The Man Called ‘a Machine for Making Masterpieces’ : Movies: Although highly respected by his colleagues, British director Kenneth Loach is modest about his latest work. ‘Some of the bits in “Riff Raff” are OK,’ he says.

Talking to Kenneth Loach, you’d never guess how highly most of his British filmmaking colleagues esteem and love his work.

Loach’s quiet manner rarely suggests his artistic weight: He is probably the key British director of his volatile, iconoclastic generation, the ‘60s and post-’60s group that includes Mike Leigh, Alan Parker and Stephen Frears. Loach’s trail-blazing realism and uncompromising honesty inspired them all--so much so that “Crying Game” producer Stephen Woolley once described him as “practically a machine for making masterpieces.”

Loach’s latest masterpiece, the workingman’s comedy-drama “Riff Raff” (reopening Friday at Laemmle’s Sunset 5), won both the Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize and the European Film Critics’ “Felix” as Europe’s best picture of 1991.

Yet, if Loach talks about his work, it’s in self-effacing terms. Asked which of his 14 features he likes best, he says: “Little bits of ‘Kes’ (1969) aren’t too bad, and there’s little bits on ‘Family Life’ (1971) that aren’t too bad. . . . And some of the bits in ‘Riff Raff’ are OK.” As he talks, he sips hot tea--little bits of it--from a hotel china cup, while blasts of Los Angeles air rip through the terrace doors. “Not as bad as England,” he smiles. “No comparison.”

The movie that brought Loach briefly to Los Angeles--where he also met with his regular film composer, former Police-man Stewart Copeland--is “Riff Raff,” a brilliant, compassionate vivisection of life in a London building crew.

Written by construction worker/playwright Bill Jesse, “Riff Raff” follows the luckless progress in work and love of a young Glasgow immigrant and ex-con, Robert Carlyle’s Stevie. It has a truth and tenderness that put it in Loach’s best vein--with “Kes,” the tale of a lonely Yorkshire lad and his pet kestrel, and with “Family Life,” a devastating portrayal of a rebellious daughter attacked by psychiatric shock therapy.

“Riff Raff” is about people on the underbelly of modern British life or “the lump”--laborers, a girl on the dole, poor immigrants--all of whom, in Loach’s sympathetic treatment, emerge as valuable, human and even, for one ironic moment, triumphant. It’s a piece of low-key, sympathetic realism: so authentic in tone and sound that the cast’s raw mix of Liverpool, Scots and British-African accents is translated by subtitles, a stratagem Loach also used for the thick Yorkshire speech of “Kes.”

Was “Riff Raff” a return to his filmmaking roots, the ultra-realist TV dramas (“Up the Junction”), the movies such as “Kes”? “In a way, yes,” he says, casually dismissing his recent thrillers, “Singing the Blues in Red” (1986) and “Hidden Agenda” (a 1990 Cannes Special Jury Prize winner), as “lacking a bit of energy, losing their way.”

The germ of “Riff Raff” came unexpectedly, when Loach was working in Columbia’s London offices on “Hidden Agenda,” and friends introduced him to Bill Jesse, a mostly unproduced playwright who made ends meet by working on construction sites. “Bill used to come (to the office) to make his phone calls, and he used to have me to a drink in the evening, after work.” Loaded with “good anecdotes, good stories,” Jesse eventually persuaded Loach that a work crew on a construction site was ideal material for a film.

“It was about survivors: about itinerant workers, just hanging on by their fingernails . . . Bill’s Scots. He loves Scots,” Loach recalls. “So, we started out with a Scotsman (Carlyle’s Stevie). The people who were on Bill’s actual site included three Liverpool guys, so we had three Liverpool guys (called, puckishly, Larry, Mo and Shem, after the Three Stooges). And there were a group of Africans; so we had a group of them too. Bill had a foreman before who was always nipping off to play squash. So we had this guy in charge who was always in his old track suit.

“The girl (Emer McCourt as the hapless would-be pop singer Susan) was an amalgamation of a couple of girls. . . . He once found a woman’s handbag, so we used that as an introduction to Susan. He wrote it down: I didn’t. But what happened to the characters: We wrote that together. . . .

“What I think is really important,” Loach says, “is that, if it’s a film about work, the actors be able to do the work. So, we looked for people who had worked on construction sites. Robert Carlyle once was a painter-decorator. The guy who played (the affable political agitator) Larry (Ricky Tomlinson) was a plasterer by trade. . . .” Fitting his role, Tomlinson was also imprisoned for two years, as a member of the then-notorious “Shrewsbury Three,” for organizing a building strike.

Loach’s style was forged in the ‘60s. Son of an electrical foreman from the Midlands, a classmate of Dudley Moore at Cambridge--where they performed in a revue together--he began by reading law and serving a tour in the R.A.F. He acted and directed in repertory--in Northhampton and a touring tent theater--and then: “I got a wife and child and a BBC job as a director.”

One of Loach’s most important collaborators for years was his longtime cinematographer Chris Menges, who recently became a director (“A World Apart”). “I owe a lot to Chris,” Loach says. “He taught me how to look at light.”

Working with Menges’ fast, ultra-natural lighting, Loach’s approach became even more discreet, empathetic. The often painfully poignant tone that he gets--in films that rarely stray from social realism--was also inspired, he says, by three “rather disparate” joint influences: the BBC news documentaries of the ‘60s (“We wanted to be just as authentic-looking”), the French New Wave (Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol), and Czech directors of the ‘60s, such as Milos Forman, Jiri Menzel and Ivan Passer--whose movies, characteristically, he finds “very quiet and sympathetic and respectful.”

Loach disowns any cultural influence from British cinema, even the “Angry Young Men” of the early ‘60s, like Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz. “They all moved on, didn’t they? Some to Hollywood. . . .”

When Loach described the plight of England’s actual construction workers, his voice gets a slight edge.

“Shortly after we made (“Riff Raff”), I was talking to some construction workers and they said that, in the previous two or three months in the London area, 11 building workers were killed in accidents. And nobody knew their names. They were working under false names, their families were on welfare in other areas of the country, and they were trying to make some extra money. I mean, it’s almost Dickensian: people going to unnamed pauper’s graves.”

Disequilibrium and loss, alienation and despair are at the core of the comic “Riff Raff.” Despite the humorous byplay of the sharply observed on-the-job routine, darkness and uncertainty seep up. And though it’s a delightful film--funny-sad and bittersweet in the manner of Mike Leigh’s “High Hopes” or “Life Is Sweet”--it has a tragic real-life coda: Bill Jesse, the film’s writer, died at 48, just as Loach was laying Copeland’s music score on the “Riff Raff” track.

What happened? “It was very sad. And a mystery. Bill lived alone. And he was found in his flat, after he’d gone missing for a week. In his bath. Drowned. Nobody knows quite why. No drink. No drugs. No injury. No stroke. It stayed a mystery. . . .”

What did Bill Jesse think of “Riff Raff,” the only screen credit of his long, but mostly unpublished and unproduced, career?

“Oh, he was knocked out . . . just delighted by the whole thing. He’d come to the cutting room and hang up trims, just to be around. He came when we were shooting, every day, just to enjoy the company.

“He was a really delightful man: very funny, very generous. . . .”