Ken Loach  

UK 
 

After the logistical problems posed by Carla's Song, which was filmed partly on location in Nicaragua, shooting My Name Is Joe was relatively straightforward. As Loach puts it, "we were playing at home rather than playing away so in that respect it was relatively simple. But you always have to push things as far as you can and to push people as far as they would go." 

Joe is a regular patron of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. He has been sober for a year and is putting his life back together. He coaches a football team, reportedly the worst in Glasgow even if the players wear the same strip as the 1974 World Cup-winning German outfit. It is by sheer chance that he runs into Sarah (Louise Goodall), a community health worker in one of the city's most deprived areas. They're from different sides of the tracks (as Joe puts it, "she's got a wee car, a job, a cheque at the end of every month, a pension, her own houseÉ I'm 37 years old, I'm 38 this year and I've got fuck all") but, against the odds, they start a relationship.  

As usual in Loach's films, the cast of My Name Is Joe comprises both seasoned professionals and newcomers who've never appeared in front of a film camera before. "But everybody is treated the same and everybody brings different qualities to the film – so that has never been a problem for me." Peter Mullan (who plays Joe) is one of a select band of actors who has worked with Ken Loach more than once: he also appeared in Loach's 1991 hit, Riff-Raff.  

Loach is a well-travelled veteran of the festival circuit, perhaps because his brand of socially committed cinema is often better received in Europe than it is back home. Hidden Agenda, his controversial film about the British army's 'shoot to kill' policy in Northern Ireland, won the Cannes Jury Prize in 1991 despite enraging the right-wing British press.  

The artificial, hype-filled atmosphere of the Riviera in May is not, one imagines, a natural habitat for a polemicist like Loach. "But you just put your head down and go into it and try to come out the other end," he says. "I usually feel like booking myself into a Trappist Monastery for the week after." He claims that giving hundreds of interviews to journalists who ask the same questions can be a surprisingly useful exercise for a director. "It gives you some sympathy for what actors go through when you say to them that they need to do one more take." 

He also believes that European audiences, critics and distributors are more open-minded than their British counterparts. "They're prepared to engage  
with the ideas in a film rather than compare it with whatever else is going on. They have a broader vision of what cinema can be." 

Loach's remarks are coloured by the lackadaisical way in which his films have been handled by British distributors. His Spanish civil war drama, Land And Freedom, was feted throughout Europe but was given only a limited art house release back home in the UK. My Name Is Joe is yet to find a distributor. 

The 1980s were a barren decade for Loach. Although he made many documentaries for television, his features were few and far between. He has been far more prolific in recent years "If you make one and it does quite well, then you can make a second. As long as they are financially viable and can make their money back, the co-productions keep on working."  

There is an unlikely German influence on My Name Is Joe. Not only do the Glaswegian soccer players wear West German shirts, but much of the financing was German too. Outside Channel 4 development money, pre-sales, and Scottish Lottery cash, the bulk of the budget came in the form of credits from the Berliner Bank. Even now, it seems, the Brits aren't jumping to bankroll a filmmaker universally recognised as one of the most influential of his generation. 
Geoffrey Macnab