Making Adolescence – part one
In the first part of DQ’s look at the making of Netflix one-shot drama Adolescence, director Philip Barantini, writer Jack Thorne and actors and executive producers Stephen Graham and Hannah Walters detail their early preparations and their motivations to tell this timely and topical story.
“We think the camera can fly.”
For all his numerous writing credits across television and film, Jack Thorne had never written anything designed to be filmed in just one take. Yet here he was on the phone with director Philip Barantini, who was explaining how he and DOP Matthew Lewis could move the camera from one character to another positioned half a mile away without a single cut for a climactic scene in Netflix drama Adolescence.
“It is extraordinary,” Thorne tells DQ. “We’re in and out of cars. We do all sorts of different things. Cameras are clipped onto the front of cars. Cameras are clipped onto everything. You can’t believe how brilliant these people are in terms of passing the camera between them to make all these shots work.”
Tapping into themes of toxic masculinity, the incel subculture and the dangers of the internet and social media, Adolescence tells the story of how a family’s world is turned upside down when 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) is arrested for the murder of a teenage girl, Katie, who goes to his school. Stephen Graham plays Jamie’s father and ‘appropriate adult’ Eddie Miller, while Ashley Walters plays Detective Inspector Luke Bascombe and Erin Doherty is Briony Ariston, the clinical psychologist assigned to Jamie’s case.
Faye Marsay, Christine Tremarco, Mark Stanley, Jo Hartley and newcomer Amélie Pease also star in series.
But while the story is topical and timely, this four-part limited series is also a groundbreaking feat, owing to the fact that every episode is filmed in one continuous shot, staying with the characters as the story unfolds in real time.
Unlike Thorne, Barantini has experience in this format after directing the 2019 short film Boiling Point and the expanded 2021 feature film of the same name – both of which starred Graham as the head chef of a high-end London restaurant during one relentless dinner service. A BBC television sequel, also called Boiling Point, then followed in 2023, but the one-shot format was largely dispensed with, save for a few particular scenes.
But as it happened, another one-shot project – Adolescence – had been on the table ever since the launch of the Boiling Point feature, when Barantini took a call from Brad Pitt’s production company Plan B Entertainment.
“They were just getting into the TV space and said, ‘We’d love to do something with you and Stephen in one take. It’s never been done before on TV as far as we’re aware – go away and have a think about something,’” the director remembers. “So I called Stephen and, at the time, there’d been a couple of quite high-profile stabbings and we just came up with the idea in the car. To be honest with you, it [the initial idea] is pretty bang-on for what the episodes are now, from start to finish.”
“There were a few incidents where young boys attacked and stabbed young girls. Knife crime in our country, it’s been in this state maybe over 10 years or so, going back to Stephen Lawrence. That’s how long it’s been going,” Graham says, referring the 1993 racially motivated murder of Lawrence. “I looked at the fact that young boys are stabbing young girls, and in my head, I just thought, ‘Why? What’s going on here? What’s happening?’ Surely we need to have a look at this in many ways as a society.”
But though he admits his “judgemental head” occasionally wonders what part the parents play in such a tragic incident, Graham was adamant Adolescence should not apportion blame to Eddie and Manda Miller (the latter played by Tremarco).
“I wanted him [Jamie] to be from a working-class background,” Graham continues. “I wanted him to be from a home where dad went to work and did a really good job. He’s not ever raised his hand or been violent towards his boy. And then mum, I didn’t want her to be an alcoholic. Mum’s got a really good job. She’s the manager of the furniture department in John Lewis, for Christ’s sake. That’s a good job. His older sister, she’s an A-level student. She’s doing brilliant.
“So we can’t pinpoint a reason why it’s happening within the family. That’s one of the things I said at the beginning. We had long conversations about influences and stuff like that. And then Jack, the genius of Jack, found all of the incel stuff and brought that to the table. So in many ways, me and Jack, our marriage was like Frankenstein. I brought the body, he injected the soul. Then every single one of us put the spirit into it.”
That initial idea, and the subsequent series, sets out to explore the impact and aftermath of the stabbing of a teenager from various perspectives. Episode one opens as the police raid the Miller family home and arrest Jamie on suspicion of murder, before the camera follows him back to the police station and witnesses his initial police interviews.
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Episode two then takes place at Jamie’s school, where his classmates are dealing with their grief and rumours of Jamie’s arrest while the police – Walter’s DS Bascombe and Marsay’s DS Misha Frank – desperately seek information about what may have been behind the killing.
Episode three is largely a two-hander between Jamie and psychologist Briony, before the finale follows the Miller family on Eddie’s birthday and reveals how the murder continues to impact their lives.
