INTERVIEW

At 10am, no more than a few score of us gathered in a modest cinema, grandly named Le Méliès in Montreuil, one of those chill eastern suburbs of Paris where workers have won the right to live in cheerless concrete batteries and socialise in malls where environmental wretchedness is the architectural endowment.

Actors, crew and some visitors were going to sit for five hours 45 minutes (bring your own sandwiches) to see a film called La Commune, in which 220 people from this and other workers' areas of Paris re-enact an experience of their forebears: the socialist Commune uprising of 1871, a nadir in French history.

In the wake of the disastrous Franco-Prussian war, following three months of fierce defiance, of heady aspirations for justice and democracy, months of solidarity and pitiful bungling, government troops assailed the barricades and in one "semaine sanglante" slaughtered, street by street, more than 30,000 of their fellow countrymen and women, and children over 14. It was worse than anything in the Terror of 1793, so persistently chronicled by historians. Even today, the French education curriculum skates evasively over this event.

The energy, conviction and skill with which the players of La Commune perform is startling; few had any previous acting experience. So genuine is the force of their passion that at moments you feel they might be about to erupt and carry the revolt live into the auditorium.

The director is Peter Watkins, outlawed genius, accomplishing again what he achieved decades ago in Culloden and The War Game: giving a demonstration of what can be achieved when programme makers are willing to use the public as creative participants, rather than passive viewers. The only director you can compare with Watkins's working methods is Peter Brook, also exiled by negligence and resentment. In both cases, the contribution from actors is creatively nurtured, but there is never any doubt that the outcome has been forged in an individual furnace. The project was backed by funds from a number of sources, notably Sept Arte and the French Centre du Cinema.

La Commune, while pillorying oppression (the Parisian working-class were under martial law for the following five years), also contains direct criticism of media manipulation. The events are "covered" by national television as if it existed at the time: once again a fastidious newscaster tells the public what is deemed desirable for it to know and in moments of crisis turns to the obligatory pundit for a supposedly civilised analysis. (Watkins put ads in the conservative Le Figaro to find people willing to give the "royalist" view of La Commune - and came up with, as splendid royalist stalwart, historian François Foucart.)

Neither does Watkins overlook left-wing oppression within the Commune; his radio reporters behind the barricade get into a dispute in reporting the banning of one of the insurgent newspapers which became too critical of the movement. Ironically the paper banned was... La Commune.

Media manipulation and the abuse of television power are issues which have preoccupied Watkins since the banning of The War Game by the BBC in 1965. (It was eventually shown in 1985, to Watkins's indignation, marking the 40th anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb.) For 30 years, he has lectured from Australia to the US to Scandinavia on this theme. Outlawed is the appropriate word to describe the status of one of Britain's most talented film-makers, working in exile now for over 40 years.

Watkins's crime was that he not only fell foul of the BBC but, he felt at the time, the defence establishment. We now know that, from 1954, subsequent Tory and Labour administrations were in agreement that the government would "retain control of the manner in which the effect of nuclear weapons were made known to the public". The BBC declared its duty not to frighten the old or very young - thereby committing itself (ironically during its most liberal period under Hugh Carleton Greene), to arms race censorship.

Watkins's mistake was to be inflexibly principled; he carried his fight against the BBC - for whom he made the film - around the world and became regarded as unemployable by any television institution. After being deprived of its TV showing, The War Game was released as a feature film instead in the 60s. But in those years the image of Watkins as a paranoid drifter, hopelessly incapable of mature collaboration, was created and perpetuated by the the media. He moved to Scandinavia and now lives in Lithuania with his second wife.

But how is it that a supposedly constitutionally disobliging film-maker can persuade 220 foreigners to work their guts out for months, rehearsing and performing in absurdly cramped conditions? La Commune was shot in the cramped Armand Gatti workshop at Montreuil, site of film pioneer Georges Méliès's original studio.

And how did this supposedly rebarbative creature manage so successfully in the past with a Norwegian cast and crew (as he did for Edvard Munch in the mid-1970s). Nowadays, silence (used wonderfully in Munch) is despised; contemplativeness outlawed. The result is that museums have become one of the rare places where you can see truly responsible or artistic work - the Musée d'Orsay in Paris is La Commune's final destination.

Patrick Murphy, a British academic who is co-authoring with John Cook a biography of Watkins to be published next year by Manchester University Press, frequently watched Watkins at work on La Commune. "They all work in complete unity with him," Murphy said. "Cast and crew are for him and he is for them.

"He has a remarkable ability to communicate with the cast. He deals on a very personal level; he knows every one of them, has respect for them and this comes back through them to him. He is able to raise their awareness of the actors to a remarkably intense degree. Watkins's casts do not act in the normal sense of the word - they become. It is a remarkable experience to see him at work. This explains how he got those performances from the people in Culloden and The War Game."

