The War Game: An Interview with Peter Watkins

From the Fall 1965 Issue

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Interview: Pier Paolo Pasolini By James Blue

The War Game: An Interview with Peter Watkins By James Blue and Michael Gill

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I reckon as somebody said—“Everyman before he dies has a right to know what he’s running from”—­and I believe that very much. Not more than a mi­croscopic percentage of the people in this country know anything about their present situation at all.

It’s not so much that facts are deliberately withheld from people as there being a gentleman’s agreement not to tell people—and this is why my film, THE WAR GAME, will really curl the eyeballs of a lot of higher ups. They will have to decide that it is not right for people to know these things, because “this will effect the war morale of Britain,” and that’s going to be a hell of a thing to decide.

This is the avenue I’m crowding them into. That’s going to be a very nice, juicy situation. They will have to admit that what the film says is true. I can say to any of these gentlemen—“How many books on radio­activity or thermonuclear weapons have you read?” And not more than point five percent will have read more than half the books. A lot of the facts in the film will be fairly new to them, and this in itself will be a very in­teresting revelation to them. And they can only admit—unless they actually lie-—that it is quite likely that there are a lot of British citizens in their position. In other words, is the withholding of knowledge a good thing? And the only kind of argument they can put forward, if they reject the film, is—“You mustn’t frighten people.” And this, I will say, “doesn’t wash.” And they will have to repeat—“You mustn’t frighten,” and then we shall really be going to town.

An interesting situation indeed. We are living in this gross lie and delusion because, of course, the full political structure rests on this thing. I, at least, feel that citizens have a right to know what that structure is, before they then decide whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. Lots of people will probably see my film and say—“Well, I still believe that the thermonuclear posture is a very good thing to prevent happening the holocaust that your film shows happening.” At least that person can say that with some knowledge now, because formerly when anyone put a cross on a ballot­ sheet it was without any knowledge at all. In the past, our ignorance might not matter so much, when nations could recover from wars. But thermonuclear war is “re­coverable-from” only in a limited degree. So we’re go­ing to catch up with it.

The film is four-fifths ready now. The problems will start when the hierarchy sees it, which should be in about two weeks time. I can’t “prepare” myself. It’s just sort of… well, I have prepared myself. I’ve got all sorts of counter-arguments, and I think I’m going to get them into a very difficult position.

BLUE: What exactly will we see in this film?

WATKINS: It’s about a nuclear attack on Britain­, probable causes of, and effects of. It’s great fun. Action is in Kent, as part of a country-wide tactical nuclear strike. As you know, no film can look at the entire country. I’ll just take Kent as a working example.

BLUE: How are you able to predict what might happen in such an attack?

WATKINS: This is why the film is going to be attacked like hell when it goes out. It’s based on con­jecture, but conjecture based on the arithmetic of Britain, based on the arithmetic of how many targets we’ve got, versus our resources, versus this, versus this, versus this. You can’t really cheat these figures. This is information spread over many, many, many books­. There are probably well over a hundred different books -books on the effects of thermonuclear weapons, books on the crippling doses of Strontium-90, books on what thermoradiation does to your eyeball at certain dis­tances, books on any number of very unpleasant sub­jects.

BLUE: Does THE WAR GAME deal with the respon­sibility of the government to inform the public?

WATKINS: Yes, this the film does in at least two of three chunks, quite specifically. There is one sequence where I put forth something with which the audience will immediately identify themselves—because they will realize their own lack of information. The camera spends five minutes with a crowd of survivors who are under­going various minor psychological “kickbacks” from what they’ve been through—they’re in fairly harmless states of daze and apathy. They have come from a radio­active Z zone. The commentary says—“It is likely that a few of these people will even know what a radio­active Z zone is,” but the commentary doesn’t explain what it is. Then it goes on-“lt is likely that a few of them will know what ‘Beta Burns’ and ‘Cell Division’ and ‘Polution’ are.” But the commentary doesn’t define these terms. And if it works, I can see the minds of viewers who are honest with themselves—“I don’t know what these terms are either! What is ID-131 and Cobalt 60-what is Carbon 14?”

I don’t need to explain these terms. The film does show what radio-activity does to the human body, and in quite horrifying detail, but with Carbon 14 and all this I’m sort of titillating the audience. The author­ity of the film is that the chap on the Board of Gov­ernors won’t know these terms either and hasn’t had them explained to him.

