"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."

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“I wanted him to use all his experience and intuition and empathy with people who'd grown up around him in Sheffield and put that into the movie, and I would be the alien force, who was the voice of what science can do, and I would kind of foist these horrible indignities and horrors on these people, and he would try and get them to behave the way they would. So there was an innate conflict in that. We had many shouting matches, really passionate things, totally necessary for doing this.”

“I remember a scientist who 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 wave sweep over them and shake their heart and their lungs around inside their rib cage. Then they would have a sense of what it was they were talking about and they wouldn't talk about a winnable nuclear war.”