Watkins’ strikingly original reconstruction of the 1746 Battle of Culloden strips away any sense of noble pageantry to confront the brutality inflicted on Highland soldiers and civilians by the British Army. Dynamically filmed with handheld cameras and adopting the style of television reportage, the film collapses the distance between past and present with visceral immediacy. It’s one of the defining works of British television. It is accompanied here by a BBC documentary examining the production and enduring influence of this landmark film.
James Bell
Peter Watkins on ‘Culloden’
I haven’t yet seen your film but I gather it’s a kind of newsreel reconstruction. In other words you are trying to give the impression that newsreel cameras were present at the Battle of Culloden, filming events as they happened and you have a reporter watching the battle and speaking the commentary – a sort of 18th Century Alan Whicker. Now I know that you originally planned this film as an amateur production. When and why did you give up that idea?
This was for very personal reasons. While I was planning the film in 1962, I became involved in a whirlwind courtship and I got married later that year. I knew that Culloden would cost me about £500 to make as an amateur and I certainly couldn’t afford it. Then later on I got the chance to make it for the BBC without spending my own money, so naturally I jumped at the chance.
Did this professional backing alter your conception of the film?
No, not at all. I made it on exactly the same lines that I would have followed as an amateur. For a start, I used ordinary people throughout because I am trying to get into my films a style of realism – not new to the film world as a whole because it has been done before but relatively new in this country.
In what particular films has it been done before?
Well, for example, Olmi in Il posto used non-professionals and other directors – mainly the Italians – have done this to try and achieve a greater grip on real life. They take ordinary people out on to location and use a flat form of lighting – in fact, often no lighting at all. The result is not newsreel but it is, for my money, something close to real life as opposed to the typical star-ridden-film-set-cluttered thing which is always patently a piece of fiction.
I feel happier working with non-actors – people who have never appeared on the stage or before a camera in their lives. A great deal of rubbish is talked about such people. When most professionals talk about amateur theatrical productions, they tend to groan and think of over-acting, but that is only due to bad handling. If you go up to a child of twelve or a woman of 80 and give them something to do which is within the bounds of their own characters and their own experience, then you can reduce them to tears, you can get a performance of pathos, you can get anything you like from them as long as you handle them carefully.
Can we just dwell for a moment on this business of handling people? How do you go about this? Do you start by telling them the whole story of the film or do you just talk about the particular shot you are going to take?
One would like to explain the whole situation but there is seldom time. From an organisational point of view, it’s difficult because these people have other jobs to do. For example, Mr Brown can only come filming on Tuesdays and Thursdays between two and four o’clock. In that short time, you have to whip something exciting and interesting out of him, so you tend to forget the niceties and use him rather like a piece of plasticine – smash him into shape in a few minutes which is a ruthless system, but it does work. And you have to maintain a sense of proportion. If you want a shot of a man grovelling in fear, you don’t necessarily have to tell him the whole history of his regiment. You just get him into a state of fear in five minutes by telling him the situation within that five minutes and then proceed to get it out of him.
Usually, it is better to get something fairly quickly. Untrained people tend to wear down much more quickly; they get tired and lose that little spark. Nearly everyone has a spark somewhere and it often comes out, if you have explained what you want, in the very first take.
But you always involve them in the situation of the film. You don’t get facial reactions by trickery like firing a gun unexpectedly to make them look surprised?
Not at all. In Culloden I have a platoon of English soldiers firing muskets – volleying by ranks as it was called. Tremendous iron discipline is involved in this system of firing and it is coupled with the beating of drums, the shouting of officers, the cursing, and then in the middle of it all the awkward little expression of a man who sees that he has actually shot somebody. You don’t trick people into this; you have to actually involve them in the situation. But you can shout and scream at them – get them worked up. That’s another reason why I like working with ordinary people because they do get worked up.
You have to work pretty quickly to keep the emotion on the boil.
Yes, it is a pretty exhausting pace. But the rewards are wonderful. I have got some totally unselfconscious performances from town clerks, firemen, makers of bagpipes, and I gave them the most difficult things to do. For example, I play a lot of the film right into the lens. You have a voice off-camera asking one of the English soldiers, ‘What do you think of the rebels?’ – this is done like a television interview – and the soldier has to direct his answer not to the questioner but to an inanimate object – the camera. Very difficult but it seems to come off. I am thrilled with that.
Is this universal? Don’t you have to select?
Yes, I do and very carefully where the known figures are concerned. I couldn’t pick up just anybody to play Bonnie Prince Charlie or the Duke of Cumberland. People know from paintings what they look like. Charles Stuart was born in Rome and educated in France; his mother was half Polish; he spoke with a lisp, had a pronounced nose and a weak chin. Not a bit like David Niven who played the part in the Korda film. Fortunately I found an Anglo-French boy who speaks with a lisp and has exactly the right face.
The fact that I get somebody who looks right is more important to me than getting somebody who might be qualified to play the part mentally because I can work on the mental performance afterwards and for the television screen you need immediate impact; you have to make your point hard and fast on that little box. Of course, when it comes to the clansmen who are really the backbone of this film, you have no historical likenesses to follow, so then you can go after marvellous faces and people who have got something extra. We had people coming on to the moor where we were filming and we would take them away, stain their bodies with iodine, put wigs and bonnets on them and suddenly they took on a roughness… they became their ancestors.
Interview by Tony Rose, Amateur Cine World, 17 December 1964
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
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