In the film, I quote from the British manual of the Home Office—these are really the villains of the piece—it’s written in 1959—“British public knowledge in the affairs of radio-activity will be made progressive in the next few years.” I then go to a totally genuine street-interview, and I ask a woman—“Do you know what Strontium 90 is?” and she says—“I think its a sort of gun powder, isn’t it?” Most people said they didn’t know. It’s appalling, absolutely appalling.

Now I’ve got the film roughly cut, and I’ve got my escalatory system—Vietnam, Berlin and all that jazz­ and then Herman Kahn, God bless him, publishes this thing in the Times two weeks ago which I’m now going to put in the front of the film. Kahn’s piece is called Thirty-Eight Rungs lo Spasm—Or Insensitive Wars. Five of my scenarios are exactly there within it. The point is that the government is going to feel that this undermines civil authority, because civil authority in this particular subject seems to rest partly on the pub­lic’s lack of knowledge. The key burning issue is this—if people really understood thermonuclear posture and the results of it and the way the results can affect a small country like this, as opposed to thinking in insular terms, then would the people stand for it? Or would they accept nuclear war? It’s possible they might, but it’s also possible they might not. So basically nobody has the knowledge even to decide that. That’s where it’s an undemocratic situation. And that’s what is going to bother the government.

BLUE: THE WAR GAME then is directed more at the governmental question than at the Bomb itself?

WATKINS: I attack the Bomb with all my might. If anyone sits through this film and comes out liking the Bomb, then they must have sat through it with both eyes shut. But I do not come out and say—“Britain must unilaterally disarm.” I leave that to the viewer himself.

I think the whole thing is a mad situation. It’s not just Britain, it’s the whole world. Expense. Do you know that I found out that one-tenth of the American labor force is on the payroll of the military in one sense or another, with defense, installations, manufacturing projects, one way or another.

BLUE: Let’s discuss the problems of shooting THE WAR GAME. Try to tell us how you went about things—people, camera, etc. I’m interested not only in what you finally said to the actors, but also in the general movement toward getting the results.

WATKINS: Well, really getting down to basic roots, my sort of film is a gross cheat. You could say that it is life as Peter Watkins sees it, and yet in a way it isn’t, because I’ve never seen an atomic attack. A lot of people will object to this film on these grounds. For example, there is a sequence on the problems that will inevitably arise should civilian evacuation be put into motion. Now, how do I know how survivors will react? How much of this is just myself, saying what I want to say? But I try not to. I’ve intensely researched the subject. I show civil authorities putting into practice certain restrictions-rationing and all sorts of things­ because they are going to receive a very large number of evacuees. This I know will happen, because if the government puts evacuation into process, then they have to put people somewhere. Of fifty-two million peo­ple in the country, there is little point in beginning evacuation unless you evacuate fifty or sixty percent of the twenty-five cities in this country that are key “counter-city” targets. So all this is mathematical logic—not completely, but almost. These evacuees have to go somewhere that is considered a non-target area. They can’t go into the sea—they have to go somewhere on the land mass. The number of places in this country that can put up and feed and shelter ten million people are very limited—those places that aren’t themselves under the radio-active lea of, or the blast range of, either airfields, ports, air bases or cities. The number is very limited.

So this is my way of getting ready to film. The civil authorities have to put certain restrictions into play, such as rationing, otherwise you’ll never feed these people. Now, if they do this, then they have to set up restrictive road movement and all this sort of business. So for my film purposes, which do you imagine a police­man saying?—“Yes, we’ve got to have roadblocks, and I don’t care if Father who is outside the roadblocks wants to come in to be with his wife—I stop him!” Or do you imagine the policeman saying—“This is ab­solutely bloody nonsense—you can’t stop husbands getting to wives at a time like this!” My policeman says the second thing, because I think it’s a more hu­mane thing for a policeman to say and I think any man would say that. But I don’t know that a policeman would say that, so I also have a policeman saying some­thing like the opposite. In the film, they do actually set up roadblocks but the thing doesn’t work very well.

BLUE: What about the behaviour of the people in the encampment?

