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Watkins:
Yes, the public process. A large amount of money will come from that.
MacDonald:
When you were in this country in spring of 1983 you spent some time trying to get money from Hollywood, from Canadian commercial TV, and other commercial sources. But I had a sense even then that part of you wanted to generate funds on a more local basis, on principle.
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