Threads (1984 film)

"Works Officer - George Cox"

"Food Officer - Roger Fisher"

"Manpower Officer - Susan Russell"

"Environmental Health Officer - D. [...]"

"Homelessness Officer(s) - Tony Barnes, Roy Chamberlain"

"Information Officer - D. Talbot"

"Scientific Advisers - Keith H[...], A. Jennings, Charles [...]"

"District Inland Transport Co-ordinator - James Lee"

"The unprovoked attack on our submarine, and the move into Iran, are the actions of a reckless and warlike power. I have to warn the Soviets in the clearest possible terms that they risk taking us to the brink of an armed confrontation, with incalculable consequences for all mankind."

"The United States government has been forced, reluctantly, to take action to safeguard what it believes are legitimate Western interests in the Middle East. This administration has therefore resolved to send units of its rapid deployment force, the U.S. Central Command, into western Iran. We are confident that the Soviet Union will take note of our resolve, and will desist from its present perilous course of action."

"Our intention in making Threads was to step aside from the politics and – I hope convincingly – show the actual effects on either side should our best endeavours to prevent nuclear war fail."

"Nuclear war is everyone’s problem, it’s not just country to country. It’s a worldwide problem, we all share it, and that’s why it’s so frightening now. Since Threads was made I’m sure there have been advances in what nuclear weapons can do."

"Of course, my character goes missing halfway through the film, so half of the filming I wasn’t privy to. [...] You want to know what happens, but you’re not told. I suppose the message is that’s exactly what it’ll be like — nothing will be tied up nicely because people will disappear."

"Who knows? He died, presumably. I have no more idea than anyone else, but that’s the point. That’s why it’s so clever."

"Barry came up with the idea of the two families – one working class, the other lower-middle – and what their lives were like. Sheffield seemed a good place to set it, and Barry knew it well. It was bang in the middle of the country, and a good way from London. Strategically, it also made sense: there were industrial and military targets nearby. Both of us were interested in the idea that none of these characters would ever have a god’s-eye-view of events, and never find out what was happening outside their immediate experience, certainly not outside Sheffield. That seemed to be the way most people would have to deal with a nuclear apocalypse, with most forms of communication vaporised."

"From the point where the bomb happens, the whole nature of the movie changes. In the first half of the movie, I hope, you have a very full soundtrack. You have all the soundtrack of TV broadcasts and radio broadcasts, the sound of birdsong in the country, the sound of musical things happening, the sound of traffic and city noises. And from the moment that the bomb drops you don't have anything. You don't even have the teletype, all these things, they just type out in silence, and all you hear is wind. [...] You hear voices of people screaming, coughing or whatever. You hear wind, you hear no birds. [...] It's gone. That world is gone."

"In this movie, from the outset, I wanted to put it in the scale of people that you might know, people like yourself, your immediate family, relations and so on, and no bigger than that, and not really to show anything except how it would happen to them. So, there's no God's eye view in this movie. You don't actually get to look down and get the overall picture and see maps of Europe and maps of the world and so on. You just get what's happening to these people, and it's all really done from ground level. There's no cinematic crane shots or anything like that. It's just very, very documentary."

"People tell me how relevant they find the movie to what's happening now. It’s comforting, at a time when so many films are being remade, to find that people still appreciate – and are scared by – the original film."

"The idea was to take a movie which was about death...and use the iconography of life to tell the story."

"The real effect of a nuclear weapon is not what it does to things, to buildings, to cities: it's what it does to society, what it does to people, what it does psychologically. I was very struck by the work that an American writer called Robert Jay Lifton had done on the psychological effects of the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima on the survivors and I talked to him a lot. It seemed to me that the story that needed to be told was the story of what this does to society as well as what it does to physical things, and you could only really tell that with a drama, with people that you identified with."

"There's the hospital sequence in The Day After and there's the hospital sequence in Threads. [...] In The Day After people are being wheeled in on gurneys and everybody's stressed, but they're coping with it as they would do on ER or something like that. In Threads, the floor is covered with muck and shit and blood and people don't have anything they can work with. [...] We see people having their legs amputated without an anesthetic, just something stuck between their teeth for them to bite on. That's what it's going to be like! And I wanted every part of this movie to be "That's what it's going to be like"."

"What we’d depicted and its implications stayed in the minds of every actor and crew member for a long time. I’m sure there were some nightmares. There are some things so far outside our experience or comprehension that they are unthinkable. Nuclear war is one."

"I think Threads didn't keep people at arm's length, it drew people in because of the characters that everybody knew. I mean, we related to them, and that's what I think made Threads so visceral for people."

"I was unaware really of the importance of it at the time, but I was asked to go for an interview, which I did, and I was the first person that Mick Jackson saw for the part. And I went looking rather radical, because I thought "oh, it's about nuclear war", you know, and I'm a very radical person, so I kind of went wearing my sort of "combat gear" which was very "in" at the time. And it was really strange, because afterwords, when I got the part of Ruth, who turned out to be a very fragile sort of a person, I was surprised and he said having been the first one, he saw me for the part. He obviously saw something in me that was, I don't know, vulnerable, maybe. It was the only time I've ever said to a director "I would really like a part in this, regardless of what that part may be", because I knew that the content would be close to my heart."

"It was cloaked to a great extent in secrecy almost. [...] You knew what it was about, but the script was a close-kept secret I think. Not many people had seen it, and I think they were worried that it would go the same way as War Games, which was made but never seen, so it was all quite mysterious really."

"It's hard to watch and it should be hard to watch. It should frighten people, and if it's done that, it's done its job."