WATKINS: All I can do is imply that about fifty or sixty percent of the people stay and another half immediately lights out. So that you can look at both sides of it. But in actual fact I could be grossly wrong—100% might stay, or flee. You just don’t know. This is unlike COLLODIN, my earlier historical war film, where at least I have a record of what people did. As the director of a film like THE WAR GAME, you have to be convinced that what you do, even without an historical record, rings true-true because it stems from this “mathematical pyramid.” This pyramid is the foundation of THE WAR GAME—just as, for COL­LODIN, British history was the foundation.

BLUE: Was it easier to direct your people in COL­LODIN; because it was based on a history familiar to the non-actors you used?

WATKINS: I don’t think that makes a lot of dif­ference, because when you get down to actually putting human beings in front of this awful camera lens, any legend or anything else all goes straight away out of his mind. He’s so worried about the whole thing, you really have to start from scratch. Basically you can only work on the assumption—he must come across as a real person and not as someone acting. And the key thing in this is trying to get nothing out of that per­son that is not right for him as a character. If a person has only got to open his mouth and say two lines, it really is chi-chi nonsense to go into all the background of his personality. I haven’t got the time, and this is nonsense. He is, in a way, not only a person, but he is representative of people in his circumstance. And having him recognize that, you have to show him that what he says is as underplayed and as believable as pos­sible. This is not easy when people are being angry into the camera-“How the hell do you expect me to do this or that?”

I did one scene last Monday—a very difficult scene­. I had a crowd of about twenty children, in age from six to about fifteen, boys and girls with mothers and a couple of fathers. I haven’t seen the rushes so I’m not sure—but it looked very horrifying. This is the one scene in the entire two-hour film where the camera says—“You are now looking at the debris of thermonuclear war. These are the injuries. These people have been gassed. These people have suffered from heat stroke. These have been impaled by flying debris. These have been burnt. These have had their clothes set on fire by radiation.” We just went along, sort of laying it on the line like that. I mean it’s rather like tossing a clump of humanity into a corner and letting them writhe. They had to scream and cry and do things that normally are the most difficult things to get an untrained person to do. I spent about a quarter of an hour getting it out of them. They were made up, but no one told them what they were supposed to do. They trundled down to this little sort of a wrecked corner of a barracks where we were filming, and we laid them all around in posi­tions without explaining the scene yet. I plumped them down and then said: “You are now in a forward medical aid unit! You have been so-and-so and so-and-so.” I ex­plained the condition they were in. I then went to each person individually. It’s a wide-angle shot, hand-held, and goes past people and sometimes someone goes past and bangs into the camera and says “excuse me.” Al­though we laid the people out and planned the camera movement, if the thing works it will look totally un­organized.

I tried to get from each of them a different sort of shock or paralysis or crying or fear or pain—reaction—extremely difficult to do and I don’t know if it worked or not. To look at someone in film and really believe that he is in pain is most difficult to do.

We were running on sound and I said that the sound is very important—“I’m only going to be passing your face for about five seconds and I want you to be giving forth.” Except for one woman who couldn’t do it for more than ten seconds without actually giving herself a rupture, to most of them I said—I want you to give forth for all of the one minute that this shot is going to last, whether you are in the camera’s range or not.” So they all got this noise coming out of them. It was awful—a sort of animal-like noise—and I was watching them and it was absolutely incredible. Something clicked. The scene clicked, they knew what they were supposed to be doing and they really went to town, all sorts of people.

A little kid was looking bolt-eyed into the camera. I had worked this all out—you cheat to start with. I have a sort of basic formula that sounds like a factory method—if you get someone breathing very quickly, this starts something going inside them, it opens the mouth and something happens to the eyes and then if you build something on top of this, the results can sometimes be not bad at all for pain or exhaustion. This sounds like Physical Exercise Number Five, and some people will say this doesn’t go at all. But I’d do it even with a professional actor, because that is a psychoso­matic thing anyway-breathing fast-it does produce certain things. But I got some kids doing just that­—bolt-eyed into the camera. Other kids I got to pretend they were crying. And when the noise of everyone was awful, they lost inhibition and went to town on it a bit and made noises that people don’t normally make, a vicious melange of this sort of thing.

Although I go on about the difficulties, it is probably easier than a subtle scene when you have one person isolated in front of the camera and the whole thing depends on the right sort of flick of the eyes. Things either work or they don’t work, and the depressing thing about this sort of film is that you can never tell whether it has worked until you see it on the screen.

