Peter Watkins, Oscar-winning director of The War Game, dies at 90 Film

Peter Watkins, the radical British director who won an Oscar for his controversial documentary drama The War Game, about a nuclear attack on Britain, has died at the age of 90. He died in hospital on Thursday in Burganeuve, near the small town of Fletin in central France, where he lived for 25 years, his family said in a statement. They added: “The world of cinema is losing one of its insightful, innovative and unclassifiable voices. We would like to thank everyone who has supported it throughout this long and sometimes lonely struggle.”

Watkins was an uncompromising figure who clashed with the BBC after the latter failed to show War Game on broadcast television, and subsequently led an itinerant filmmaking presence, seeking support abroad. He was wary of the press. In a rare interview he spoke to The Guardian newspaper in 2000, saying he was “someone who has been working for 30 years to help change the balance of power between the public and television.” He added: “If television had taken an alternative direction during the 1960s and 1970s and operated in a more open manner, today’s global society would be vastly more humane and just.”

Watkins was born in 1935 in Norbiton, Surrey, and studied at RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts) after doing National Service. “I was not going to point my gun at a human being,” he told the Guardian. After producing a series of short films, including Forgotten Faces, about the Hungarian Uprising, Watkins joined the BBC in 1962 and was subsequently asked to produce a film about the Battle of Culloden, the victory of “The Butcher” Cumberland over Jacobite forces in 1746. Watkins’ resulting film, broadcast in 1964, was groundbreaking in its immediacy and sense of realism, using contemporary news techniques and non-professional actors.

Watkins then followed it up with The War Game, another pseudo-documentary but this time about a nuclear strike on Canterbury in Kent. Alex Cox, the film’s director, described it as a “great and emotional” film that gave a voice to ordinary people. The 1965 film The War Game was cancelled, according to the BBC’s response to a question in Parliament, because it was “too horrifying” and denies external pressure to remove it. However, the film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1967, and received vocal praise from American critics including Roger Ebert, who described some scenes as “certainly the scariest of all time”. The War Game was finally shown on television in 1985, on the 40th anniversary of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima.

As a result of a clash with the BBC hierarchy, Watkins was forced to look elsewhere. In 1967, he directed the feature film Imtiaz, another pseudo-documentary with a radical bent, about a pop star (played by real-life musician Paul Jones) who is manipulated into becoming the leader of a cult to keep the population distracted from politics. In 1971, his US-set film Punishment Park was another provocation, depicting a Hunger Games-like situation in which extremists and liberals are hunted down for sport by the National Guard.

Watkins followed this with a biopic of the painter Edvard Munch, originally shown on Norwegian television in 1974 but later shown in cinemas, and described by The Guardian as “a four-hour film of extraordinary beauty”. Watkins would follow this with a series of films made in Scandinavia, culminating in The Freethinker, another extended portrait of the Scandinavian artist, playwright August Strindberg. Besides, between 1983 and 1987 Watkins made an 873-minute documentary called “The Journey” about ordinary people’s understanding of nuclear weapons. It is considered the longest non-experimental film ever. Watkins’ last film was The Commune, a 345-minute recreation of the 1871 workers’ uprising in Paris using Brechtian-style techniques, which premiered at the Musée d’Orsay in March 2000 and was then shown on television.

Watkins married twice and had two sons, Patrick and Gerard.