No public figure in the UK can express old-school leftist politics without being labelled a ‘firebrand’ – a word implying an angry, rabble-rousing nature, which once invoked a person, damned to burn in hell. It is frequently appended to the name of veteran (perhaps retired, it’s unclear) filmmaker Ken Loach, despite his softly spoken, avuncular demeanour, and it would be applied to Paul Laverty, too, if only more people knew who he was.
For Laverty, the scriptwriter for fourteen of Loach’s fifteen last full-length features, its use would be just as inappropriate as for Loach; at least it seems that way from most of the interviews he’s given. In the one tucked away under the ‘extras’ tab in the My Name Is Joe DVD, Laverty can be found sitting on a park bench next to a filming location (possibly near Drumchapel, one of the ‘big four’ post-war social housing schemes). He answers questions from his French interviewer in a quiet voice and with a friendly, if slightly guarded, manner. Laverty sounds almost apologetic as he stumbles his way to answering whether it’s important to him that the film is set in Glasgow: ‘It’s not that Glasgow is any less or more complex or worthy than any other city […] I’m from Glasgow so I can write Glasgow stories better than other stories, I suppose.’
But at the end of the clip, when he’s asked if there’s anything else he’d like to mention, Laverty becomes uncharacteristically emotive. ‘Where we’re filming this film just now there’s forty percent unemployment,’ Laverty says, before calling out the wider ‘cosy consensus’ in politics that if ‘two thirds are doing OK, that’s fine [even if] one third of the population are simply forgotten about’. He speaks of his anger at the inequality he observed out and about in Glasgow researching the film: ‘one part is very, very successful and very rich and then there are other parts out of sight and out of mind, and there’s people living there whose lives have simply been written off and seen as irrelevant’. All this, Laverty continues, despite the ‘great talent and great energy’ in such areas, along with the desire – people are ‘desperate’, he insists – to participate: ‘I’m always amazed how much people want to contribute and how few people are given the chance, and I think that’s probably true not only for the city of Glasgow, but many cities in Britain and Europe.’
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