A Quote by Ken Loach

I challenge the idea that films about rich people are escapism and films about working class people are dour and sad. I find the opposite's the case. — © Ken Loach
I challenge the idea that films about rich people are escapism and films about working class people are dour and sad. I find the opposite's the case.
I don't think films about working class people are sad at all; I think they're funny and lively and invigorating and warm and generous and full of good things.
I make films about working class people. All my films have always been about that. For example, the brothel is a workplace. It's aberrant, but a workplace nonetheless. I was more interested as opposed to glamorizing and saying, oh, this is a great erotic place, it's a place of business. The commodity is sex.
I make films about working class people.
The really successful work in England tends to be working-class writers telling working-class stories. The film industry has been slow to wake up to that, for a variety of reasons. It still shocks me how few films are written or made in England about working-class life, given that those are the people who go to movies.
I like the idea of making films about ostensibly absolutely nothing. I like the irrelevant, the tangential, the sidebar excursion to nowhere that suddenly becomes revelatory. That's what all my movies are about. That and the idea that we're in possession of certainty, truth, infallible knowledge, when actually we're just a bunch of apes running around. My films are about people who think they're connected to something, although they're really not.
When I talk about 'working class,' I don't talk about 'white working class,'. I talk about 'working class,' and a third of working class people are people of color. If you are black, white, brown, gay, straight, you want a good job. There is no more unifying theme than that.
There were a lot of people dreaming about making films, and they would finance maybe 6 films a year. Because they were funded by the government, the films sort-of had to deal with serious social issues - and, as a result, nobody went to see those films.
My friends are always honest with me about films. But I really wanted to talk to regular people and kind of have a forum to interact with them; not just about films, but about everything.
People talk about the difference between working on stage and working on film. I think you could say that there are as many differences between working on low budget films and working on big budget films. You really are doing the same thing, but at the same time you're doing something vastly different as well.
Coming out of the '60s and the Vietnam War in America, it was commonplace for people to make films that had relevance to them. And since the '70s, cinema has gone almost entirely in the direction of spectacle and escapism and superhero films.
It was important to focus on working-class women because we so rarely focus, particularly in period films, on the working people. The suffragettes brought together women of all classes, which was one of the striking things about the movement.
People think that I have some idea about how I choose my films. I make sure that I am doing the kind of films that I want to watch. You hear so many stories, and one of them will stand out and connect to you somewhere.
The biggest misconception about me and my work is that I only make political films denouncing human-rights atrocities, even though all of my films are about people fighting for their rights and their quest for justice. My films aren't depressing, are very human, and always offer a way forward.
Festivals are where I see other peoples' films, where we talk, where I get to learn what was working about the film, I get to have a discussion with viewers... and people who enjoy reading films - I enjoy reading other peoples' films, and what discussions can come of that.
I definitely don't intend to only make films about Nigerians or Africans. I want to make films about people, any people.
In England we only make films about the working class or the aristocracy.
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