Watkins:
That's right. I wasn't ambivalent about the principle at all, but at that point I was concerned about the practice. It takes a long time to raise money. You can't be quite sure, until you're underway and really rolling, how people will respond to a particular project. It's a very special and individual chemistry, dependent on the time you're in, on the nature of the subject, on so many things. I tried to raise money publicly in England last year when I wanted to remake
The War Game
. That project was stopped by Central Television. We had started the public fund-raising there, though I'm not sure if it's fair to judge the results or not. At the time the project was stopped, we had raised around thirty-five thousand dollars. That was a national appeal concentrating mostly on England, but it went on for only about two months, and I think it tended to peter out once people thought that Central Television was paying for the film. So it's hard to say whether that rather small amount of money was a warning or not, but it did show me that the process could take a tremendous amount of time. We were trying to find several hundred thousand dollars.
MacDonald:
At what point did the idea for this film become international?
Watkins:
So much has happened in the last year and a half. I've been around the world twice just this year. So I can't remember exactly, but the idea was already germinating by the time we tried approaching Home Box Office and Hollywood last spring.
MacDonald:
I know you want to shoot in the Soviet Union. How do you mean to arrange that? Do you know other filmmakers who have worked that way?
Watkins:
There are Western filmmakers who have worked in Sovietbloc nations, of course. There have even been some international television linking arrangements, and I think they're trying now to link citizens of Lawrence, Kansas, and citizens of Leningrad for
The Day After
[1983]. I'm not sure which citizens. But I don't know anyone who's done what I'm trying to do: deal with a major subject, with different yet common perspectives from all the major countries involved.
I don't know if the Soviet Union has ever been involved in this kind of process before. We're approaching the state authorities. It's very difficult because Soviet state authorities are extremely slow-moving; they're
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like the Indian state authoritiesextremely bureaucratic, very much wanting to make sure that what comes out is favorable to the existing regime, or whatever. I'm approaching them saying that I don't want to have to deal very much with constraints. This is a film that can't function with the usual constraints. I told the Soviets that I wanted to film with a non-party family. After all, I'm not filming with a U.S. "party" family: some Washington family, fresh out of some Republican committee. There may lie the crunch. They've never had to deal with a nonstructured project like this before, something that isn't all detailed on paper. They just don't understand it.
Western television doesn't understand that approach either: to work without a script would be unheard of. That you might have a learning process out of which the film develops is total anathema. I am very strongly aware of how revolutionary this project is going to be in terms of the existing mass media. I can't really talk much about some of the internal meaning of the project for fear it will sound too abstract. I talk most about the way in which the film will very, very publicly ask people to challenge the way the media is functioning. One of the aims of the film is to compel the film establishment and the media to actually deal not only with "content," the nuclear issue in this case, but with the effects of conventional media language on the issue and on the widespread feeling of powerlessness about the issue.
Anyway, if you can understand that there are difficulties
here
in dealing with this process, you can image how difficult it is in the Soviet Union. We're dealing with the Soviet Peace Committee, which is the internal peace organ in charge, I think, of all internal peace arrangements and all peace people who visit the Soviet Union. I'm going to sit down in front of these people, and I'm going to be quite open about what this film is about. I'm going to ask them to help us give the film top priority, to say that the film is absolutely essential. If they won't do that, I won't go there: I'll find some way of doing it outside the Soviet Union. [The Soviet Union agreed to a family sequence which was shot in Moscow in August 1984.]
MacDonald: The War Game
is a painful, powerful film. Will this new film be similar?
Watkins:
I've never repeated any film I've made. And I'm not interested in doing that. I won't think about
The War Game
. This film will make me work in different ways. The blending of the various elements will be entirely different. One thing I plan to do, that I've not done as overtly before, is to deconstruct some scenes. I'd like to show the effects a cut has, how a scene is constructed.
MacDonald:
You mean that the film will move back and forth between narrative and self-reflexive examination of narrative.
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Watkins:
Yes, though I think you can use "narrative" here only in the very loosest sense. The film will be constantly moving from one set of people to another. There will be a certain chronological drive which will be interrupted from time to time by self-reflexive moments.
I really wouldn't like to project how television companies are going to react when asked to show the film, a self-reflexive film which is not just a didactic exercise on the blackboard, but which confronts the issue in the context of nuclear war. But the film will be put on the desks of all the television organizations, in each of the countries where we film. And you can be quite sure there will be people ready to make a strong challenge when any of those companies reject the film. I'm quite sure there will be a sizeable rejection. The only thing I cannot project is who will do the rejecting. Neither can I be sure about the cinema distributors, some of whom are very conservative, some of whom are very helpful.
I'm going to try it all, because that's the only means one has of reaching large numbers of people. And I want the film to earn money, because it's important that money comes back into the groups that helpedand into the movement toward demilitarization. But I can't rely on that, as I know from bitter experience. So we're going to try to set up an alternative distributionit's just a theory at this pointasking different groups to start a series of showings in local halls, in churches, at universities, in
public
places where there can be rigorous debate on the material the film is dealing with. I want that to happen a great deal. I'm going to aim for that, because that's the nearest equivalent in distribution to the way in which the film is being made. It's organized to be part of a discussion that explodes upwards and outwards.
MacDonald: