Threads at 40: Director Mick Jackson on his disturbingly realistic portrayal of nuclear war

24:11Mick Jackson: Threads at 40 — his realistic imagining of nuclear annihilation

Mick Jackson's Threads is still just as shocking as the day it first aired on the BBC in 1984. Presented as a docudrama, the film depicts the effects of a nuclear attack on the city of Sheffield, England, as well as the harrowing long-term consequences of atomic armageddon.

With unvarnished realism that was unlike anything seen before, Threads served — and continues to serve — as an urgent warning against nuclear conflict. In an interview with Q guest host Talia Schlanger for the film's 40th anniversary, Jackson explains that the British government had been deliberately silent about nuclear war since the time of prime minister Winston Churchill.

"Nobody knew anything," he says. "It turned out that the BBC, which was the only national broadcaster in Britain, was contacted directly by Churchill and he said, 'I want no mention ever of nuclear war. You're not to discuss it, you're not to make plays about it, documentaries, nothing, not even serious discussions. And the BBC said, 'Well, OK.'"

When Jackson joined the BBC as a producer in the 1960s, he says he walked into an atmosphere of shame. "Everybody working at the BBC felt that the BBC had cowed to the government, even though it was much more complex than that," he recalls.

It was that fear, silence and shame that motivated Jackson to make Threads.

"[I thought] maybe I could take my visual imagination, my scientific background, my knowledge of drama and actually make something that people could use in their heads," he tells Schlanger. "Indeed, images that they couldn't get out of their heads once they'd seen them. That's what you see in Threads. Those images are meant to stick there: the woman in the ruins holding a dead baby, the woman just before the second bomb drops who pees herself in the street when she sees a mushroom cloud rising above the distant horizon … the maggots and the rats and the aftermath and so on."

The first 45 minutes of the film builds tension as the characters go about their business amid an escalating political conflict that's mostly heard about through news sound bites in the background. As the threat of a nuclear attack becomes more inevitable, those sound bites give way to urgent instructional broadcasts about practical matters of survival. Meanwhile, local officials in Sheffield hastily improvise emergency headquarters that are woefully inadequate in the face of an unprecedented disaster. Threads not only depicts the hours and days that follow the attack, but the staggering human loss and utter hopelessness that persists for generations after.

Before making arrangements to shoot the film, Jackson had to visualize these chilling images and hold onto them in his head, which he found extremely difficult on a personal and emotional level. At the time, he had recently remarried and was hoping to have a child with his new wife. "We kept asking ourselves, 'What kind of world is this that we want to bring kids into?' We seem to be on the brink of war."

By the time filming began, Jackson's wife was pregnant. "I've occasionally told my daughter, Holly, 'This is one of the reasons why I made this film, because of you and your future,'" he says. "She is now nearly 40 years old and she has decided that she doesn't want children — she doesn't want to bring them into this world with the threat of nuclear war and the threat of climate change and everything else."

The night the country didn't sleep

Working with a shoestring budget, Jackson asked numerous residents of Sheffield to be extras in the film's crowd scenes. Afterwards, they were all invited to a screening of Threads at a local nightclub. "Although they'd known what they were doing when we shot it, they saw the whole picture and it just destroyed them," Jackson remembers. "They didn't know how to cope with it."

At 9:30 p.m. on Sept. 23, 1984, the film premiered to a national audience on the BBC. That evening was dubbed "the night the country didn't sleep." 

"People just sat there," Jackson says. "[They] turned the TV off after the movie and just sat there, in many cases not able to go to bed — being scared of going to bed for the nightmares that might come."

While Threads is a brutal watch (you can stream it for free on YouTube), Jackson says the danger of complacency is much greater than any risk that may come with knowledge. "These things do enter into your subconscious," he says. "If you're a politician, I hope it gives you pause."

The full interview with Mick Jackson is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power, where he also talks about going on to direct one of the biggest romances in movie history: Whitney Houston's The Bodyguard. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Mick Jackson produced by Mitch Pollock.