Paul Laverty is one of the world’s leading lefty screenwriters. His historic collaboration with director Ken Loach, British cinema’s lion of the Left, has spanned 30-ish years, producing 14 films. The Loach/Laverty team’s latest film is the awards-nominated “The Old Oak,” likely the last feature helmed by Loach, who is turning 88. Since 1964, Loach’s socially committed oeuvre has dramatized leftwing subject matter including the Spanish Civil War, the Irish rebellions, union organizing by Hispanic workers in L.A., struggles of British workers, etc. Many Loach films have been written by Paul Laverty, starting with 1996’s “Carla’s Song,” about an exile in the UK from Nicaragua, where Laverty lived during the Contra Wars, working for a human rights organization. Laverty was born 1957 in Calcutta to an Irish mother and Scottish father and was interviewed via phone in Edinburgh, Scotland.
ED RAMPELL: How did “The Old Oak” come about?
PAUL LAVERTY: After long discussions with Ken and our producer, Rebecca O’Brien. We had done two films in the Northeast of England, I, Daniel Blake and Sorry We Missed You. Both were tragedies, really; very tough stories. And we thought this might be Ken’s last film, because he was 86 at the time. So, for the last film, we wanted to end off on a different type of note. And something that was important to both of us, ever since we started working together over 30 years ago, was the notion of hope, where we find it, how we nourish each other.
You just can’t copy a screenplay or a story from the street. You have to make the connections. Anyway, I thought we’d go back to the Northeast of England again, where we made the last two films at Newcastle, the big industrial city. The Northeast is an area of high deindustrialization and mining. There were lots of mining villages all around Newcastle. I wandered around them. What was very, very striking was how they had deteriorated ever since 1984, a huge and important year because that was the year of the miners’ strike. The miners went on strike for over a year and Margaret Thatcher, with the help of the state really crushed the miners. After the miners’ strike was lost in 1984, many of these villages came upon hard times, people lost their jobs and there was gradual deterioration of these communities. Post offices and banks and their livelihoods would go. They became very, very tough, bleak areas. There was a real rich cultural life. But after 1984 that fell by the wayside.
And then what happened was the housing in those areas began to fall in price. Local authorities started dumping people who had evictions, were coming out of prison, and then they started putting Syrian refugees fleeing war, enormous mass murder and mass incarceration, into these cheap houses as well. So, the people who lived there were under great stress, saying: “Why are you sending needy people to some of the poorest areas in the country? Why not send them to Chelsea or Westminster, rich areas in England and London, and not to us?” People felt that everything was being dumped upon them, wrongly. They felt angry, alienated and had little control over their lives…
They become furious, then of course, the racists come in, they find the easiest targets, and they target people. It’s not their fault – they’re Syrian refugees, they fled war and ended up there because the housing was cheaper. The racists blame them and try to capture and harness all that anger, alienation and fury…
So, I went back to talk to Ken and we just felt there was something here that was very much of the moment. The whole question of people looking for asylum has become a bigger and bigger issue. Not only in the UK, but in America, too.
Ken said “Syrians in the film should be those who have settled in the area.” Were most of the film’s refugees non-professional actors?
“The Old Oak” is set in 2016 because that’s the year thousands of Syrians came in. All of the Syrians, apart from Ebla Mari, were people who lived in the area. Like Amna Al Ali, she played the mother [Fatima], lived in a little village close by. The character of Yara was played by Ebla Mari from the Golan Heights. Ebla had not worked in film before, but she had worked in theater.
How about the English locals?
Some were professionals; others weren’t. A mixture of actors and ex-miners who hadn’t acted before. Trevor Fox [2004’s “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason”] plays Charlie, who used to be T.J.’s friend. He’s a very well-known actor. Dave Turner, who played T.J. Ballantyne, used to be a fireman. He’d done one scene in “I, Daniel Blake” and “Sorry We Missed You.” Claire Rodgerson, plays Laura, an activist in the community. Claire in real life is like her character in the film, an activist [for the national charity Citizens UK].
”The Old Oak” ends with a huge parade, with workers carrying banners, including a union banner inscribed with Syrian writing, another honoring the International Brigade that fought in the Spanish Civil War, a Palestinian banner. Is this march meant to be real or a fantasy sequence?
Oh no, this is based on the Durham miners’ march that goes on every single year for 130-ish years. It’s been traditionally a day when the miners used to gather and march through Durham, in the Northeast, where the mining communities were. This is a long-standing tradition, one of the biggest gatherings of the working class in all of Europe. There are hundreds of thousands there – not even Hollywood could manage to organize marches of 100,000. The trade unions meet there every year. We asked permission if we could join in with them with our fictional characters and our banner of solidarity among all the real demonstration that was taking place. All that was real.
How would you describe your convictions?
I don’t think you can understand the world unless you see it in class terms.
You in the US are faced with an aberration, two pathetic candidates in Biden and Trump, a product of a broken political culture, and we are faced with a similar pair of two lightweight apparatchiks in [Conservative Prime Minister Rishi] Sunak and [Labour Party leader Keir] Starmer climbing the greasy corporate pole to power, while leading us to doom. Maybe it takes stories to try and disentangle how we have come to such a crisis, and maybe it takes stories too to try and find a way out, and find the energy to change things. When we made The Old Oak we shot a scene in Durham Cathedral built by the Normans 1,000 years ago, I was reminded of Saint Augustine’s words of, from five centuries earlier: “Hope has two beautiful daughters, anger at the way things are, and the courage to try and change things.”
For more information on the film, see https://zeitgeistfilms.com/film/the-old-oak/.
Ed Rampell is an LA-based film historian/critic, author of “Progressive Hollywood: A People’s Film History of the United States,” and coauthor of “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book.” This is an edited version of an interview published April 13 in Jacobin. See the original interview at https://jacobin.com/2024/04/ken-loach-paul-laverty-the-old-oak.
From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2024
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