So where is the problem for television? Is it that ordinary people have respect for integrity, however uncomfortably inflexible, and that institutions - particularly TV, in recent years corrupting itself at vertiginous speed - simply cannot afford it?

The BBC washed its hands of The War Game and, in a move which would rid it of responsibility but allow it to maintain that there was no real "ban", gave the film to the BFI. But when The War Game was nominated for an Oscar (winning the best feature length documentary award of 1967, although it only looked like a documentary), the BBC did something which would have made even Pilate blush.

The director of BBC television, Kenneth Adam, was chosen to go to Hollywood to receive the award as he happened to be a governor of the BFI too. It is long forgotten that by 1967, Watkins, who made Culloden at the age of 29, was regarded as the new Orson Welles of the film world and had showbusiness friends throughout the world. He rang his pal Elizabeth Taylor and asked her to circumvent the BBC and pick up the award for him.

I can personally attest to the permanence of the BBC's vindictive attitude towards Watkins. In 1975, he made Edvard Munch, for Norwegian and Swedish television. This four-hour film of extraordinary beauty is a work of startling originality in narrative structure, in use of colour, sound and hugely confident deployment of non-professionals. Watkins's film is perhaps the most persuasive depiction of the artistic process; of an artist's inner anguish and of the environment which haunts, torments and nurtures him that has ever been screened. In other words it is a work of genius, far beyond the modest War Game.

In 1976 the BBC, which at least had the gumption to recognise its worth, bought it and gave it a champagne launch. Senior BBC executives fronted the press reception with an absurdly proprietorial air (although the corporation had put nothing into the production). As television critic of The Sunday Times at the time, I expressed my admiration for the work to one of the corporation's most senior executives. But even as the champagne bubbled for what took on the aspect of some kind of BBC cultural triumph, one senior executive at least had a more pressing task: to convince me of what a totally untrustworthy and impossible creature Watkins was. Nine years after the banning, revenge still dripped from every corporate word.

It is futile to pretend that Peter Watkins handles the media well. It took months to establish enough trust for him to agree to any meeting. When we met in a Montreuil cafe one Sunday he was 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 (mostly rightly) to be essential issues. But there is a detectable vulnerability in his unsubtle attempts to protect himself - and even a hint that if he could only trust you, the media, as he does his cast and crew, the relationship could be quite different. At one point he made it clear that, even aged 65, exile was still painful for him.

The media slaughtered Privilege, his sci-fi parable starring Paul Jones as a pop star who becomes a vessel for social control, which he made just a year after The War Game. Despite two years of work, the Swedish Film Institute pulled the plug on his almost-complete Strindberg. When the BFI gave it a single showing some years ago, they refused to introduce him to the audience. Contrary to its usual practice, the Halliwell guide makes no mention of the Oscar for The War Game in the 70s and 80s editions of either the Television or Film Companions. It's enough to make you paranoid.

Watkins admits that he is "a product of the British educational system" - educated at Brecon, a small public school in Wales, although his family is English. "But, thank God, I had no university education. Instead I went to drama school."

There is an extraordinary consistency in his development. While doing military service ("I did not intend to point my rifle at a human being") at Canterbury, he made his first film, Forgotten Faces, a 20-minute model of what was to come. He recreated the Budapest uprising in the back streets of Canterbury, with locals and a couple of Hungarians. It won him the top Amateur Ciné Camera Award ("A very nice object depicting a hand-cranked camera.") This got him a job as PA and then programme-maker at the BBC.

A few years later he was defiantly going around the world showing The War Game in schools, colleges, public meetings.

"But you did not have copyright," I said, "How did you get a print?"

"I don't play the game entirely by the rules of the BBC establishment," he said. "What could the BBC do - send in the police in Australia or America? They were too embarrassed to deal with me physically."

There is a glimpse here of why television companies find him intimidating.

But Watkins insists that the BBC "must not be made an Aunt Sally". CBS, NBC, all the big television institutions are equally at fault, as is "so-called community television".

"The discussion about my position must be in a broader context," he said. "Not just about somebody who produced a film on nuclear weapons which was squashed. Basically I am someone who has been working for 30 years to help shift the power balance between public and TV. The crisis is so severe in television."

"On the basis of what?"

"Everything."

"Financial? Political?..."

"Go on," he said, his smile getting tighter. "Any word you care to use."

"Cultural?"

"Creative?" he suggested. "Moral?"

"I have no doubt," Watkins continued, "that had TV taken an alternative direction during the 1960s and 1970s and worked in a more open way, global society today would be vastly more humane and just."

His thesis, which few honest citizens can quarrel with, is that there has been an "accumulation of global media power with no accountability that is not only not being challenged but is not even being debated".

"Dennis Potter is dead," he concludes. "The people who were once able to work critically within the media have been marginalised."