Threads
Short description
Threads is a British television film that imagines what happens to the city of Sheffield when nuclear war breaks out. Ruth Beckett and Jimmy Kemp are a young working-class couple with a baby on the way and plans to marry, living amid the steelworks and busy streets of a city of half a million people. As tension builds between the United States and the Soviet Union over the Persian Gulf, the couple's everyday concerns carry on until explosions over the North Sea bring the conflict home. The film follows the attack and the years of hardship that follow for the city's residents, blending scripted drama with a documentary-style account of a nuclear strike and its long-term effects on society.
Mick Jackson directed and produced the film from a screenplay by Barry Hines, and it stands first in Jackson's directing career, ahead of later features such as L.A. Story and The Bodyguard. Karen Meagher and Reece Dinsdale lead a large credited cast of fifty-five as Ruth and Jimmy.
Made for the BBC with Australian co-production involvement, the film runs just under two hours. It holds a critics' rating of 8.4 out of 10 from fifteen reviews, noticeably higher than its 7.9 out of 10 on IMDb from around 27,000 votes and its 7.6 out of 10 on TMDB from roughly 440 votes, a pattern suggesting stronger admiration among professional reviewers than among the wider viewing public.
What's left behind the scenes
- The film features a Salvation Army brass band marching in a demonstration. This was not in the script. The band was returning from a performance and happened to be at the filming location. The director liked it and didn't stop filming.
- The umbilical cord that Ruth has to bite through was made of licorice.
- While gathering material for the filming, director Mick Jackson and screenwriter Barry Hines spent a week at a specialized center where people were taught survival skills in the event of a nuclear conflict.
- Scenes set six weeks after a nuclear exchange were filmed in Peak District National Park. The weather was too good for a "nuclear winter", so artificial snow was spread everywhere, and the cinematographers used filters to dull the sunlight.
- Flakes and tomato sauce were used as makeup to simulate third-degree burns.
- After the nuclear explosion, a cat is shown supposedly suffocating in the intense heat. In reality, the animal was given catnip, which has an intoxicating effect on cats.
- When describing the psychological effect of nuclear war on those who survived, Mick Jackson based his work on knowledge gleaned from Magnus Clarke's book "The Destruction of Britain in Nuclear War" (1982) and conversations with hibakusha (victims of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
