Days of ‘Bread and Roses’

A feature director for more than 30 years, a legend in Britain for socially conscious films like “Riff-Raff,” “Raining Stones,” “Land and Freedom” and “My Name Is Joe” that have won numerous European awards, Ken Loach thought he knew his own mind--and making a film in America was not on it.

“I’ve been around the block a few times and I never wanted to do it,” he says, a considerate but very tired man of 63 who was up at 2:30 a.m. (“Part of the Cannes torture ritual,” he jokes) to check out the festival projection system. “But the idea came up and I thought I ought to have a go before I pack it in. And I might as well do it in the belly of the beast.”

Which is how Loach, who’s had films at one section or another of Cannes 10 times before, is in the official competition once again with “Bread and Roses,” which debuted Thursday. It’s not only set in Los Angeles but also, in its focus on the “Justice for Janitors” movement that scored a much publicized victory after a strike just last month, couldn’t be more up to date.

Of course Loach, who now knows more about the ins and outs of the Southern California janitorial situation than most local residents, will tell you that his film as well as the recent strike are all part of what he calls “a rolling campaign” to expand the influence of the Service Employees International Union. It’s a situation he wouldn’t have known about except for a long stay in L.A. by his occasional collaborator, screenwriter Paul Laverty (“Carla’s Song,” “My Name Is Joe”).

“Paul spent a year in Los Angeles in the early ‘90s, allegedly as a student, but mostly with the Mexican and Central American community,” Loach says, smiling. Their idea at first was to do “something about being immigrants in the U.S. without papers,” an element in “Bread and Roses” that Loach still feels passionately about.

“The United States is the richest country in the world surrounded by some of the poorest, and people come out of desperation, to find an income to survive,” the director says. “Because they are illegal, they are very open to being exploited, and they can’t go to the police or established sources of justice. At the same time, they are abused by the public and newspapers for taking services and jobs. They are ripped off and attacked, getting it both ways, with one feeding on the other.”

Film Focuses On Two Sisters

But, Loach believed, if you simply “do a film about people who are victimized and exploited, there is always the charge that you are just wallowing in their poverty and hardship. The good thing about using the janitors’ campaign is that it’s a very positive thing and plainly something they are winning.” (The strike was settled last month with the janitors approving a contract that raises wages by more than 25% over the next three years--more than any janitorial settlement in the last 20 years.)

So “Bread and Roses” deals with two sisters, the newly arrived Maya (Pilar Padilla) and the resident Rosa (Elpidia Carillo of “Salvador” and “The Border”), both of whom work as janitors in a downtown office building and interact with union organizer Sam Shapiro (Adrien Brody of “Liberty Heights”).

Given his passion for authenticity, Loach did have some qualms about making his organizer white. “It was the problem of language,” he says, explaining his decision. “If Sam wasn’t white, then the whole film would have been in Spanish and I couldn’t have done it. And there were models in the union organization, white Americans from the East Coast, to follow.”

Casting Maya, the Mexican sister, also presented difficulties. “If you’re a Mexican actor in Los Angeles, you get softened, you start to become what the casting directors want,” Loach says. “What we wanted was someone who had not been through that process. We saw Pilar in Mexico and ruled her out initially because her English was fairly rudimentary. But we used her to read against other actresses and she takes no prisoners.” Loach ended up casting Padilla and then sending her to language school in California for two months.

Even more problematical was Loach’s experience living and working in Los Angeles, a city he continues to have mixed feelings about. “The disparity of wealth and poverty is so extreme,” he says, shaking his head. “You couldn’t help but be struck, as you drove past those big houses on leafy streets with electronic gates and ‘Armed Response’ signs, by how absolutely excluding that was to anyone who passes by. The Latino culture was much more open and inclusive, in those neighborhoods the doors were open and people welcomed you in.”

Loach was also struck by how “your expectations are constantly stood on their head” in the U.S. “I expected the land of rugged individuals with a disregard for authority and the opposite was true. Instead of the ordinary guy looking authority in the face and telling it where to go, it was all very bureaucratic, very authoritarian, very hierarchical.”

Though it would have suited his $5-million-plus budget to do without a union crew, Loach “didn’t even toy with the idea. We didn’t want to break unions when we’re going in to support them, that would have been the ultimate stupidity.”

Still, despite good cooperation from many crafts, Loach believes “union agreements were not meant for people like us, it was quite a struggle at times.” The Teamsters, he says, were especially perturbing. “They didn’t really know what we were about and their requests were unyielding and a bit silly. And with a large part of the local work force being Latin American or black, they seemed to be almost entirely white male with kind of redneck political tendencies. That was disappointing.”

Loach Is Proud of American Crew

On the other hand, Loach believes the core of his American crew were “absolute knockouts” and was especially moved that several of them paid their own way to Cannes from L.A. to support the film, including costume designer Michele Michel and first assistant director Ricardo Mendez Matta, who said that the experience of working with Loach was unique in his 15 years as an assistant director.

For one thing, Loach showed the script to the cast a little at a time. “He fed them scenes on a need-to-know basis, which meant he got reactions from people you couldn’t possibly stage,” Matta says. And, in a further attempt to ensure authenticity, Matta says Loach not only shot with minimal equipment (“just a camera on a tripod, like some kind of nature documentary”), he kept both the actual area of the shoot and the space leading up to it completely clear of all gear.

“He wanted,” Matta emphasizes, “the place to be real.”

Though not fluent in Spanish himself, Loach asked Matta and everyone on the crew who was to use the language as much as possible for the benefit of the real-life janitors who played about half of the “Bread and Roses” characters.

“He didn’t want them to look at the crew like the bosses at the buildings where they clean,” Matta recalls. “ ‘Make them feel at home,’ Ken would say, ‘because I can’t.’ ”

Given that, it’s not surprising that the screening Loach is most looking forward to is not the black-tie one here at the festival but the one for the janitors and union organizers back in Los Angeles. “They’re engaged in a more important thing than filmmaking,” the director says. “They’re our most important audience. Much more important than Cannes.”