As his new film Sorry We Missed You takes aim at zero-hours contracts, the director reveals why he still has to fight to get his films made, and how he thinks Labour should tackle the ‘piratical’ Boris Johnson

On the film sets of legends, size matters: big equipment, big performances, big egos, big budgets, big screen. On this shoot, none of that applies. We are on a trading estate in Gateshead, in a unit that looks as tired as any depot you have ever seen, right down to the backroom office’s carpet tiles that are now the colour of boot soles. The fulcrum of this production is not a swaggering auteur, but a slight, bespectacled 83-year-old man who, instead of barking orders, speaks in a tone as polite and wholesome as Ovaltine.

“Righto, folks!” he says, swaddled in a coat against the autumn cold that keeps pushing in.

This is Ken Loach, socialist firebrand and provider of such recent headline hits as Tom Watson “is the biggest threat” to the future of the Labour party and Ed Miliband is a “fake left” politician – and those were from just one week in September. Yet the atmosphere on set is more like a school camping trip than a political seminar.

“Karen,” Loach tells one actor, “we’ll see more of you later.” When he spots the innuendo, he breaks into a giggle, joined by the cast and crew. More directing notes follow, before he breaks off again: “Ricky, Charlie – don’t take the piss.” More laughter. “We’ve got the liberal press here today.”

Fifty years have passed since his breakthrough Kes, and Loach is still at it, winding up class enemies and sneaking reality into the multiplex. His latest is Sorry We Missed You, which will no doubt be described as a companion piece to I, Daniel Blake – the 2016 film about our inhumane welfare system that provoked condemnation from Tory ministers even as it shaped public debate about poverty in the fifth-biggest economy in the world.

Both films are set in and around Newcastle upon Tyne, both show the human wreckage left by a broken economy and a punitive state, and at the heart of both are characters who could be your dad, your uncle, your mate – men who start off with high hopes and faith in the system, yet who in 90 minutes on screen are swallowed whole by an abyss.

In Sorry We Missed You, that man is Ricky Turner. A blow-in from Manchester, he used to be a builder, until the financial crash killed the local trade. His latest, perhaps last, roll of the dice is to become a delivery driver; one of those guys who park their vans on double yellows and lug boxes to your door and who make today’s consumer economy work. His wife is Abby, whose dreams of a family home died along with the collapse in 2007 of their mortgage provider, Northern Rock. She is a carer, looking after sick and elderly people as best as she can within the few minutes allowed by her agency.

The couple work in the gig economy, a world of zero-hours contracts, barely any holiday or sick pay, and firms that paint workers as their own bosses, even as they punish them for being an inch out of line or a minute over time. The gulf between rhetoric and reality is mapped in the film’s opening minutes, when Ricky signs up at the depot with promises of being “master of your own destiny” just before another driver throws him a plastic bottle saying: “You’ll need this for a piss.” The routes they must follow don’t allow for toilet breaks.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kris Hitchen in Sorry We Missed You. Photograph: Entertainment One

I have been reporting on this area for the Guardian for years and I am here to see what cinema can do with a subject usually confined to print. I have met an injured cleaner bullied so badly by her supervisor she considered suicide, minicab drivers who were whistled at “like sheepdogs” by their manager, an outsourced security guard living at home with his mum at the age of 46. The gig economy employs 4.7 million Britons, according to the TUC, from consultants on fat daily rates and hipsters in east London to these people working their guts out for poverty pay. Victorian capitalism used to mangle workers’ limbs in machines; a large part of 21st-century capitalism does something less visceral but still devastating: it pumps you full of dreams of self-realisation even as it destroys your deepest notions of who you are.

“It’s labour you can turn on and off like a tap,” says Loach. “It follows on from Daniel Blake because while researching that film we were struck in the foodbank that a number of the people were working, and when we were in the benefits office most [claimants] were working. The idea of the working poor loomed large in our conversation.”

