Oranges and Sunshine
There is, according to Jim Loach, one very good reason for making Oranges and Sunshine: she's called Margaret Humphreys.
“I read Margaret’s book,” he explains, “and went to Nottingham to see her. She spoke and I was captivated. Her story is utterly compelling, I found her deeply inspiring - and slightly intimidating, if I’m honest - and I knew there and then I wanted to make it into a film.”
That, however, was over nine years ago. “It was a marathon, not a sprint,” adds Jim with a laugh. In the meantime, he kept busy with his TV career, directing Shameless among others, while screenwriter Rona Munro produced several drafts of the script.
“There was a lot of rewriting,” says Jim, although some of the delay sprang from the pressure to tell the story properly AND, more importantly, be true to the people involved.
“I walked around [the film] for a little while,” Jim admits. “I mean, every film is perfect until you’ve done your first shot. And we didn’t want to get into anything melodramatic. Emotionally, every scene here could be ‘turned up to 11’ and, every time, we went the other way. It wouldn’t have been truthful to the people we met: they were strong, quite heroic characters.”
However, the crunch time arrived and “we just had to go for it”, and, as Jim acknowledges, he always had Margaret for inspiration. “She kept going, she didn’t walk away, she wouldn’t accept defeat. She’s formidable. We would often talk on set and wonder at what point would we have walked away: there would have come a point where you’d have to stop and think ‘I can’t do that anymore, I’ve done my bit’ but she absolutely didn’t. “
In the film, Margaret is played – typically brilliantly – by Emily Watson. Jim acknowledges that her casting was crucial, not least because they’d been thinking of casting her for years.
“We were in a really dangerous place,” says Jim. “Well before I’d phoned her, Emily WAS Margaret. That’s a really bad place to be because if she hadn’t wanted to do it, I’d have been stuffed. I was...” – Jim laughs – “quite fortunate when she said yes.”
Happily for Jim, Margaret was also delighted with Emily Watson’s performance and his storytelling.
“She liked the film a lot,” he says, with obvious relief. “We were very nervous about showing her: Rona and I sat outside the cinema like two naughty schoolchildren waiting for the verdict. She loved it though, she felt we’d been faithful to the spirit of the book and the spirit of the people, and that meant so much to me.”
As you may have realised from the name, Jim is the son of acclaimed director Ken Loach, a subject he’s clearly been asked a lot about recently. Jim, to his credit, laughs heartily at a question about how many films he’ll have to make before we stop asking about his dad.
“I think it will always be there,” he says with a good-natured shrug. “It’s unavoidable but I’ve given in to it. I’m really proud of my mum and dad, obviously, so it’s no big deal. We laugh about it a lot.” He pauses. “Well, sometimes it gets a bit much but mostly we laugh about it.”
As a younger man, Jim had declared that he would never direct – “I swore it to all my friends” - but now writes it off as standard rebellion. Eventually, as Jim admits, “it all becomes a bit irresistible. It was always in my heart, really.
“And dad and I talk all the time. He gives me advice and I ask him for advice, but it’s never that big a deal, because we talk every day. Mostly about football, admittedly, but sometimes about film. He came into the cutting room for Oranges and Sunshine, and made some suggestions.”
Jim laughs. “We didn’t take all of his suggestions. Well, like every dutiful child you have to ignore some parental advice...”
Oranges and Sunshine is out now.