Creating a buzz
Director Mark Munden, writer Jack Thorne and executive producer Joel Wilson take DQ inside the BBC’s new Lord of the Flies miniseries, revealing the origins of the first TV adaptation of William Golding’s novel and how they wrangled a large cast of young boys on location in Malaysia.
If the premiere screening is anything to go by, Lord of the Flies director Marc Munden certainly had his hands full helming the new BBC adaptation of William Golding’s seminal 1954 novel.
At a packed-out auditorium at BFI Southbank in London at the end of last month, the audience looked more like that for a school assembly than the debut of a high-budget drama. Which is hardly surprising given the ensemble cast features more than 30 boys – most not yet even in their teens – and doesn’t have an adult in sight.
What’s more, the show marks the professional acting debuts of many of its young stars, and their excitement at seeing themselves on screen for the first time was palpable, with plenty of whooping and hollering from those in attendance to view the first of the four hourlong episodes that comprise the series, which landed in full on BBC iPlayer last night. Episodes will also air weekly on Sundays on BBC One.
‘Never work with children or animals’ is one of the oldest maxims in showbiz. And while it’s regularly contravened, it is rare to find a project that exclusively features those two groups – in front of the camera, at least.
“It was quite chaotic on set a lot of the time,” admits Munden, whose previous TV directing credits include Utopia and National Treasure. “It was brilliant, beautiful chaos sometimes.”
Regardless of whether they’ve actually read the book, almost everyone knows the gist of the Lord of the Flies plot: a group of schoolboys find themselves stranded on an island with no adults, and things soon turn ugly. More specifically, the boys are isolated following a deadly plane crash and, in an attempt to remain civil, they organise themselves, led by Ralph and supported by the group’s intellectual, Piggy. But when Jack becomes more interested in hunting and being in charge, he soon begins to draw other boys away from the group and, ultimately, from hope to tragedy.
In this version – the first time Lord of the Flies has been made for the small screen – each episode unfolds largely from the perspective of a different boy as their hastily arranged society begins to unravel. Written by Jack Thorne, whose One Shoe Films label produces the series alongside Eleven, it retains the original early 1950s setting and its focus on themes including human nature, the loss of innocence and boyhood masculinity. Sony Pictures Television is the distributor of the show, which will also stream on Stan in Australia.
With the aim of making a faithful adaptation, the daunting task of wrangling a classroom’s worth of child actors could not be mitigated by filming in the easily controllable surroundings of a studio. Quite the opposite – the story calls for an isolated and tropical setting, and that’s exactly what the production delivered by shooting in a remote Malaysian jungle.
“Everyone was soaked to the skin every day, either through sweat or seawater or torrential rain,” Munden says. “But it was a lot of fun as well. The boys really enjoyed it.”
Unsurprisingly, preparation was key to getting the cast up to speed. “I always rehearse. That’s something I always do,” the director continues. “We didn’t really workshop; we rehearsed the scenes most of the time, and then just gradually developed it from there.
“We had a fantastic acting coach, Tommy Lawrence, animating all those boys in the background while I was dealing with the principals. And a lot of the little ones, they just got on with it. They were just enjoying being on the beach and in the sea, and we just filmed them playing with crabs and stuff like that.”
With the number of children involved, duty of care was of course paramount for Eleven (Ten Pound Poms, Sex Education), whose co-founder Joel Wilson is among the show’s executive producers. The tropical climate, in particular, presented numerous challenges.
“There were an awful lot of things we had to put in place,” Wilson says. “Not just logistics, but even the tents the kids were in [for example]. At first, we were told it’d be better for them to acclimatise and not have air conditioning. And then we realised that was not a good idea, and we got air conditioning.
“We had very few cases of sunburn, but we had lots of people with umbrellas and went through an awful lot of sunscreen. And we had quite a few people on set who were trying to communicate with the kids, and also with their parents, about kind of any anxieties they had, and there were some.
“We had a big infrastructure in place dealing with all of that but, fundamentally, it was the safety that was important – and it was not particularly safe place to shoot. In fact, my daughter got stung by a scorpion.”
Led by Winston Sawyers as Ralph, Lox Pratt as Jack (it’s easy to see why he’s also landed the role of Draco Malfoy in HBO’s forthcoming Harry Potter series), David McKenna as Piggy and Ike Talbut as Simon, the cast was assembled following a nationwide search that deliberately strayed beyond the usual avenues.
