers."

"Kes is really about the colossal wastages of kids, whose lives and abilities are written off before they're even in their teens. We chose to make it in Barnsley, we chose a Secondary modern school on a new estate that's becoming shabby. But it could have been one of hundreds of schools or estates. We didn't happen to unearth one child star, there were several kids in that one school who could have done the main part, [Billy Casper]."

"[On where he fits on the left] I would have thought if you want to align yourself to any left current, the one to follow would be the one that fought Stalinism at the outset, and that was the left opposition and [[Leon Trotsky|[Leon] Trotsky]]. So I think that socialist current is the one I care to be identified with."

"I turned down the OBE because it's not a club you want to join when you look at the villains who've got it."

"If there has been a rise [in antisemitism in Europe] I am not surprised. In fact, it is perfectly understandable because Israel feeds feelings of antisemitism."

"We had won the war together [...] Together we could win the peace. If we could collectively plan to wage military campaigns, could we not plan to build houses, create a health service and make goods needed for reconstruction? The spirit of the age was to be our brother's and our sister's keeper."

"Labour's rhetoric may be softer than the Tories', but its fundamental stance is limited by the same imperative: profit comes before all else. Can the Labour party be reclaimed? Or, rather, made anew into one that will represent the interests of the people? History suggests it cannot. The high-water mark of 1945 is long gone. The many great achievements of that government have largely been dismantled, either with the collusion of Labour or directly by the party when it has been in power."

"The Labour party is part of the problem, not the solution. The Greens have many admirable policies, but we look in vain for a thoroughgoing analysis for fundamental change. We need a new voice, a new movement – a new party."

"[On antisemitism in the Labour Party] It's funny these stories suddenly appeared when Jeremy Corbyn became leader, isn't it?"

"I don't think people exist outside of their social situation. You can't abstract people from their environment. It always baffles me when people ask why I don't direct a comedy or a thriller. I think they would be much more artificial fields in which to work. The great expanse of people is really rather interesting."