Ken Loach

The worst thing about being a freelance film director is that you're scrambling around Soho with a briefcase, looking for somewhere to make phone calls. That was my position for 10 years.

Oh, I don't like labels.

I think the Norweigan model of municipalities owning cinemas and being programmed by people who know about films is a good one.

We have what we call ‘fake left' politicians, like Ed Miliband and those who went before him."

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.

The older you get the more new memories get wiped out, and you end up remembering more about your early life than what you did last week.

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.

Preparation is really important for actors; they need to know who they are, where they're from, and the experiences up to the point that we make the film.

When I was young, you were told that if you had a skill, you would find a job for life and you could bring up a family on the wage.

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.

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.

History is for all of us to discuss. All history is our common heritage to discuss and analyze. The founding of the state of Israel, for example, based on ethnic cleansing is there for us all to discuss.