"I can't tell you how much that affected me, in the wrong way. I was, in 1983 when it came out, I was planning Threads, I was in pre-production. And I thought "Oh my God, they will tell it. [...] I hope to God they tell it well. If they tell it well, I'm going to stop what I'm doing". [...] I didn't want it to become something that everybody did. I wanted it to be one thing that was done once and done well, and done with no punches pulled at all. I wanted something you could hardly bear to look at and you can hardly bear to look away from , so something that was totally uncompromising: You didn't look away, you didn't flinch from things. So, I waited for The Day After to come out, [...] I looked at it and I thought "Oh my God, they didn't, they missed it". They missed it! They made a TV movie, they made something like a soap opera because they had to, because they didn't have a genre in their head that they could copy and or invent. And I thought the underlying thought of this is it would all be manageable. At the end of the movie, where everything is ruined, you've got Jason Robards still there and you know that just out of the frame, about to come in, there's all the bulldosers and relief efforts, rescue and help, and it's going to be okay really. And I thought "That's not telling the truth, that's not really the way it would be.""