I'm not a great cinema-goer.
— Ken Loach
Ordinary people can be very articulate and very eloquent.
All politicians will say they celebrate the NHS, but to a greater or lesser extent, they've all undermined it.
A TV series is a long commitment.
How families interact is not some abstract concept of mother, son, father, daughter; it has to do with economic circumstances, the work they do, the time they can spend with each other.
Don't take advice. You have to make up your own mind what to do from the beginning.
If you think back to the great French directors it's difficult to think of British film-makers who are comparable.
Oh, I don't like labels.
It would be exciting to take part in what we now call the Enlightenment at the end of the 18th century, but with modern dentistry.
Anti-Semitism is a form of racism, and all forms of racism are horrible.
It's what people have always done. They have always told stories, put on plays. It's characters and narrative and thought and context and resolution so you reflect the way the world is in some way. It comes out of experience. I think it's OK to do that.
In the 1980s, I had a lot of films, documentaries for television, which were about why the trade unions had failed to organize resistance to Margaret Thatcher's plans. And they were banned. I had to fight for those films.
The job of the director is to make certain that the film has one voice and a sense of a single vision, even though it's produced by a large number of people making contributions - to turn all those contributions from individual voices into one coherent one.
When you're at the wrong end of your 70s, everything is a challenge.
I think you find amongst ordinary people there are a lot of people that are really talented.
A journalist uses the most precise words he or she can. An artist does the same sort of thing. You gather material about a particular subject, you refine it as best you can.
Bath was dusty and a little shabby when we moved here. It did look its age and you felt its history in its streets and buildings and little alleyways. The sense of the past was palpable. There were some bad modern buildings but there was a patina of age.
Gordon Brown is and always will be committed to the interests of big business, so there's no way I want to be involved in the Labour Party again.
Churchill the right-winger has been elevated to a status where you can't criticise him. People from the time remember him as an imperialist, a hard-right politician, very instrumental in the oppression of Ireland and the attempt to defeat the general strike.
I wasn't from a political family. Nobody talked politics.
I know there are people who can direct sitting down away from it all at a video monitor. But I can't do that.
Politics lives in people, ideas live in people, they live in the concrete struggles that people have.
I think it's time British filmmakers stopped allowing themselves to be colonized so ruthlessly by U.S. ideas and stopped looking so slavishly to the U.S. market. It demeans filmmaking when they do that.
I think cinema is taken a bit more seriously in France.
People who are deaf or hard of hearing need all the support we can give them.
I try to avoid mirrors.
A film has got to demand to be made. Otherwise - if it's just, 'Shall we? Why not?' - you shouldn't make it.
I was stage-struck from an early age. I just loved the language. We lived quite near Stratford so I would cycle and watch the plays.
I think that cinema is medium of communication. It's as valid as novels or fine art.
You've only got to look at a film to see that it has to be collaborative - the images, the performances and all the art direction and the costume, everything shrieks collaboration.
I think people think of auteurs as being a dictator shouting over everyone about his vision. That's not the way I think of auteurs or the way I work.
There's so much control, so many executive producers, so many people looking over their shoulder, so many people trying to second-guess the boss. The space for writers and directors and actors to be creative is zilch.
After 'The Gamekeeper' I made one other film called 'Looks and Smiles,' but making British films was very difficult. There wasn't a tradition of British cinema.
Cannes is the largest festival of world cinema.
My father worked in a factory and as a child it felt very secure. It felt very secure because everybody had work, the schools were free, so there was a security of knowing that the war had finished and families would come together again.
I hate programmes where some TV personality looks you in the eye and tells you what to think - the Andrew Marr version of history. I hate the authorial voice telling you what to think.
When you get older you do one film at a time.
For the writers I have worked with and for me, the relationship between the personal comedy of daily life and the economic context in which that life happens has always been very significant.
In general I think that in art you only have the responsibility to tell the truth.
Often people write stories about people who are suffering, and they're miserable all the time. That's not the case. You go to the food bank or wherever and there's laughter, there's comedy, there's stupidity, there's silliness and warmth. And that's the reality of people's lives. If you cut out that sense of humor and warmth, you miss the point.
I think that's one of the things that sport teaches you. You are only as good as the team around you.
Eric Cantona is a giggler.
I was an understudy in a show called 'One Over The Eight' with Kenneth Williams and Sheila Hancock.
There's no great desire to own lots of stuff - and I don't. You can only live in one house and drive one car.
The problem is, if you make a film that has certain implications in the story, and then you don't follow through, it's a cop out really, isn't it?
The E.U. is an economically right-wing organization that prioritizes the interests of big corporations.
We made 'The Wind That Shakes the Barley' about the war of independence and the civil war, which were the pivotal moments of Irish history, really. 'Jimmy's Hall' would seem to be a smaller story 10 years later.
It's more interesting to see new people on the screen when you go to the cinema. I don't want to see the same old faces.
Because I've been around a long time I get a bit of leeway that other people don't.
Most cities are eclectic. There's a bit of medieval, Georgian, some Victorian and some 20th century. That's fine. Bath is different because it was built within 100 years or less. It has a homogeneity.
