Paul Laverty talks about the background to My Name is Joe, his latest screenplay for Ken Loach. 

I owe Paul Laverty a big debt. We first met on a hillside above Loch Lomond during the shooting of Carla's Song, the Ken Loach film which marked Laverty's debut as a scriptwriter. It was the scene where Bobby Carlyle's bus driver had commandeered a Glasgow Transport bus to take Carla (Oyanka Cabezas) on a picnic. 
 

We'd been there since dawn, but towards 10 o'clock, Paul lent me his hat. Since we are both bald, it wasn't a casual gesture. Hence my debt. 

Extremes of temperature also triggered My Name Is Joe, also for Loach, which screens in competition today. It happened on the last day of shooting on Carla's Song in the Nicaraguan capital, Managua, whose climate didn't much appeal to Loach. "All of a sudden Ken said, 'You don't fancy doing a story in Glasgow, do you?'," recalls Laverty. "I think the mosquitos and the temperature had sapped his energy." 

Laverty is a diminutive Glaswegian who comes across like a benevolent, albeit highly-politicised, version of a cartoon Tasmanian Devil. He was a court reporter in Glasgow when, in the late eighties, he went to Nicaragua, learned Spanish, worked with the Sandinistas, went on to Guatemala and El Salvador, became involved in the whole issue of US imperialism in Latin America, returned to the UK, and submitted the idea for a film about Nicaragua to Loach. 

Since Carla's Song, Laverty has again been travelling. Sent off on a Fulbright Award to the University of Southern California, for instance, he made his statement about the middle-class, West LA, Hollywood-oriented ethos at USC by renting a room in South Central and cycling – yes, cycling – to work from there. He was the only person in his apartment building never mugged. 

And, while his fellow USC students were concocting coming-of-age tales about well-heeled youths with parental relationship problems Laverty was focusing on attempts to unionise LA's office cleaners, the city's ultimate underclass. 

But My Name Is Joe dates back to before all that. "Sometimes I used to gatecrash lectures at Glasgow University," he says, "Once I was listening to this professor who had done a breakdown of postcodes in Glasgow. There were two postcodes side by side, one G15 and the other G52, and people on average lived 10 years longer in one than they did the other.  This was many years ago but it was always in the back of my mind" 
The story which Laverty drew from this statistic was originally centred, not on Joe, but on Sarah, a tough, independent but caring Glasgow social worker. But what evolved, as Laverty worked on the screenplay, was Sarah's relationship with Joe, a former alcoholic who trains what is "probably the worst football team in all of Glasgow". And it is a story which is, as with all Laverty and Loach's work, about people first and issues second. 

"For two months, I simply walked the streets," says Laverty. "I talked to lots of kids who were dealing in drugs, doing drugs; talked to football teams; talked to people from all sorts of backgrounds. Then I went away and did a narrative." 

For Laverty, My Name Is Joe is a film about choices, the very real 'What the fuck do I do?' choices of unemployment and the poverty trap, in which drugs have replaced alcohol as the oblivion-inducing option of choice. 

"I remember one day I was just out wandering and I bumped into this young lassie who was selling in a little kiosk in a shopping centre," he recalls. "We started chatting away and she told me about her dance club. She was really articulate, with tons of bounce and everything, and she was earning £80 a week. She was 23, and had a friend who'd just bought a car for £14,000 and had also bought her own flat" (If you have to ask what she did for a living you don't know much about inner cities.) "And this brave articulate woman said to me, 'I wish to Christ I had the guts to do what she was doing'. And I just thought, 'Those are the choices'." 

Laverty's final barb is reserved for one of British Home Secretary Jack Straw's most loudly-trumpeted initiatives: the war on drugs. "It makes me laugh," says the writer, "when you hear this drugs Tsar, George Halliwell, saying 'We must make people aware of their choices'. 

"If they were in that position, what choices would they make? This girl just saw that, with £80 a week, she would never ever escape from this. Those choices and being at the bottom is something that runs through all the film."