BLUE: You say you’re after an unorganized result.

WATKINS: Organized unorganization.

BLUE: What does that look like, in terms of the image?

WATKINS: You completely avoid the “well-framed” look. Things in my film must be “flat-on”—this doesn’t denigrate dramatic effect at all. But if I film someone talking to camera, I prefer to film them “nicely framed” in a fairly tight closeup. And never an extreme closeup—there you begin to get into the field of drama. I like to keep people back a bit so that you can look at them. My people always look straight into your eyes because they are looking into the lens. They are not looking off. In a raw situation to go flat onto someone saying into the camera “I think so and so”—this is where you are using a real person, this is direct, no phony dialogue scenes.

This sort of film has to be incisive, has to make points and move ruthlessly. The traditional low-angles or the traditional angles of westerns looking up past the gun holster just don’t fit this sort of film. Seldom if ever an “over the shoulder.” You constantly say to yourself-“You are in a newsreel situation. What is the sort of thing that you would have taken if you were there.” This is a fairly good criterion-then you cheat sometimes on that. Because you can say, as I did when directing COLLODIN—“There were no newsreel cam­eras in 1746 and a cameraman would never have been in front of charging men.” But if you film it in such a way that it looks real, then that question usually doesn’t arise.

BLUE: When you say “looks real,” what do you mean?

WATKINS: That life is existing on both sides of the camera. I had a shot going through a whole stack of people and you hear someone saying near the cam­era “excuse me, please”—this does things, I assure you. Or if someone comes up and looks in the camera and the camera sort of “bumps” and moves away from him just as you see him-this is the technical nuts and bolts of it. You’ve got to make sure it’s not overdone, that it’s right for the scene and you’ve got to use different ways of doing it, because you see it twice and it looks wrong. Once in a film is just about right. Hand-held is half the answer to the whole thing.

Never, never, never in this sort of film do a track, a smooth track. I have one track in THE WAR GAME. It takes six minutes; however, it looks real. A shot in sync; the camera is on the back of a motor-bike look­ing over a police-dispatch rider’s shoulder. He drives about two-hundred yards very fast down the road, stops, gets off the motor-bike, goes up to two policeman with a message, they say “take it straight up there,” the camera follows him up the flight of steps, through swing doors, into the vestibule of a big county-hall, across the floor, up a flight of steps, around a corner, up another flight of steps, down a corridor, into a room-all in sync-listens to two people talk to each other for a moment, follows a man across a floor, circles around a table where four men are sitting, then down behind the table where someone starts to talk in dialogue. All that happens in one shot. It works because it’s hand­held, because people look into the camera as they pass, people react normally, because the dialogue isn’t always crystal-clear, because all sorts of things happen that are justified. You might get a light flair into the cam­era. This is real.

BLUE: Tell us about your selection of non-actors for your film. You are looking for people who will make us say upon seeing them—“Those are real people” and not “Wow, what a great performance!”

WATKINS: Yes. In THE WAR GAME I have a series of people, each having only one and two sentences to say. Each talks about domestic trivia—what it’s like not to have heat, or not very much food, or to have unclean washing water. None of the people who played these roles had ever been in these circumstances be­fore, but somehow they understood what I wanted. This is a thing one shouldn’t really say, I suppose—but it’s partly an audience delusion as well. Because if you have a woman very quietly and simply say—“We’ve been eating out of tins for the last three days and it’s been cold,” then you think to yourself—“My God, that could happen to me,” because it’s a normal thing. She says it quietly and she looks dead tired and it’s totally unacted in the accepted sense, then the audience will help that by reading a tremendous lot into it. Getting right down to the mechanics of it, you’ve taken an ordinary person, you’ve gotten her to repeat it two or three times until she says it quietly and simply enough, and with fatigue enough, and then you’ve got it. It is· a cheat in a way.