The process took in numerous schools up and down the country and involved many first-timers, as well as actors without agents. “We were just looking for the best actors, young actors,” Munden says. “Most of the boys, this was their first experience on a film set, you know? I mean, it’s a big, big thing. There weren’t that many actors out there of that age that could possibly do it, so we just spread the net as widely as possible.
“That’s how we ended up with such a diverse cast. We were just looking for the best performers – it’s as simple as that, actually.”
“Not that I have anything against private school, but we wanted to expand the net and make sure we had a big diversity of kids from all backgrounds,” says Wilson. “So we very deliberately saw people from private school, we saw people from state school, we saw people from everywhere.”
The search was led by award-winning casting duo Nina Gold and Martin Ware, who “really sought out kids from every possible place you could conceive of,” Wilson adds.
Scripting the adaptation was Thorne, arguably the hottest writer out of the UK at the moment following his success with perhaps last year’s most lauded series, Adolescence.
The project first materialised over a supposedly ‘no work talk’ dinner between Thorne and Wilson’s families at the latter’s home.
Thorne explains: “I was at Joel’s house having a nice dinner with my wife and his children and my child. It wasn’t supposed to be about work. And then Joel broke the creed by saying, ‘What is it? What’s the one book you’re desperate to do that you’ve never had the chance to do?’ And I said, ‘Lord of the Flies. It’s always been Lord of the Flies for me, and I’ve tried a few times.’
“He said, ‘I think I can get the rights.’ And I said, ‘OK.’ It sort of started from there. And then we worked up quite a careful pitch for our first conversation with [Golding’s estate]… and thankfully, they gave us the opportunity.”
By the time Thorne got to work on the scripts, he was also in the midst of penning Adolescence for Netflix. And as it happened, the two shows were filmed simultaneously too. With Adolescence – also a four-part miniseries – revolving around a 13-year-old boy accused of killing a girl from his school, it’s easy to draw parallels between the two series. Despite being set 70-odd years apart, both offer a troubling look at young masculinity, the pivotal transition from boyhood into teendom and the loss of innocence.
As a result, it’s no surprise to hear Thorne say that the two projects fed into each other. “They were shot the same summer, so I was moving between Pontefract [where Adolescence was filmed] and Malaysia, which was quite wild,” he notes.
“In terms of the reaction to Adolescence, that hasn’t informed this at all,” adds the writer, who had completed his work on Lord of the Flies by the time the Netflix sensation was released last March. “But the shows were written at the same time, and definitely Golding slipped into Adolescence and I think a little bit of Adolescence slipped into this. I find that moment – and it’s not adolescence we’re studying, it’s the moment before adolescence – absolutely incredible to look at. My son is about to hit that moment – 10, 11, 12 – when I think so much of us is made, and I think Golding captured something that no one else has quite captured. I hope the two spoke to each other.”
While Thorne describes Golding’s original novel as a “perfect book,” it wasn’t just his fondness for the story that made him keen to adapt it, but also what he perceives as its relevance to the current political environment.
“I think it’s wonderful, and I think it gets misappropriated as being a book that’s about black and white. What’s wonderful about his writing, and what I hope we bring out in this adaptation, is that it’s about glorious shades of grey. No one’s perfect, no one’s imperfect on the island,” Thorne says.
“We find ourselves in a fascinating moment in terms of young people and the pressures we’re putting on them in the world we built for them. I think there is a really interesting echo in terms of the populism of the moment that Golding was writing this, and the savagery of the populism that he saw, and the populism we’re seeing now.”
In terms of how younger viewers might perceive the show, he adds: “We [adults] sort of experience [the current political climate] from one direction, and they’re experiencing it looking up. So maybe they’ll see more in this than we do, and maybe they’ll recognise more of their time than we recognise.
“I hope we’re going to be able to clear some of this hate out of the way for them, so that they can build a better world than the world we currently live in. But at the moment, that seems very, very far away. So I hope they see something, and I hope it inspires them to do better than we’ve done.”
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tagged in: BBC, Eleven, Jack Thorne, Joel Wilson, Lord of the Flies, Mark Munden, One Shoe Films