Threads (1984)

David Gregory (0:02)

I'm David Gregory from Severin Films, and we're here for the audio commentary of Threads.

Mick Jackson (0:07)

Mick Jackson, director.

Kier-La Janisse (0:09)

My name is Kier-La Janisse. I'm the author of House of Psychotic Women.

David Gregory (0:15)

Okay, and we're here watching Threads, which was possibly the most traumatizing television broadcast that I remember from my youth. Why did you want to do this in the first place, Mick?

Mick Jackson (0:29)

Because I was terrified. It's difficult now.

We're not in the 1980s anymore, to remember how terrified everybody was, how paranoid everybody was about the end of the world being nigh. In the year that I prepped this movie in 1983, the Korean airliner was shot down by the Russians. Reagan gave his evil empire speech, strategic defense initiative, Star Wars started, and people like Herman Kahn in the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, where I now live, were talking about winnable nuclear war and gain theory. And I just thought people who talk like that, and people who behave like that politically and make speeches like that, they're doing that because they have no real sense, no physical sense of what a nuclear war would be like. And since the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, there haven't been any nuclear explosions you could watch, whoever you were, a general or a politician or whatever. They're all underground. And I remember a scientist who's worked on the Manhattan Project said to me, you know, when I hear people talking about winnable nuclear wars, I just wish I could take them to the Mojave Desert, the Nevada Desert, wherever, strip them down to their underwear and let them watch an actual nuclear explosion from miles away, feel the blistering heat pulse on their skin and feel the blast waves sweep over them and shake their heart and their lungs around inside their ribcage. Then they would have a sense of what it was they were talking about and they wouldn't talk about a winnable nuclear war.

So I thought, I've been given certain gifts, everybody has gifts, I can tell a story visually, I can imagine things and so I set myself a task of kind of digesting millions of pieces of information. I talked to literally hundreds of scientists and agronomists and doctors and strategists and defense experts and I read about 40, 50 textbooks, cover to cover, masses of stuff and I thought, okay, I can visualize this because of my knowledge of the world, I can visualize this. People can't talk about nuclear war as a rule because there are some things which are so unthinkable that you can't think them. You have no kind of visual vocabulary in your head for thinking about them. I thought, well, I can give them some indelible images which will make it not remote and abstract, but something you can actually think about. And I didn't want to do it in terms of generals and politicians and the big world, but just in terms of the small world, you know. If this happened to you, what would it be like? What would this do to your life? What would it do to the lives of your family, the community around you, to civilisation as a whole? But not as a whole. 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.

I wanted to do this because in 1982, I had done this documentary called, half hour documentary called, it was originally called A Consumer's Guide to Armageddon. Slightly flippant title, but the idea was there's this new series of science programs on BBC One, the main channel in Britain. Half hour science, it could be pop science, any kind of thing. And I thought, wouldn't it be fun, in inverted commas, in quotes, fun to do a consumer's report on fallout shelters? Because of the paranoia of the time, the height of the Cold War, people were actually building, buying fallout shelters. They were reading things about how you could construct something in your garden. I thought, let's do a consumer's test. See how they work. Well, seeing how they work means knowing what they work against. What would they protect you against? And that was a kind of sneaky way for me to break a 20-year deadlock in British television and broadcasting that had really lasted since an iconic and very important film was made in 1964 by a brilliant young director called Peter Watkins, who went on to a feature career.