Director Michael Radford once said of this movie: "There are attitudes of doublethink all around us. (George) Orwell pointed it out in a very extreme form. He was writing when the world had just experienced an upheaval from the Right (Nazism), but since then we have an upheaval from the Left (Soviet Communism), and now we can see both sides of it. What I have tried to do is tread a delicate path between satire and parody, and make it clear that Orwell was offering a vision of totalitarianism derived from the world he knew. The film is not a pseudo-documentary about what might happen if the Soviets took over Britain. At the bottom, 1984 is about a human being, and that's all. Orwell was a philosopher of human decency. There are no references to anything that happened after 1948. This is, in a sense, a period movie. I have tried to make the story utterly real, although the setting is utterly unreal. Everybody behaves as normally as possible, which produces a strange, surreal effect. That's how you feel when you read the book. I think this is the first ever naturalistic science fiction movie."
