It was the first day of shooting last October when Ken Loach handed Dave Johns a fat form. “Fill that in,” the veteran film director told his leading man. It was an application for income support, and it was 52 pages long, not including the introductory notes.
Johns, who had not signed on since the late 1970s, looked at the paperwork in horror. “I said: ‘I cannot do this, this is insane’,” the 60-year-old recalls, a year on. “When I got that form I thought: ‘Wow, they’re going to give a sick person that and, if the sick person doesn’t fill this in properly, they’re going to lose their benefits.’ I mean, the stress that must put you under.”
It was different when he was on the dole, between jobs as a bricklayer: “You’d go to the Labour Exchange, and you got paid cash. Every day you signed on and would be paid cash. I had it a couple of times when a little bloke would come on a motorbike and pick you up to take you to a job.” Thirty-five years later, Johns still looks more like a brickie than a movie star: short, slightly stout, bald as an egg, in a woolly jumper and jeans, with a throaty geordie voice you can imagine yelling at his pals from the scaffolding. There are not many Oscar-tipped actors called Dave, but Johns was tickled earlier this year to be listed, by Variety magazine, as a potential Academy award winner for his part in his debut film I, Daniel Blake. It put him at No 20, in between Colin Farrell and Jake Gyllenhaal. As he puts it: “I pissed myself.”
For the past 27 years, Johns has been plugging away on the UK comedy circuit. It didn’t earn him the big bucks, but it kept him out of the jobcentre. There were a few telly appearances, a Never Mind the Buzzcocks here, an 8 Out of 10 Cats there, plus a few stage appearances alongside bigger names, such as his bit part alongside Christian Slater in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, when he was hung up on a wall and told to go, “Arrgggh.” But, until a year ago, he paid his bills as a jobbing comic, getting heckled at by stags and hens in the small towns of Britain, taking any gig that would keep his mortgage payments up to date.
All that looks set to change with the release of I, Daniel Blake, which arrives in cinemas in the UK today with a string of major prizes to its name, including Cannes’ Palme d’Or. No one is as surprised as Johns, who is from the Newcastle suburb of Byker – as in Grove – where much of the film is set.
He never envisioned a career on the big screen. He didn’t even have an agent. Then, out of the blue, Guy Masterson, the West End producer behind One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, texted saying he had heard of a part that would be right up his street. It turned out to be a character in Loach’s latest film, about the benefits system and sanctions regime.
After a few auditions with various potential leading ladies, Johns got the part of Daniel Blake, a widowed carpenter who tries to sign on after suffering a massive heart attack that renders him unfit for work. The film charts his attempts to retain his dignity in the face of the callous bureaucracy of the department for work and pensions’ welfare programme, which requires him to not just spend 35 hours a week searching for jobs his doctor has said he is too unwell to take, but also to prove that he has done so – all with a handwritten CV cobbled together after a mandatory workshop ordered by his “work coach” at the jobcentre. It is there that he first encounters Katie (Hayley Squires), a single mum in her 20s who has been moved up to Newcastle with her two children from a hostel in her native London because of a shortage of social housing in the capital.
The two begin a perhaps unlikely friendship when Daniel steps in to help her after she is sanctioned for turning up minutes late to sign on, having got lost in an unfamiliar city. This is the first injustice in an incredibly powerful film, which has had audiences weeping at film festivals from Toronto to Locarno, when it was shown in the Piazza Grande in front of an audience of 8,000 crying Swiss. One audience member was so moved that, upon spotting Johns and his 10-year-old daughter in a restaurant the following day, insisted on secretly paying their bill.
It is unclear whether this benevolence was prompted because the bill-settler had failed to separate Johns from the penniless Daniel or was simply bowled away by his naturalistic performance. There are certainly similarities between Johns and his character. Both 59 at the time of filming, bald, working-class geordies (one of Johns’ favourite standup lines is: “You can tell I’m working class because I’ve got little bits of scratch card under my fingernails.”)
Apart from trying to fill in the wretched income support form, taking a brief woodwork class and talking to a doctor about the after-effects of a heart attack, Johns didn’t do a great deal to prepare for his film debut. He recalls an earnest conversation with a man at a Q&A at a film festival, who asked what Johns’ “process” was. “He had trained at the Lee Strasberg school of acting. He said: ‘I loved the film. What was the process? Did you and Ken Loach, for example, discuss how Daniel would sit?’ And I went: ‘Er, no, I just sat down on the chair.’ I don’t understand that intellectualising of it. I think [acting] has to come from just raw feeling.”
I, Daniel Blake was filmed in chronological sequence and made on location in Newcastle over 10 weeks, with the actors receiving just a few pages of script at a time. If Daniel was going to receive a phone call, that would be all that Johns would know. He would be given a phone, put it to his ear and on the other end would be the fitness-to-work assessor leaving a message. The unfolding drama was shared on a strictly need-to-know basis, so that during what is arguably the film’s most agonising scene, in a real food bank, with real food bank volunteers, even Johns didn’t realise what his co-star, the heartbreakingly brilliant Squires, was going to do – and ended up gasping with horror, just like many audiences. Another of the most memorable scenes took place in a real mini-mart, remembers Johns. “They didn’t close it, they didn’t have extras. I remember Ken said to Hayley: ‘After he’s paid his gas bill, we’ll do another take.’”
Johns says the experience has changed his life – and not because he has now paid off half the mortgage on his house in Whitley Bay. “I never came into this a raving socialist, I didn’t think ‘Power to the people’! I just thought: ‘Wow, I’m doing a film with Ken Loach, who I love as a director.’”
And yet, watching the finished film awakened his political consciousness. He recently spoke at the Labour party conference and is optimistic that the film will prompt audiences into action. He is delighted that the distributors, Entertainment One, are making it available for community groups to show in pubs and village halls following its cinematic release, which is already wider than most Loach films. “The rightwing press will try to dismiss it,” he says, but they cannot deny its power.
He recalls an encounter with a couple who run a shop in Whitley Bay. “I was buying something and this woman said: ‘You’re that bloke from Daniel Blake, aren’t you?’ And I said: ‘Yeah, I am.’ And she looked at me and said: ‘My husband and I went to a preview screening and it shocked me.’ She says – and this was the best thing; I told Ken, and you should have seen his little face – she said to me: ‘This film has made us think where we are going to put our cross next time we vote.’ And I said to Ken, ‘You’ll never guess what somebody said to us. And if that’s only one person …’”
The film is connecting with people all over the world, Johns says. He met a journalist from Variety, whose critic raved about the film’s “quiet beauty”, who said the film will speak to the working poor in America. “People said to me after screenings in San Sebastián, in Spain, ‘This is happening in our country’,” he says excitedly. “It’s about austerity; it’s about the working person getting shafted again, getting blamed for everything. And what’s happening is that people are getting tired of this now. This film is making people cry, it’s making them angry. And things can change with the will of the people.”
I, Daniel Blake is released today.
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