Ken Loach is now saying that “The Old Oak” will be his last film.
Speaking to THR, as “The Old Oak” is set to be his 15th film premiering at the Cannes Film Festival, Loach, who turns 87 in June, confessed that “realistically, it would be hard to do a feature film again.
“Films take a couple of years and I’ll be nearly 90,” he said. “And your facilities do decline. Your short-term memory goes and my eyesight is pretty rubbish now, so it’s quite tricky.”
Loach adds that the physical demands of long working days required during production of “The Old Oak” opened his eyes up a bit to the “nervous emotional energy” needed during a shoot.
Loach goes on to say that he went into the film knowing that it would probably be his last.
“I’m just not sure I can get around the court again […] It’s like an old nag at the Grand National. You think, good God, I’ll be falling at the first fence!?”
Loach has been going at it for 60 years now. His seminal films include “Kes”, “Sweet Sixteen”, and “My Name is Joe”, we cannot go without mentioning his two Palme d’Or winners “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” and “I, Daniel Blake.” He also won the festival’s Jury prize (in 2012 for “The Angel’s Share.”
Bless Loach’s heart. The man is relentless in his refusal to stop depicting working-class stories. After all, even his closest competitor, Mike Leigh, has dabbled outside his comfort zone in the past; not Loach though, who was once retired in 2014 but came back to tell the tales. Good on him.
In Loach’s last few films, we were inundated with the kind of misery porn we’ve seen countless times before, but in better movies, starting with ’60s Kitchen Sink dramas all the way to Leigh and Loach’s own marquee films.
Whenever Loach subtly goes for our gut instead of our tears, then we get to see shades of the man who gave us the masterful “Kes,”— still his best movie by the way.