I usually do this: I say—“I want you to say it like this” and then I say it. And “I want you to be tired and play it down”-you have to keep holding people down. Some people—some ordinary housewives—sur­prised me like hell. They came out with a marvelous thing the first time. Some people were good at about take seven. It’s the basic simplicity of it, it’s dialogue that I’ve thrust into their palm about ten minutes be­fore the take, telling them—“Now go and learn that.” They know they are to act housewives—they are in a way standing for a lot of housewives who will be in this position. The point has to be made in about four seconds flat. I explain exactly what she has got to do. What she says must be relevant. If it’s a housewife ex­plaining about the lack of washing-up water, then that is all that needs to come out.

But there are also more difficult things. I have a man who plays a police inspector who must explain in a one-minute take straight into the lens in a anther quiet and shacked-out way, as though it is literally two months after a thermonuclear strike, the process of moral breakdown. An interviewer asks him about the way people are behaving; and he looks straight into the camera and says—“Well, before the strike, people behaved in such and such a way, but now people are getting worse because…” and then he tries to explain. It helps to have a fairly intelligent amateur actor.

Of the amateur actor there are two categories—those who over-project like mad and are literally useless and those with tremendous intelligence who immediately grasp this totally different technique they’ve never used before. The camera and microphone are close, so you have to put yourself forward in another way. Their acting experience really helps in all sorts of technical things, such as emphasis, the intelligent grasp of where and why pauses come in.

Usually I write my text all the way down to putting the pauses in. And I write the “uhs” in. People gen­erally forget these but get the idea. If you write it “I … I … well, uh … ” and explain that this is how you want it said, then they usually don’t have to copy you exactly and they might even change the words slightly. I usually say the thing over and over as I write it until I feel if the reality is coming out of it.

BLUE: How do you introduce your non-actors to their text?

WATKINS: With sympathy and intelligence, that’s all it is. I may let him see the script first. I tell him the sort of man he is supposed to be. I don’t go into character a lot. I don’t believe in that for this sort of film. I believe a man is a man and he’ll come out as he is. And if I say—“You have fifteen children”—this is irrelevant because he has forgotten that. The audience is not going to look and say—“He’s got fifteen children, hasn’t he? I can see it in his eyes!” As long as he knows the circumstances, then basically the sort of man he is as the performer is the sort of character he is. I seldom attempt “character playing.” People are them­selves. As long as he knows the circumstances he is in and the way he would react, then you are really most of the way there.

BLUE: What about directing emotional responses other than screaming and yelling?

WATKINS: Emotions in this sort of film tend to be fairly basic and uncomplicated. Here’s an example, concerning one woman. It was supposed to be a crowd scene, a riot, and a rather fascist citizens auxiliary corps drives up a truck and runs a child down. This precipitates a mass reaction from the crowd. I actually used a woman with her real son. I said to her—“You are in this situation, the truck drives up, and we’ll put your boy under the truck. The camera will approach from the back, by the time the camera charges through the crowd to the front you’ll just be picking your boy up from under the wheels of the thing. And because the truck has gone over the curb, it will look as though it has hit someone in the crowd. By the time the camera charges through we’ll see you picking him up and we’ll know it’s your boy.” And she was dead worried about this because the truck has to come screeching up and then she has to put her boy underneath. We tried it once and the brakes weren’t right and you swore that another six inches and it would have really hit him. And I said—“I then want you to pick this boy up and I want you to go bloody, animal mad! You’re two months hungry, two months of deteriorating conditions, low on rations, and then this happens! And you’ve got a boy lying there who feels odd in your arms and there is some blood coming out of his mouth because of the internal puncture. Now I want you to go mad at these people in this truck!” But could she do this? I shouted and screamed, I ruptured myself, the crowd was going berserk. The conditions couldn’t have been better, and she just looked like somebody out of a girls’ school hockey-team. So I finally had a man do it, some­one who wasn’t the boy’s father at all! He looks mar­velous! He looks as if he’s going to go castrate every­one of them. He had this sort of intelligence and he grasped it. To make the woman react, I had almost kicked the boy in the teeth, but she couldn’t do it. Being a mother doesn’t always have any advantage whatsoever. You need this basic sort of click-”I under­stand,” click-“I’ll forget inhibitions,” click-“I can do it.” In some people no click takes place at all.

