In the late 1960s, the film-maker Peter Watkins wrote to John Lennon and Yoko Ono, telling them: “People in your position have a responsibility to use the media for world peace.” This directly inspired the couple to start their own idiosyncratic protest, known as the Bed-In. Lennon described receiving that letter as “like getting your induction papers for peace.”
Watkins, who has died aged 90, had already nailed his pacifist colours to the mast four years earlier with his 1965 BBC television film The War Game. It used the hypothesis of a limited nuclear attack on Kent to demonstrate the futility of nuclear war, and to show Britain’s feeble defences against such a disaster. This was a film unstinting in its grimness, featuring shots of molten eyeballs and ravenous rats. The critic Kenneth Tynan called it “maybe the most important film ever made”.
After secret consultation and collusion with Harold Wilson’s Labour government, the BBC shelved it indefinitely. “The effect of the film has been judged to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting,” said the corporation in its official statement.
It won the Oscar for best documentary, somewhat bizarrely for a fictionalised film. (Watkins, who was not short of celebrity friends, asked Elizabeth Taylor to collect the award, to prevent the BBC’s Kenneth Adam doing so and snatching any of the glory.) But it would not be aired on television until 1985.
With The War Game, Watkins effectively invented what is known now as the mockumentary or docudrama. Using documentary conventions to deepen, enhance and fortify dramatic scenes, he allowed the two modes to bleed indivisibly into each other. This was how he challenged and dismantled what he later called the “Monoform”, a common media language that he regarded as a distraction at best, an anaesthetic at worst.
He had already pioneered the docudrama method in his previous film for the BBC, Culloden (1964), which applied modern-day TV journalism techniques to a recreation of the 1746 Battle of Culloden. There was a thrilling frisson here in the disparity between form and content: the 18th-century combatants interviewed on-camera showed no surprise when confronted with technology that would not be invented for more than a century, and were perfectly at ease with the conventions of 20th-century reporting.
“What I’m reaching for is a way to make the audience believe that it is not looking at a movie or a ‘story’,” said Watkins in 1967, “but that somehow what it is seeing on the screen is actually happening at that moment.” In one respect, it was: he intended Culloden to inspire reflection on the conflict in Vietnam, which at that moment was playing out on screens across the world, earning it the title of the first televised war.
But it was the urgency of the subject matter in The War Game, coupled with the minatory tone and the immediacy of the visual style, that made it too much for some to bear. Objections had already been raised in the tabloid press during the shooting of the film. The Sunday People warned its readers that The War Game would “bring the full horror of a Hiroshima into your homes” and asked: “Should [Watkins] be allowed to inflict his obsession with violence and pain on viewers?”
Watkins was apoplectic at the film’s suppression. “The BBC attitude is that the majority of the lay viewers of this country … must not be allowed to see a film showing that nuclear war is terrible,” he told this paper in 1965. He called this “patronage at its worst, a hell of an insult to the average viewer”. The Observer noted in 1965 that Watkins had a tendency to talk with “a kind of tense, hidden wrath, as if he were about to strike you for some nameless wrong you had done him”.
He went on to apply his scrupulous methods to other subjects. The nearest thing he made to a conventional narrative film was Privilege (1967), set in a Britain of the near-future. Paul Jones, singer with the band Manfred Mann, gave a bleakly impassive performance as Steven Shorter, a pop star appointed by the state, who leads stadiums of teenagers to chant: “We will conform.” Eventually, he begins to chafe against the confines of his role.
In Punishment Park (1971), inspired by the fatal shooting of student anti-war protesters at Kent State University in Ohio, Watkins depicted another dystopian near-future. Here, dissidents and demonstrators can choose either to go to prison or to be released into the desert without food or water, where they are hunted by armed police and the US National Guard. Like much of Watkins’s work, it was improvised by non-professional actors. The film’s harrowing vision was dismissed by some critics as “paranoid”. In fact, it came to represent Watkins at his most prescient.
His masterpiece was the four-hour Edvard Munch (1974), made for Swedish and Norwegian television, and also released in a shorter cinema cut. Watkins brought his singular scrutiny to bear on the life of the maligned and tormented artist, drawing on Munch’s journals as well as incorporating art criticism and an analysis of patriarchal capitalist society. Watkins’s usual documentary devices (interviews, narration, verité camerawork) were fused here with highly cinematic touches such as cross-cutting and flashbacks, resulting in his most formally sophisticated film.
He also considered it deeply personal. “The opposition to [Munch’s] work, especially in his own country … paralleled my own experiences,” he said. “I quickly came to understand that in making a film about Edvard Munch, I was also making a film about myself.”
Watkins was born in Norbiton, south-west London, the son of Ralph, a bank teller, and Peggy. He was educated at Christ college in Brecon, mid-Wales. After completing his national service in the army with the East Surrey Regiment, he enrolled at Rada in London. In his early short films, he was already experimenting with docudrama techniques. For one, The Forgotten Faces (1960), he restaged the 1956 Hungarian revolution on the streets of Canterbury in Kent.
That film, which won him the Amateur Cine Camera award, caught the eye of Huw Wheldon, editor of the arts strand Monitor and later head of documentaries at the BBC, who said: “His talent is extraordinary.” A short spell at the corporation ended unhappily after the furore over The War Game.
He spent the rest of his life in self-imposed exile, living variously in Sweden, Canada and Lithuania. Subsequent films included The Gladiators (1969), which imagined a reality television show featuring teams of soldiers. With hostilities contained on camera, the outbreak of a third world war is prevented.
Resan, aka The Journey (1987), described by Watkins as “a global odyssey for peace,” ran more than 14 hours, and addressed the world arms race and its consequences. The Freethinker (1994) revived and reshaped an earlier project about August Strindberg, which the Swedish Film Institute had initially scuppered by withdrawing its funding.
In 2000, Watkins made La Commune (Paris, 1871), a re-enactment of the socialist Commune uprising. Meeting him that year for the Guardian, Peter Lennon found him “wary, rather rigid and given to a kind of managerial tetchiness, ready to abandon the interview on the spot if I appeared to be straying from what he considered … to be essential issues.”
Distrustful of the media, Watkins withdrew from publicity in the last few decades of his life, preferring to issue “self-interviews” in which he could outline his ideas without fear of manipulation.
He never stopped fighting for the idea that a media revolution could be a catalyst for change. “I do not believe that the anti-globalisation protest will ever reach its true fruition if we leave the cinema and television and the radio in the present position we’re in,” he said. He would likely not have admitted what everyone else could see: that he had already helped to transform it radically, and irrevocably.
He is survived by his second wife, Vida Urbonavicius, whom he married in 1992; by two sons, Patrick and Gérard, from his marriage to Françoise Letourneur, whom he married in 1962, and which ended in divorce; and by two grandchildren, Lucio and Robin.
• Peter Watkins, film director, born 29 October 1935; died 30 October 2025
