Quotes from Ken Loach

Shaping it is something I would expect to do together with a writer, because that's a director's job.

The older you get the more new memories get wiped out, and you end up remembering more about your early life than what you did last week.

You've only got to look at a film to see that it has to be collaborative - the images, the performances and all the art direction and the costume, everything shrieks collaboration.

The problem is, if you make a film that has certain implications in the story, and then you don't follow through, it's a cop out really, isn't it?

Often people write stories about people who are suffering, and they're miserable all the time. That's not the case. You go to the food bank or wherever and there's laughter, there's comedy, there's stupidity, there's silliness and warmth. And that's the reality of people's lives. If you cut out that sense of humor and warmth, you miss the point.

Maybe if we tell the truth about the past, we can tell the truth about the present.

For the writers I have worked with and for me, the relationship between the personal comedy of daily life and the economic context in which that life happens has always been very significant.

You always feel a degree of insecurity about getting through a film.

How families interact is not some abstract concept of mother, son, father, daughter; it has to do with economic circumstances, the work they do, the time they can spend with each other.

There are different cinema traditions in France, Spain and other European countries. There's a much stronger intellectual tradition: cinema is seen in a more serious way.

If all political parties are committed to the role of the free market, the politicians act as, I don't know, as traffic policemen; they stand outside the ring and let the real decisions be slugged out by entrepreneurs. That doesn't seem to me a proper democracy.

Jimmy's Hall' is set in Ireland in the '30s and everything that went under the camera we had to generate.

After 'The Gamekeeper' I made one other film called 'Looks and Smiles,' but making British films was very difficult. There wasn't a tradition of British cinema.

There's so much control, so many executive producers, so many people looking over their shoulder, so many people trying to second-guess the boss. The space for writers and directors and actors to be creative is zilch.

Oh, I don't like labels.

What the Labour movement is about is a broad mass of people actively engaged in a democratic process.

I've been going to Labour party meeting for over 50 years.

Film is one small voice in a great cacophony of noise from newspapers, from the television, from social media, so it can have a little dent, you know? It can help to create a climate of opinion.

If you accept the unacceptable without being angry, then there is something wrong with you.

In 1969 Billy Casper was going into a job he didn't want. Today he'd be lucky to get a part-time casual job in a far more hostile world. Maybe we should ask what went wrong.

A TV series is a long commitment.

I try to avoid mirrors.

It would be exciting to take part in what we now call the Enlightenment at the end of the 18th century, but with modern dentistry.

I know there are people who can direct sitting down away from it all at a video monitor. But I can't do that.