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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.