('Regeneration' was also released in the US as 'Behind the Lines'.)

Scottish director Gillies MacKinnon (1949 — present) directed Regeneration. The film premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 1997. It was made on a budget of less than £5 million, in six weeks and filmed on location in Glasgow and the Clyde Valley. The external hospital scenes are not of Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh but Overtoun House near Dumbarton. The internal scenes were shot on a Glasgow set which was built exactly as Craiglockhart used to be.

Before he became a film-maker, MacKinnon trained as an art teacher and taught teenagers with challenging behavioural problems. He used his artistic eye to plan the 'look and feel' of his film with Canadian cinematographer Glen MacPherson. They studied around 50 war films in an effort to capture and reproduce an authentic vision of the horrors of war on screen. In addition, they created a collage of WWI photos depicting the soldiers carrying out their daily activities and in battle situations to ensure that the scenes were representative of actual events.

The screenplay reduced the scope of Barker's novel in order to place emphasis on the 'father'/'son' relationship (between Rivers and his patients) and the betrayal of one generation by another. Rivers also appears to be more overtly against the war and Sassoon and Prior are shown as being unified in their attempt to 'defeat' Rivers in his duty to return them to the frontline as quickly as possible.