Famed British filmmaker Ken Loach (“Kes,” “The Wind That Shakes the Barley”) has said that his fifteenth feature “The Old Oak,” set to premiere next month at Cannes, will probably be his last after more than sixty years of a career.
Speaking with THR, the 87-year-old veteran filmmaker says that “realistically, it would be hard to do a feature film again”.
He elaborates saying films take a couple of years to come together, at which time he’ll be nearly 90. He says: “your facilities do decline. Your short-term memory goes, and my eyesight is pretty rubbish now, so it’s quite tricky.”
Loach says the physical demands of long working hours has become harder to sustain with the “good humor” and “nervous emotional energy” he needs to keep a shoot’s momentum going.
Last time Loach teased retirement was in 2014, indicating “Jimmy’s Hall” would be his last film. Then shifting UK politics led him to film 2016’s “I, Daniel Blake.” which won him his second Palme d’Or and has become one of his most famous works.
“The Old Oak” is set and shot in the northeast of England and revolves around the last pub standing in a former mining village that has fallen on hard times after thirty years of decline. The arrival of Syrian refugees turns the pub into a hotbed of tension.
Source : https://www.darkhorizons.com/ken-loach-retiring-from-filmmaking/
