Based on the novel by Booker-prize-winning author Pat Barker, Regeneration tells the story of four troubled men at Craiglockart, a military hospital in Scotland for shell-shocked soldiers who witnessed the horrors of the battlefield during wwi.

Shot in Scotland in 1996, the film is a coproduction between Toronto’s Norstar Entertainment and Scotland’s Rafford Films, with Peter Simpson and Allan Scott producing. Scott, who is nominated for a best screenplay Genie, also wrote the script.

Scott read Barker’s novel in 1991 and immediately optioned the rights.

‘It was an opportunity to make a film that was powerful emotionally, that spoke to today and was to be made before the last generation of people who participated in that war left us forever,’ says Scott from his production office in Beverly Hills.

Scott, who is Scottish and ‘an ex-landed immigrant,’ wrote a spec script of Regeneration, which Scottish director Gillies MacKinnon (nominated for best director) was slated to helm for the bbc.

Recalling two of MacKinnon’s films, Small Faces and The Green Arena, Scott decided he was ‘the right director for this material. He’s very good with emotion and truth. He won’t make anything that is anything other than true, and I thought that was very important for this kind of story.’

Unfortunately, they lost the rights to mgm when Scott’s option ran out.

Scott says mgm approached him about the film but he and the studio had opposing views of what it should be about and went their different ways. When mgm dropped the project, Scott ‘leapt back into the breach’ and ‘grabbed’ Simpson.

The $7-million film was funded by the Scottish Arts Council Lottery Fund, the Glasgow Film Fund, BBC Films, Telefilm Canada, Rafford and Norstar, with the Scottish Film Production Fund one of the executive producers.

Because the film was an 80% u.k. coproduction, financing the movie was ‘complex,’ says co-executive producer Kathy Avrich Johnson. ‘I ended up flying over because we had so much paper flying back and forth,’ she says, adding that the Lottery Fund and the bbc ‘were a lot more aggressive about what they looked at and were more used to paperwork than we’re used to.’

The film stars Jonathon Pryce (Evita, Miss Saigon) as Dr. William Rivers, a pioneering psychiatrist at the military hospital, who nears a breakdown as a result of his close involvement with his shell-shocked patients. Pryce is nominated for a best actor Genie.

James Wilby (Howards End, Maurice) plays poet Siegfried Sassoon, a heroic soldier who, though not mentally disturbed, is sent to the hospital as punishment for speaking out against the war.

Stuart Bunce (First Knight) plays celebrated war poet Wilfred Owen who was inspired by and, according to the book, secretly in love with Sassoon.

Jonny Lee Miller (Trainspotting, Hackers) plays Billy Prior, whose experiences in the trenches have left him mute. His recovery is aided by Dr. Rivers and his affair with Sarah, a young nurse played by Tanya Allen (The Newsroom).

John Neville (Emily of New Moon, The X-Files) has a small but powerful role as Dr. Yealland, whose use of electric shock therapy unsettles Dr. Rivers.

In transforming the book into a film, Scott chose to include battle scenes ‘to give the audience the visceral sense of fear.’

‘The book itself didn’t deal very much with the war,’ he explains. ‘It was done entirely through the eyes of the men. The book was set entirely in the hospital and a book can do that, it can describe the emotional impact, but a film has to give the emotional impact to the viewer.’

Because most of the battle scenes were portrayed as flashbacks, cinematographer and Genie nominee Glen Macpherson achieved the nightmarish green film quality by using a technique he discovered during a failed camera experiment he tried while shooting a hockey movie almost 10 years ago.

‘I was trying to do something in camera instead of relying on post,’ says the Vancouver-based dop. ‘I remembered a long time ago we had to shoot in a hockey arena that had mercury vapor lighting, which is really green. I told [the producers] I was going to have to bring in three generators and light the whole arena.

‘Because it was so expensive, the producers asked me if I could just shoot it under that lighting, so I did. The lighting was so green I tried to have the lab correct it back, but [it took] the color out of everybody’s skin and made their lips purple. It just looked awful. So they got the generators and we lit the place.’

To shoot the battle scenes, Macpherson recalled that experience and used a deep green lighting gel (Lee 322) as a filter on the camera. ‘Everyone had the purple lips and had pasty skin,’ he says. ‘It looked really cool.’

Shooting in the mud of the battlefields was another story. The crew’s first two weeks of shooting in November 1996 took place in Glasgow in sub-zero temperatures, wind, snow, rain and several feet of mud.

‘That was so miserable,’ Macpherson recalls. ‘It’s a good thing we had a crew with a sense of humor.’

While recreating battle scenes in the trenches and on the field surrounded by prosthetic limbs and dummies of dead soldiers and horses, a reminder of how real the scenes once were came one week after shooting began on Armistice Day, when the cast and crew observed two minutes of silence.

Says Scott: ‘You couldn’t help but to feel the power of what we were commemorating.’

Regeneration received its Canadian theatrical release in August through Alliance, which has North American rights.