I have another scene that worked but not as well as it should because the woman just wouldn’t give. A house thirty miles from a series of megatonic explo­sions in an airfield. Nothing is happening in that house really, other than the place is under the prolonged blast wave, so that means that everything is going like this [Watkins rattles an ash-tray on the desk to simulate an earth tremor] and this goes on for 45 seconds. And all this family is doing—the boy’s been out in the field -and of course they don’t hear the sirens and he suffers from the flash and they pick him up and the camera rushes inside the house with them. And then the rattling starts and they just grab onto the table. And when they charged into the house they had one boy in their arms and there was a little baby on the floor screaming his bloody head off when we were filming this. The scene looks horrifying! Because you’ve got this [Watkins imitates baby scream] and the camera is bouncing and we’ve got all the crockery on the mantle rattling. But the woman’s face wasn’t right and I couldn’t do this again because I’d got her out there with a lot of great palaver and whatnot. And she just didn’t give some­thing, she couldn’t. But the scene is luckily over-all not bad. I wanted an awful non-comprehensive gape from her, which is very difficult to get from some people. But since you don’t really see her, and the baby is screaming and the other little kid is going [Watkins imitates the short bursts of cries], it works all right.

GILL: Did you aim for a complete shooting script with dialogue before actual production started?

WATKINS: Yes, I get it all on pa per, and then I shoot and it all changes because of special circumstances of weather and people and all sorts of things. But I certainly try to start with a very detailed script, be­cause you can’t improvise this sort of thing. It’s difficult enough to organize with a working script, but without it would be chaos. You’re not working with profes­sional actors, so you’ve got to organize private people who are coming on their own time and the thing 1s an immense jigsaw puzzle to work out, to shoot.

BLUE: How do you find your non-actors?

WATKINS: You just find people. I’d decided the areas to do it-three fairly big towns in Kent. I went to these towns and got the ball rolling by finding the local dramatic societies, or the local cine-societies. And these people bring in all their uncles and dads and the whole thing just snowballs, snowballs into a series of large meetings held in each town with usually a hundred or a hundred and fifty people attending, mostly from local drama groups—and I try and get them or­ganized into the film. This usually works very well. I I suppose if you count heads, I had about three hundred and fifty people in my last film.

GILL: What do you think of DOCTOR STRANGE­LOVE?

WATKINS: I don’t know… whenever I open my mouth about that, there are all sorts of people who… I liked FAILSAFE far better.

GILL: Isn’t FAILSAFE much more conventional?

WATKINS: Don’t under-rate it. Sidney Lumet has got his head screwed on. It’s a very well made film. I haven’t seen TWELVE ANGRY MEN and I haven’t seen THE HILL. But DR. STRANGELOVE… I don’t know. I thought at the time it was a well made film, but I keep hearing people say how bloody awful they thought it was, so I keep having doubts. I heard a woman coming out in the foyer at the end of that film and she said “Oh, ho, my dear, I did enjoy that!” And so that’s why the film fails! I just have certain feelings about the present nuclear situation to not think it’s awfully funny. Basically DR. STRANGELOVE is an acceptance film. I mean the full title means more in actual fact than people give it credit for—HOW I LEARNED TO QUIT WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB.

BLUE: You feel that this represents a particular danger?

WATKINS: Getting down to nuts and bolts as far as the next bloody well war goes, Mate!, it will be your people and the Russian people who will really be more particularly involved. And we British shall be there purely as a crisped-up side-kick.

But in America you have a far greater dissemination of public knowledge on the effects of nuclear weapons. We’ve got nothing at all in this country. Mr. and Mrs. Bloggs know nothing about it whatsoever. This is why I’m making THE WAR GAME.

Regarding the effects of DR. STRANGELOVE, I don’t think many people have seen it here. Basically, it sends you out—if you don’t know the ends and outs of nuclear weapons, if you don’t know what they can do, if you don’t know what the present stockpile is, if you don’t know all these things, and most people don’t!… then DR. STRANGELOVE sends you out laughing. And that ain’t on. How many ordinary people say—“That film frightened me,” as opposed to saying—“Do you re­member the scene with the Coca Cola machine?” But how many people have said to you—“That could actually happen.” Now, come on, how many?

There is an acceptance of thermonuclear war, espe­cially in the United States, and this seems to measure a certain degree of thinking, particularly top-level think­ing. I know a little bit about this now, after THE WAR GAME, I mean this whole “limited-phase” thing, all this whole business. It’s just nonsense. But there is an acceptance of thermonuclear war as something that can “possibly be absorbed.”