Ken Loach on his new film Sorry We Missed You, an attack on zero-hours contracts and the British gig economy

At 83, Ken Loach hasn’t lost one ounce of the anger that’s driven so many of his films. The last time the British director went behind the camera, for 2016’s I, Daniel Blake , he delivered a savage broadside against the British welfare state. The story of a carpenter struggling to get benefit money after suffering a heart attack, it won Cannes’ Palme d’Or – the second of Loach’s career – and a Bafta for Best British Film. Now Loach is back with Sorry We Missed You, a stinging companion piece to I, Daniel Blake. “It was a story that really demanded to be told,” he says. If its predecessor looked at those below the poverty line, this film examines those barely above it, focusing on father-of-two Ricky (Kris Hitchen), a driver for an Amazon-like parcel company, and his care worker wife Abbie (Debbie Honeywood) – a family sinking in debt ever since the 2008 financial crash. Typically, Ricky feels ripped right from Loach’s gallery of characters – good-humoured working class folk like Ricky Tomlinson’s odd-job man in Raining Stones or Peter Mullan’s alcoholic painter and decorator in My Name Is Joe. Here, Ricky cheekily antagonises customers who support rival football teams. “It’s very important with Ricky, that he’s not a man who’s defeated from the start,” says Loach. “He’s an optimist and he makes you smile.” You see they haven’t stopped for something to eat. I saw guys in their 30s and they just looked terrible. Their colour, their health, their diets Ken Loach on researching for the film At our interview, with his arm in a sling, the bespectacled Loach is sitting next to his regular collaborator Paul Laverty, the 63-year-old Glaswegian screenwriter he’s worked with on nearly every film since 1996’s Carla’s Song. Together, they present a united front. During the making of I, Daniel Blake, he and Laverty visited charity food banks, meeting people who “were working and they still couldn’t feed their family”, Loach explains. “So the idea of the working poor was very important.” Out of that film grew Sorry We Missed You, an attack on the so-called gig economy and zero-hours contracts, the shady practice of offering employees ad hoc work. In the case of Ricky, he’s given a chance to buy his own van and be a self-employed driver, an increasingly common practice that Laverty says transfers responsibility onto the individual, locking them into “skilfully drawn up” contracts that ensure “they’re not deemed an employee … no holidays, no sick pay, [and] fines if something happens.” With its deceptively gentle title referring to the polite messages that delivery drivers post through your letterbox when you’re out, on a deeper level it’s a nod to the forgotten millions working multiple jobs to make ends meet. As ever with Loach and Laverty, the details impress, as Ricky gets sucked into a desperate situation where he dare not miss a shift, or even a delivery, for fear of being penalised. With no time to even stop for a bathroom break, he’s forced to carry a plastic bottle around to relieve himself in his van. For his research, Laverty loitered in car parks, accosting delivery drivers and eventually persuading some to let him ride with them on their rounds. Many of them were beaten down with tiredness. “You see their red eyes,” he says. “You see they haven’t stopped for something to eat. I saw guys in their 30s and they just looked terrible. Their colour, their health, their diets … I don’t know what it’s going to do to people. You can’t do that for 10 years.” Even their leading man, Kris Hitchen, who has briefly appeared in Loach’s 2001 railway worker drama The Navigators, had some experience of this way of life. A former gas engineer in Manchester, he spent his days serving boilers in rental properties. “If I didn’t get there and they’d gone out, I wouldn’t get paid,” he explains. “It’d be a wasted journey. So, the stress of the job that I’d already done, five years previous, added to playing the part of Ricky.” Naturally, it’s all too tempting to draw comparisons with Amazon, the global online retailer that is known for setting extreme targets for its employees (despite currently running an advertising campaign with folk saying how much they enjoy working there). “Amazon just said they are going to invest hundreds of millions making sure they’ll get next day delivery for even more customers,” comments Laverty. “Same day delivery,” corrects Loach. “Think of the pressure that puts on the drivers.” The intense stress to deliver all day every day is made worse by the hidden difficulties of the job, says Laverty. “Amazon will say, ‘Well, they start work at such-and-such a time’. “But, when you talk to drivers, they’ll have to go along to a holding car park. If they want to go out in the first wave [of deliveries], they’ve got to be there two hours beforehand. So the day just gets extended and extended and extended. I don’t think people realise what’s going on under the surface.” Unsurprisingly, the left-wing Loach points the finger at capitalism, rather than one company. “If the economy is run by corporations … business will go to the cheapest, most efficient service. “That means they have to be the cheapest. But how do they get there? By reducing their labour costs; they’ve got to cut their labour costs to a minimum. Hence this bogus self-employment, which is cheap. It’s cheaper for the employer.” Since his work for the BBC in the 1960s, including the seminal Cathy Come Home, which broached Britain’s homeless problem, Loach hasn’t stopped championing the poor and disenfranchised across his entire career. But does he see anger or antipathy in the generations below him? “The environment is a big issue itself for young people because they can see that falling apart,” he nods. “It’s their future. So I think some of them are getting very concerned.” While Loach was said to be retiring back when he made 2014’s Irish period drama Jimmy’s Hall , his desire to continue working into his 80s is admirable. He shot Sorry We Missed You in a rapid-fire 28 days. “Oddly enough, it’s a very simple film,” he says. “I mean, we thought that the situations are so strong that we wanted to be simple and economic and clear and allow the complexity to be through people’s reactions and how they are with each other.” This time, his retirement may be for real. Recently asked if he was working on another film, “There comes a point, aged 83, where it’s really a case of whether I can crawl around the course again, to be honest!” he stated. “But we’ll see. It would be nice.” A flame that has burned brightly for so long, it’s almost impossible to think of British – or world – cinema without him. A case of Sorry Ken, We’ll Miss You. Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook