Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on January 2011

©2010 NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT DOCUMENTARY, LLC.

“When I was a child, the thing that I was most afraid of was nuclear bombs.”

That might not be the most common fear for a little girl, but then again, Lucy Walker wasn’t your average little girl. The London native first gained recognition as a theater director while still an undergraduate at Oxford, going on to win a Fulbright Scholarship to study film at New York University—all the while DJing on the side. She began her motion picture career on the small screen, directing several Emmy-nominated episodes of the Nickelodeon children’s series Blue’s Clues before transitioning to feature-length documentaries.

Walker’s films tackle topics ranging from the Amish “rumspringa” (Devil’s Playground, 2002) to a group of blind Tibetan teenagers who set out to climb Mt. Everest (Blindsight, 2006). More recently, she became the first documentary director to have two films screened simultaneously at the Sundance Film Festival, when Waste Land (2010) and Countdown to Zero (2010) both premiered there last year.

With Countdown set to hit theaters in Japan this spring, Metropolis caught up with the busy director by phone. The film presents a chilling overview of atomic weapons and the risks they pose in an age when concerns about nuclear war have been overshadowed by terrorism, global warming and a host of other issues.

“We’ve stopped worrying about [the problem], but that’s a big mistake,” Walker says. “I made the movie because I was scared, but as I went along I only got more scared.”

Countdown features interviews with more than 80 people, from former world leaders like Tony Blair, Jimmy Carter and Mikhail Gorbachev to scientists and nuclear experts, as well as man-on-the-street surveys that reveal just how little most folks know about the issue.

Walker says that although people on all sides of the debate were happy to sit down with her, getting relevant background footage was more of a struggle. “It was really hard to get permission to shoot anything inside the nuclear weapons establishment. Nobody said, ‘Hey, I’m going to sneak you in and give you a close look at a bomb.’”

Which is not necessarily a bad thing. “Thank goodness,” she says with a laugh. “I discovered the security is really good and tight.”

When asked about the most frightening segment in the film, Walker points to her interview with a nuclear weapons smuggler. “He says in the movie that the Taliban was trained in the Scottish highlands, which is not true. And I think, ‘Oh my goodness, this man was selling real weapons-grade uranium, and he thought he was selling it to somebody from Al-Qaida so that it could be used to blow up the United States.’ And yet he was so ignorant. That was very shocking.”

While Walker is busy promoting Countdown and Waste Land (tentatively planned for release in Tokyo later in the year), she hasn’t stopped thinking about the future. “The next chapter in the ‘Adventures of Lucy’ is a big question mark,” she says. “I’m not quite sure what’s going to happen, and until I’m in love with an idea, I won’t know.”