Top 114 Quotes & Sayings by Ken Loach - Page 2

I think you find amongst ordinary people there are a lot of people that are really talented.

I think people think of auteurs as being a dictator shouting over everyone about his vision. That's not the way I think of auteurs or the way I work.

Eric Cantona is a giggler.

A film has got to demand to be made. Otherwise - if it's just, 'Shall we? Why not?' - you shouldn't make it.

Most cities are eclectic. There's a bit of medieval, Georgian, some Victorian and some 20th century. That's fine. Bath is different because it was built within 100 years or less. It has a homogeneity.

I think cinema is taken a bit more seriously in France.

I'm not a great cinema-goer.

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.

The job of the director is to make certain that the film has one voice and a sense of a single vision, even though it's produced by a large number of people making contributions - to turn all those contributions from individual voices into one coherent one.

The E.U. is an economically right-wing organization that prioritizes the interests of big corporations.

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.

When you're at the wrong end of your 70s, everything is a?challenge.

Bath was dusty and a little shabby when we moved here. It did look its age and you felt its history in its streets and buildings and little alleyways. The sense of the past was palpable. There were some bad modern buildings but there was a patina of age.

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.

I wasn't from a political family. Nobody talked politics.

It's more interesting to see new people on the screen when you go to the cinema. I don't want to see the same old faces.

Churchill the right-winger has been elevated to a status where you can't criticise him. People from the time remember him as an imperialist, a hard-right politician, very instrumental in the oppression of Ireland and the attempt to defeat the general strike.

Oh, I don't like labels.

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.

I was stage-struck from an early age. I just loved the language. We lived quite near Stratford so I would cycle and watch the plays.

Because I've been around a long time I get a bit of leeway that other people don't.

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.

I think it's time British filmmakers stopped allowing themselves to be colonized so ruthlessly by U.S. ideas and stopped looking so slavishly to the U.S. market. It demeans filmmaking when they do that.

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?

I hate programmes where some TV personality looks you in the eye and tells you what to think - the Andrew Marr version of history. I hate the authorial voice telling you what to think.

There's no great desire to own lots of stuff - and I don't. You can only live in one house and drive one car.

A TV series is a long commitment.

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.

Politics lives in people, ideas live in people, they live in the concrete struggles that people have.

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

I think that's one of the things that sport teaches you. You are only as good as the team around you.

In general I think that in art you only have the responsibility to tell the truth.

In the 1980s, I had a lot of films, documentaries for television, which were about why the trade unions had failed to organize resistance to Margaret Thatcher's plans. And they were banned. I had to fight for those films.

A journalist uses the most precise words he or she can. An artist does the same sort of thing. You gather material about a particular subject, you refine it as best you can.

I try to avoid mirrors.

Don't take advice. You have to make up your own mind what to do from the beginning.

It's what people have always done. They have always told stories, put on plays. It's characters and narrative and thought and context and resolution so you reflect the way the world is in some way. It comes out of experience. I think it's OK to do that.

When you get older you do one film at a time.

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.

If you think back to the great French directors it's difficult to think of British film-makers who are comparable.

One lesson to learn is that the press and the broadcasters are not neutral. And it seems we have to learn it each time there is a dispute: they are actually committed to one side.

About Thatcher's death: Let's privatise her funeral. Put it out on competetive tender and accept the cheapest bid. That's what she would have wanted.

History is contemporary. Your understanding of history confirms what you think of the present. It's not neutral. I would be very surprised if people with a different view of the present, don't take issue with my view of the past. I just hope that people deal with the content of the film.

The duty of a film director is to focus more on the soul of the spectator.

No political politicians on the board and stop sub-contracting anyway, which means getting out of Iraq. If anything needs to be policed, it needs to be done through a proper international body... not through us sub-contracting teams of mercenaries.

The Iraq war is a huge subject and there have been many films about it. But it was when the private contractors started taking over and taking responsibilities from the regular army, which hides the war. You have these private armies of mercenaries acting with immunity for their actions, the worst of which was the Blackwater case where they killed 17 Iraqi civilians and the guys who did it just went home. We [screenwriter Paul Laverty and Loach] felt this deserved a story.

The most depressing thing is the political slogan: there is no alternative. But there is.

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

Every time a colony wants independence, the questions on the agenda are: a) how do you get the imperialists out, and b) what kind of society do you build? There are usually the bourgeois nationalists who say, 'Let's just change the flag and keep everything as it was.' Then there are the revolutionaries who say, 'Let's change the property laws.' It's always a critical moment.

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

A film is one small voice among other large ones. The film is a tiny part of the discourse. You do what you can but under no illusions of what a film can do.

A movie isn't a political movement, a party or even an article. It's just a film. At best it can add its voice to public outrage.

I turned down the OBE because its not a club you want to join when you look at the villains whove got it. Its all the things I think are despicable: patronage, deferring to the monarchy and the name of the British Empire, which is a monument of exploitation and conquest.

In the end the privatisation of war is not acceptable. We shouldn't be issuing these sub-contracts to these contracting companies because the people who run them are making millions. There should be no relationship between ex-politicians and them, like John Reid and Malcolm Rifkind, who are now associated with contracting companies having been ministers of defence. That's unacceptable.