Isaac Asimov was never consulted in the making of the film based on his short story, and completely disowned the finished film when it was released.
Nightfall was the short story which helped establish Isaac Asimov's reputation when it was published in 1941. Julie Corman became aware of it in 1979 when she read a review of an Asimov anthology in the New York Times. She was attracted by a story "about people who have recognizable moral dilemmas," and bought the screen rights. Roger Corman announced in 1980 he would make the film with a reported $6 million budget, co producing with a German company.
The amount of suns was reduced from six in the short story to three in the movie.
When Isaac Asimov turned down the chance to adapt the story himself, Julie Corman approached Paul Mayersberg, then best known for writing The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). He passed so she tried a number of different writers. In July 1987 Corman eventually went back to Mayersberg after seeing his directorial debut, Captive (1986). Mayersberg agreed to write the script if he could direct. Corman agreed. Mayersberg wrote the script in five weeks in London and the film was shot over an eight week period in October 1987.
The only characters retained from the story were Aton, astronomer and leader of the city, and Sor, leader of the Believers (called the Cultists in the original short story). Paul Mayersberg created the female character of Roa, who was once married to Aton but left him to become one of Sor's disciples. Maybersberg said the two men stood for "the relationship between science and religion as a means of explaining the world. As for the Day of Judgment, do you believe the religious view or do you subscribe to the scientific view that it's nothing more than an eclipse and is a part of the movement in the universe?", he also said "Instead of hardware and lasers, I used strings and elastic bands and crystal swords, whatever the people who lived on the planet could find that might exist or, in the case of something like a kite, could build. I wanted to omit the present totally, and work on merging the past and future."