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An Evening with Ken Loach
Bread and Roses
Panel members discussing Ken Loach's Bread and Roses. Left to right: Paul Laverty, Ricardo Méndez Matta, Elpidia Carrillo, Ken Loach and George López.
(Photo: Robert Hale)
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British independent director Ken Loach brought his unique approach to filmmaking to the DGA on May 9, 2001, as part of the DGA Latino Committee's "An Evening With Ken Loach." The event featured a screening of Loach's latest film, Bread and Roses, followed by a panel discussion with Loach and members of the cast and crew. It was the director's first DGA screening.
Bread and Roses is the stirring drama about the struggles of Latino janitors in downtown Los Angeles as they rise to organize into a union. The story is revealed through the experiences of two Mexican sisters, Maya (newcomer Pilar Padilla), who is smuggled into the United States by outlaw coyotes, arranged by her sister, Rosa (Elpidia Carrillo), herself an L.A. janitor. The custodians face low wages, long hours, no health benefits and daily berating by their brutally mean supervisor, Pérez (played by L.A. morning-radio personality and standup comedian George López). The crew is mobilized, however, by a young labor organizer, Sam (Adrien Brody).
The film had its world premiere at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, where it was nominated for the prestigious Golden Palm Award, and received its U.S. premiere the night before the DGA event, at Hollywood's historic Egyptian Theater.
Present at the screening were Loach, screenwriter Paul Laverty, actors Elpidia Carrillo and George Pérez, and Latino Committee Co-chair Ricardo Méndez Matta, who moderated the panel discussion. Matta himself was able to provide particular insight into the film's production -- he was Loach's first assistant director on the project.
The idea for the film developed following a 1994 visit to Los Angeles by Laverty. The writer, who hails from Scotland, chanced upon a number of janitors as they left their shift, while on a late-night bus ride. Laverty became engrossed in their plight after attending labor organization meetings -- even to the point of volunteering his own time on their behalf. He approached Loach with the idea, and the two began developing the story.
Loach's directing career began in 1967 with Poor Cow, and his films, including My Name Is Joe, Carla's Song and Land and Freedom, have garnered numerous awards and nominations from Cannes to the British Academy Awards. His approach with Bread and Roses, his first to be filmed in the States, and as a DGA member, was typical of a Ken Loach film -- unorthodox.
The director took the unusual step of providing only enough script material to his actors for a given day's work -- frequently keeping them in the dark regarding the true nature of a scene or even their co-stars' lines. "Sometimes, we were only given a strip of paper!" noted Carrillo.
Often, actors were permitted to improvise their scenes on set, Loach trusting his actors to live in their characters' shoes -- and influence the direction of the film. In one crucial scene, Maya returns to her sister Rosa's house to confront her about what appears to be an act of betrayal on Rosa's part with respect to the labor union, only to be surprised by her sister's own dark past in order to keep her family alive.
Actress Pilar Padilla was purposely given only enough script to lead her to believe the scene would center around her character's (Maya's) confrontation of her sister, resulting in Maya packing her bags and leaving. Unbeknownst to Padilla, however, Carrillo's Rosa was to unleash an emotional outpouring of sordid history, enough to produce an unexpected response from Padilla.
Padilla's reaction was one of true surprise. According to George López, "Ken noted to us that it's hard to act surprised twice." The director filmed the scene using a single camera (as he did for most of the project), first filming Padilla's emotional reaction as she hears Rosa's story for the first time, and then filming Carrillo. "The actual moment of surprise, you might only get once or twice. But you can live off the impact of having done it once," says Loach.
Director Ken Loach directs Pilar Padilla and Alonso Chavez on the set of Bread and Roses
(Photo: Merrick Morton)
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As mentioned, the scene was to have concluded with Maya storming from the house, passing Rosa's husband and son on her way out. "The scene was planned, the location was booked, and the other two actors were standing by," says the director. "But Elpidia's instinct and Pilar's instinct were absolutely true. We changed the end of the film in response to how they played the scene."
Loach took another unusual step in hiring real janitors as background actors. "They were all very excited when they found out what SAG scale was!" notes Matta. [The police used in a protest scene were also real LAPD officers. "You'd be surprised how many cops in Los Angeles have SAG cards!" says Matta.] "If you're doing a film about janitors, you want to see janitors," explains Loach.
In one scene, supervisor Pérez (George López) chats with an elder cleaning woman (played by María Orellana, a real janitor) manipulatively attempting to get inside union information from her by offering her a promotion, only to fire her for not cooperating. True to form, the actress wasn't told what the conversation was to be about. María's reaction -- not answering and leaving the room -- was not scripted, but came from her own experiences, suffering similar injustices on the job. "In fact," recalls López, "I followed her to the door, screaming at her, and when she got to the other side of the door, she fainted from the stress of remembering what happened to her." He adds with a laugh, "Ken said, 'Why couldn't she have fainted on this side of the door?'"
Another important feature of the film is its equal use of both Spanish and English. "It was very important that the languages had parity," said Loach. "Language is power." Matta added, "It's a novel concept that the two main characters were Latina and spoke in their own language." Subtitles appear in both English and Spanish, depending on the speaker -- a first for a foreign-language film. Interestingly, Loach himself does not speak Spanish -- again trusting his actors to provide appropriate dialogue for the scene. "The key thing is in the editing room," he said. A Spanish-speaking researcher was on hand to help select continuous phrasing from several takes in key scenes.
"You hear discussions about 'How can we get Latino actors into Hollywood films?'" said Ken Loach. "And that seems to be entirely the wrong question. Because if you put Latino actors into Hollywood films, we know that they will have a certain kind of role, where the white people in the hills are somehow the main characters. To have both this enormous wealth of dramatic possibility and this huge array of talent, there's something wrong if we somehow can't pull the two together."
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