Most key players on Team Loach, meanwhile, have been with him for decades. Paul Laverty has been writing the screenplays since before Tony Blair entered No 10. To research this film, he hung around in car parks talking to drivers, doing their rounds with them, seeing them spend long days with only high-energy, gut-rotting drinks to keep them going. The cast on the other hand are largely new or relatively unknown, such as lead actor Kris Hitchen, who has spent the past two decades as a self-employed plumber, careering around in a van just like Ricky Turner. Other actors who usually work as delivery drivers respond to directions on loading and scanning parcels with finicky details about how it would be done in real life.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The director (centre) on the set of Bread and Roses with Adrien Brody and Pilar Padilla. Photograph: Allstar/FilmFour

This is Loach’s 27th feature film, and it is done his way. The script is shot in sequence and actors learn the story as they go along – all the better to surprise them. “I just want the performance to come straight from their stomach,” he says. At lunchtime, everyone piles into a minibus to go to a church hall. Loach remembers shooting Bread and Roses in Los Angeles, and an actor asking: “Where are the chairs?”

Loach said: “What chairs? There are a few around. Find one.”

“We always have chairs with our name on.”

Loach: “How old are you?”

“Sixty.”

“Well I’m fucking 75. When you see me sit down, you sit down.”

Loach laughs then says: “We keep going because we’re so inexpensive.”

Labour haven’t taken Johnson apart politically. We’ve pretended he’s a joke Ken Loach

By the time I next meet Loach at his production company in Soho in early September, nearly a year has gone by and his film is already lined up for release. Outside the edit suite, the Conservative government has failed to get the UK out of the EU, Theresa May is out of No 10 and Boris Johnson is in. A number of Labour MPs have left to form a new political party, ChangeUK, which has taken flight only to crash disastrously, even while Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour has slumped around 10 points in the polls. As he walks into the attic of the office townhouse, the most pressing issue on Loach’s mind is not promoting his new film.

The new prime minister is “very dangerous”, he says. “A convincing populist, a piratical buccaneer who just cuts through the crap.” He is also slicing through Her Majesty’s Opposition. “We haven’t taken him apart politically. We’ve pretended he’s a joke and we’re not making the sharper analysis of where Johnson stands.”

When there is another general election, what does he think are Labour’s chances? “They can win …” he begins. Then, ever the realist, he checks himself. “Corbyn needs a team, and that’s where the MPs around him have failed. Look at the ones who say: ‘We won’t work with him.’ The majority of them would be very happy to see a rightwing leader … And the leadership’s compromised too much with the [Labour] right.”

This is not the routine criticism of Corbyn: it comes from one of his most stalwart and high-profile supporters. But if asked, Loach “wouldn’t have a hesitation” in making another election film for Labour, as he did in 2017.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kate Williams and Carol White in Loach’s 1967 film Poor Cow. Photograph: Cinetext Bildarchiv/Allstar/Fenchurch/Studiocanal

One of his suggested solutions is forcing Labour MPs to reapply for their jobs before each electoral battle. It is a strategy that has left Margaret Hodge, MP for Barking for the past quarter century, fighting for her political life. “Every candidate in an election, whether you’re a sitting MP or a councillor, should be chosen afresh. Every candidate should be asked: ‘What have you done over the past five years?’”

His other big demand is for all wearers of the red rosette to argue hard for socialism: “Enhancing trade union rights, planning the economy, investing in the regions, kicking out the privatised elements of the NHS.”

Note what is not on his list. “The big issues transcend Brexit,” says Loach, who voted remain, albeit “with a heavy heart” because of the EU’s “free-market orientation”. “If change is to come, it must come from the working class. That’s why telling their story is important. That’s why knowing our history is important.”

It was the BBC’s drama department that taught him this ethos. As a director on the Wednesday Play in the 1960s, Loach focused on people who barely got a look-in on screen or stage and put them on primetime BBC One. “The whole point of that project was: explain the world.” In an era of two-and-a-half channels (BBC Two didn’t reach much of the country), with schedules that only began at teatime, each episode was an event. They made headlines and lit up debates. His drama about homelessness, Cathy Come Home, prompted the founding of housing charity Crisis.

Everything is micro-managed. We couldn't have done Cathy Come Home without people saying: Why have you cast this person? Ken Loach

This was the decade of kitchen-sink realism, of A Kind of Loving and A Taste of Honey, although that school of film-makers had one crucial difference, says Loach. “They saw the working class in the north as a location.” The working class was both set dressing and a rung on the career ladder, just as they are in today’s media. “John Schlesinger went to the States, Lindsay Anderson went back to the Royal Court …” whereas to him, producer Tony Garnett and writer Roger Smith on the Wednesday Play, “that subject matter was the core of what we did”.

Today, he says, “Everything is micro-managed, by a whole hierarchy above the programme-makers. There’s no way we could have done Cathy Come Home without people saying: ‘Why have you cast this person?’.” The meddling is as political as it is editorial and Loach reaches for a phrase from Garnett: “It’s the enemy of creativity.”

What he is describing is the death of a liberal pluralism that could tolerate radical politics and formal experiment. Producer Rebecca O’Brien first approached Channel 4’s films division to fund I, Daniel Blake, as they had with previous Loach projects. “They seemed to take ages to get back to me,” she recalls, before the money person at Film4 rang. “She said: ‘I’m embarrassed about this … but the current regime think we’re already covering the area because we’re doing Benefits Street.’” Asked for a response, a spokesperson for Film4 says it has “backed 11 Ken Loach films and at the time it was in development I, Daniel Blake didn’t feel quite right for us”. In the end, the tab was picked up by BBC Films.

“People are aware of what the unspoken rules are,” says Loach. Otherwise, “the airwaves would be full of outrage at poverty, homelessness, the grotesque inequality, the stupidity of privatisation, the collapse of the NHS. But they’re not – because of that pressure.”

As we speak, the Edinburgh TV festival’s MacTaggart lecture is in the headlines, thanks to Channel 4 News boss Dorothy Byrne calling the prime minister a “known liar” in her address. Yet, the Byrne storm notwithstanding, Loach thinks some previous speakers show how cosy things have become. “The MacTaggart lecture: that’s Jimmy MacTaggart, who was the main producer of the Wednesday Play. Jimmy was an iconoclast, constantly trying to knock down authority. The people giving the lecture are the authority that MacTaggart would have cut off at their knees. Now they use it as a mouthpiece for the establishment.” Previous MacTaggart lecturers include not one but three Murdochs, including Rupert, plus Google’s Eric Schmidt and a boardroom full of BBC and ITV bosses. “That’s the wickedness of what they’ve done to his name. He’d have been horrified. These people: Jimmy MacTaggart would have pissed on them.”

For him, the output of the BBC is full of cosy complacency. “The BBC’s investigative journalism is a joke.” Then he moves on to the recent Panorama on antisemitism in the Labour party.

Corbyn urges May to see I, Daniel Blake to gain insight to life on welfare Read more

“That was probably the most disgusting programme I’ve ever seen on the BBC. Disgusting because it raised the horror of racism against Jews in the most atrocious propagandistic way, with crude journalism … and it bought the propaganda from people who were intent on destroying Corbyn.”

It’s a comeback that feels just as tin-eared as Labour’s initial response - given the testimony of staffers in the documentary who talk emotionally about how their mental health was seriously affected - even if some of his points, especially on the lack of statistical context, seem justified.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bruce Jones and Ricky Tomlinson in Raining Stones (1993). Photograph: Allstar/Channel 4 Films

The hard task in capturing Loach, whether in interview or over his films, is marrying up what he says with how he says it. He is the most self-effacing firebrand.

As a boy in the 1940s, Kenneth Charles Loach would be taken by his mum and electrician dad to Blackpool for a week every year. He remembers seeing “the old man going on the beach with his lace-up shoes and suit … seeing the comics and people rocking with laughter” and his work often thrums with a quiet delight in the silliness of life, from the three-legged dog who makes a cameo in all his films to the sheer exuberance of Ricky Tomlinson showing off his backside in Raining Stones and Riff-Raff. Tomlinson has just turned 80 and Loach hopes they will work together again, “but I don’t know if the arse has now gone beyond repair”.

As for Loach himself: “I don’t know if I can go around the course again. It does get increasingly hard. You always feel a degree of insecurity about getting through a film. Knowing you’ll be away from home for a long time, that you’ve got to put a physical and emotional commitment to it that’s got to last 12 to 14 hours a day.”

And as we end, I find myself wondering why Britain has been so casual about one of its giants and if it will ever again encourage someone of his political commitment and artistic stature.