What's the current state of
?
We have a concept and a dramaturgical structure. We know how long the film will take to produce and post- produce. In fact, Philip and I have been working on the film since Christmas of 1985, so we're ready to move. I've gotten a third of the money earmarked from European sources, and I'm working with George Lucas, who is the co- executive producer on this film, to interest other sources. My problem is that the box office projections, as a result of the last film, don't add up to six million dollars (my budget for
)though all of us feel that neither film has really been exploited to its full potential. What I am clear and happy about is that the films can have longevity, and are 'repeatables'that's an industry term: people can see them more than once, and I think both films will stay around a long time. When the third film is finished, there'll be a trilogy to offer.
What will the new film be like?
Fifty to seventy percent of the film, assuming I get the images I want, will be stock and archival footage. We'll print that footage; we'll recompose it; we'll cross frame it; we'll do opticals on it; we'll extend or constrict the grain structure; we'll manipulate it. And then we'll shoot the other fifty percent of the film. The principal photography will be the 'outside look,' seeing the present from the point of view of the past. The stock and archival footage will be the 'inside look,' the visual vernacular that people's minds, eyes, imaginations are drenched in by virtue of being part of Media World. We'll try to reposition the context of those stock and archival images so they can be looked at in a new way.
means 'war';
means 'life'in its compound: 'war as a way of life.' But this is not a film about the battlefield. It's a film about sanctioned aggression against the force of life, how we confuse human freedom with our pursuit of technological 'happiness'' or material affluence. Essentially, the film will be about the death of naturenot in an ecological sense, though that'll be includedbut the death of nature as the
as the place where life is lived, and how it has been replaced with the synthetic world we live in. I think the film will be timely. I hope it will allow us to rename the world we live in, albeit with the very limited resources of a film.
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Peter Watkins
Peter Watkins has been directing films that critique the commercial cinema in general, and television news in particular, since the late fifties. Even in his early 'amateur films'as they were called in Englandhe dealt with the issues of war and revolution in unconventional ways. By the time he went to work for the BBC in 1963, Watkins was a recognized talent (
1959, and
Faces, 1961, had won 'Oscars' in the then-annual Ten Best Amateur Films Competition) with a desire to use film as a means of changing conventional ways of seeing and understanding history and current developments. Watkins's first two directorial projects at the BBC caused considerable controversy. The first of these to be completed was
(1964), a dramatization of the final major battle between the Scottish and the British and the subsequent destruction of the Highland Clans as a political force. The film was based on John Prebble's history of the events,
(London: Secker & Warburg, 1961), but while
is rigorously true to the facts, it in no way conforms to the cinematic forms standard at the timeeven at the BBCfor 'recreating' history. For
Watkins extended the methods he had explored in the amateur films, especially the use of the camera as part of the action, rather than detached observer, and the reliance on close-ups of characters who look directly at the camera/audience. As the Highlanders look out at the viewers, they defy the conventional limits of history and geography, confronting our tendency to fantasize about the 'heroic' past and ignore the problematic connections between past and present.
Watkins's break with convention in
resulted in both awards
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and protests; at the BBC it catalyzed an opportunity to follow through on a project he had suggested before
a dramatization of the potential horrors of nuclear war. In the years since its controversial release (the BBC initially banned the film from television, and maintained the TV ban for more than twenty years),
(1965) has become a widely influential 'documentary,' and it remains a film of considerable power and insight. The irony is that the film's very effectiveness as a form of horrifying entertainment has obscured its brilliance as a critique of conventional filmmaking and of mass media in general. While the subject of
is nuclear warthe film dramatizes events leading up to a nuclear holocaust, the moment when the holocaust begins, and its seemingly unending aftermaththe focus of its critique is the emptiness of the 'involvement' promoted by commercial media fiction and of the 'detachment' of documentary film and TV news. The passages in
that look and feel most like candid documentarythe sequences of people experiencing a nuclear detonation and its gruesome resultsare acted fictions; and the passages that seem most ludicrousa churchman explaining that
