Wilfred Owen Film #6 Why aren’t there many films about Wilfred Owen, our greatest war poet?

Meurig Marshall (DOP), Richard Weston (Director), Sid Phoenix (Siegfried Sassoon), Matthew Staite (Wilfred Owen), Will Burren (Robert Graves)

Wilfred Owen films are hard to come by and it is difficult to see why. Perhaps the question should more be why aren’t there many films about World War 1 period? As the marketers busily rewrap the rather excellent Dunkirk for the DVD market place, it is apparent that WW2 seems to be a better economic risk for mainstream film-makers.
 
Let us try to marry the ‘image’ of these two catastrophic events firstly. For World War One, we think primarily of trenches. We see disaffected men carrying bodies on carts. Skeletal trees against a big sky. Mud. And yet we would rather take the view that these images, whilst not disputed, can become stereotypes if we don’t examine the human psyche that drove those who were forced to become  part of it. In contrast, World War Two is more recent. People who fought are still alive. There was a lot more variation in theatres of war and also in the technology used such as advanced fighter aircraft, tanks and also the Americans entered the conflict earlier on and therefore had more stories to tell. It follows then that Hollywood would payroll.
 
Money aside though - and this is a huge factor hence we have a series of crowd funding campaigns - let us look at the Owen story and our approach to it. Primarily it is a story of a creative mind caught up in a conflict over which he nor anyone else had any control.  So what do we have as source material? His upbringing in Oswestry, Birkenhead and Shrewsbury during the Edwardian era was a possible angle. Childhood has such an impact on hearts and minds. Here was a perspective without a precedent. The richest story for us though was about his last year on earth, the people he met and his ironic urge to return to battle.
 
In doing so, our scriptwriters were also aware that he was a man whose poetry stands as a testament to a doomed youth. And yet he was a listener, an observer both of people and the tumultuous action that maimed bodies, broke up families, left many children without fathers and ultimately blasted a generation of minds, bodies and spirits. Owen mopped up the maelstrom on our behalf.
 
Refreshingly the writers also wanted to explore the positives and this is where the irony in our story is rich. We fail to understand that, aside from Regeneration (1997), War Requiem in the same year and Behind the Lines (1989), nobody is doing on Owen what we are doing. It is a story that needs to be told. Recommended viewing though is Hedd Wynn, a Welsh language film and Oscar nominated.

Owen laughed lived loved, saw irony in the bloodshed and found solace in the friendships he made in the otherwise tedious white walls and dim dorms of Craiglockhart hospital. Who on earth would want to go back to a front strewn with forlorn hope when he had inspirational icons like Moncrieff, Sassoon, Graves and HG Wells to count as friends? We can examine documents, biographies, primary sources and secondary accounts. Owen scholars tend to avoid the issue of some of the contemporary descriptors. First, ‘cowardice’ is a military term along with ‘shellshock.’ Neither are particularly useful as methods of explaining character nor intent. It would not drive the narrative and simply hinder it. They are subjective. All we know is that Owen wasn't one yet he suffered from what would now be described as PTSD.

​‘Insanity’ too was used at the time for those whose morals did not fit with establishment thinking. Our approach is to avoid, by the same token, straying too far into the territory of ‘war hero’ and into a zone that lets the viewer make up his or her own mind about what Owen termed ‘the pity of war.’ Owen's own descriptors should be allowed to take precedence. Propaganda has a habit of encompassing us all in a mud of fake news (nothing new in this). Much of this propaganda is handed down through generations and can frame our thinking if we are not careful. 
 
Owen was a damn good poet. Owen was an effective soldier.

Any other adjectives are simply ruses for political or economic ends. So, in our story we have focused in on ears! In the absence of audio recordings, we have the poetry itself. Owen is our everyman. He is our reporter. His sexuality is another aspect of Owen that lays thus far dormant in other accounts. Why? Because this threatens the very concept of a ‘war hero.’ How can we have an icon who breaks the law of the time? We don’t ignore it. Others would argue that it is irrelevant. So is it then irrelevant to our understanding of Shakespeare when he wrote the lines ‘who ever loved that loved not at first sight?’ in our understanding of what made the Bard tick?
 
Owen and his fellow soldiers killed people. A disturbing fact that when the doyens of the British Empire were sending our youth to war, it never occurred to them that clever minds could help to fashion the consequences. So consequently if you enter a war zone, your objective is to kill the enemy. Again, irrelevant? In certain quarters, we are not supposed to examine Owen's military record for fear of revealing a confusing, disgusting and ultimately destructive conflict. We are just about to film a scene where Owen actually commits an act which he felt necessary to fulfill in his capacity of a leader of men at Joncourt. Fact: he captured a German gun and turned it on his hosts. He didn't read Dulce et Decorum Est at them. Let’s all get over it and emerge from our fireside myths with a sense of reality about this talented man and his time. And here is the irony I was talking about earlier. A worthy and oh so clever a writer wasted wasting others. Futility indeed.
 
So why aren’t there any films on Wilfred Owen to commemorate the 100th year of his passing? We have no idea but we’re certainly making one.
 
#wilfredowenfilm
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1375078667/the-burying-party