 Best known for his long and fruitful partnership with Ken Loach, Paul Laverty
has penned a series of emotional screenplays fired by a robust sense of
injustice that can verge upon didacticism. But they are also shot through with
bittersweet comedy and, occasionally, romance.
Laverty comes from a remarkably cosmopolitan background. Born in Calcutta in
1957 to an Irish mother and Scottish father, he studied philosophy in Rome, then
law in Glasgow. In the 1980s he worked for three years as a lawyer in Nicaragua,
recording human rights abuses; he also travelled to Guatemala and El Salvador.
He has remained keenly interested in Latin American affairs ever since.
In the late 1980s, Laverty contacted Loach with an idea for a screenplay -
although his first collaboration with the director was a cameo in the Spanish
Civil War drama Land and Freedom (1995), scripted by Jim Allen. Laverty's own
proposal became Loach's next film, Carla's Song (1996), in which Robert
Carlyle's Scottish bus-driver accompanies a Nicaraguan refugee back to her
homeland at the height of the Sandinista/Contra conflict. The pair's follow-up,
My Name is Joe (1998) created a star-making role for Peter Mullan as a
recovering alcoholic, while Bread and Roses (2000) spotlighted Latina workers in
Los Angeles struggling to unionise.
In 2002 Laverty won Cannes' best screenplay award for Sweet Sixteen, about a
young Scottish delinquent battling for a better life, a milieu which Laverty and
Loach revisited in lighter vein in the interracial love story Ae Fond Kiss
(2004). Also in 2002, Laverty, Loach and their producer, Rebecca O'Brien, formed
a company, Sixteen Films, which has been behind most of their work since, as
well as a handful of films by other directors.
Laverty also wrote Loach's contributions to two compendium movies. In
11'09'01 (France/Egypt/UK, 2002), Laverty's segment pointedly recalled not the
World Trade Centre disaster but 11 September 1973, when Salvador Allende's
government in Chile was brutally deposed. Their contribution to Tickets
(Italy/UK, 2005) was a comic sketch about football fans on a train.
Less well received have been his ventures with other directors: Cargo (Spain/UK, d. Clive Gordon, 2006),
about a stowaway on a freighter, and También la lluvia (Even the Rain, Spain/Mexico, 2010), the
story of a Spanish film crew making a political epic about Christopher Columbus. But the Loach-Laverty team received a
very high accolade when The Wind That Shakes the Barley (UK/Eire, 2006), a poetic portrait of Irish
Republican fighters in the 1920s, won the Palme d'Or in Cannes.
Their films continue to swing between darkness and humour, with It's a Free World (2007), about
the exploitation of migrant workers, Looking for Eric (France/UK, 2009), a light-hearted fantasy
co-starring Eric Cantona, Route Irish
(2010), a bleak thriller exploring the role of British mercenaries in Iraq, and, next, The Angel's Share
(2012), a comedy about an ex-con trying to start a (legal) whisky distillery.
Sheila Johnston
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FILM & TV CREDITS