Barantini and Graham went back to Plan B with their idea, jumped on a call with Pitt and then started to develop the series further, with Warp Films (This is England, The Virtues) coming on board as the UK producer alongside Matriarch Productions (A Thousand Blows), the company run by Graham and his wife and fellow actor Hannah Walters.
To write the series, Graham teamed up with Thorne following their previous collaborations on feature-length drama Help and series The Virtues and This is England. Thorne had been sent a copy of Boiling Point by Graham after it was made, and the writer sat in awe of what he was watching. “I was just going, ‘I don’t quite know how you did that.’ But watching it now, it’s actually even more complicated than I first thought,” he says. “It’s really fun to write [a one-shot] and completely different from anything I’ve ever done before.”
Picking up Graham’s interest in a story about knife crime, Thorne spoke to the actor a lot about the subject before suggesting they write series together. “That isn’t something he’d done before, but this is our sixth time working together and we know each other pretty well,” Thorne says. “It was a brave leap for him into something new. But Stephen’s quite good at bravery and so he just jumped at it with me. Then we’d just talk and talk until we thought we had something. I’d write the first draft, send it to him, then we’d talk some more and make some changes. That was the process by which we got all the scripts together.”
Thorne found the process of writing scripts for a one-shot series “really freeing,” taking inspiration from one of his favourite writers, Alan Ayckbourn, to find creativity in constraint. One of Ayckbourn’s plays, House & Garden, consists of two plays designed to be performed simultaneously on two different stages, with the same cast moving between them.
“I’d experimented with single-room plays in theatre, and the Greek unities [unity of time, place and action] felt really exciting to play with in TV. The camera is always passing on and finding different stories, and that’s the way you sustain it,” Thorne says. “When we were rehearsing, we were constantly talking about energy – ‘Oh, we’ve got an energy dip here and we’ve got a problem’ – so we re-route, we do different things, or we pass the story on to different little stories to help sustain us as we’re telling the bigger story. We just work out how to pass the parcel to keep that energy going – and it’s like nothing else.
“But as a writer, I found it really glorious. I found it exciting all the time. The difficult thing is telling a story that is coherent in an hour and feeling like you can capture that beginning, middle and end.”
For the school-set episode two, Thorne visited the location to work out how the camera might move between characters and settings across the episode – at one point the camera follows a student through a window as he is chased by Bascombe – and then rewrote his early draft to suit. But for episode one, the police station was built in a studio, so he and production designer Adam Tomlinson worked together to ensure the building matched the script’s ambition.
“I wrote ‘stairs’ and Adam built some stairs just for the office for the detectives so there was a separation between life on the ground and life above,” Thorne says. “It was built to suit the story, which is amazing.”
He also worked closely with Barantini and Lewis – who previously collaborated on all three iterations of Boiling Point – to imagine how the camera might pass between characters and stories in each episode, leading to that aforementioned phone call between writer and director.
“The amazing thing about the way Phil and Matt work is those two are a two-headed monster, and they can do anything,” Thorne says. “One of the most exciting calls I’ve ever had was when we were working on the end of episode two; I had a certain ending in mind for Bascombe, one that was all about emotion, and then Phil phoned me up and said, ‘We think the camera can fly.’
“I’d written in this bit where Bascombe was charging after this boy, and the boy took us through the murder site. That was proving difficult for a number of reasons, not least the amount of time it would take to get there.” Then Barantini and Lewis had the idea to leave the school, clip the camera to a drone and have it take off.
“This girl has been killed, and you’ve spent the day in the school that’s haunted by it,” Thorne says. “There’s this girl, Jade, who’s Katie’s best friend, and we can see how much trouble this is going to cause for her. You’re scared for her. Then the camera takes off from her, flies over the houses and lands at the murder scene.”
With the story told through four interconnected moments that span approximately 13 months, Thorne says the series was pitched to Netflix as a ‘whydunnit’ rather than a ‘whodunnit,’ for reasons that become apparent early on in the series.
“You’re not sitting there going, ‘What happened here?’ You’re sitting here going, ‘Why did this happen?’” he says. “In those conversations with Stephen, with Phil, with Warp, with Plan B, we were constantly saying, ‘How do we understand this?’ At the centre of it is this 13-year-old-boy who has done something, and it’s the question of why and how best to express that through the different windows into his life. It does go into questions around masculinity and where masculinity is right now that really interests me and really interests Stephen, and hopefully brings light onto something.”
Hannah Walters, who appears in episode two as schoolteacher Mrs Bailey, agrees that the show was always going to be a whydunnit. “But the reason that Stephen thought about it within the nucleus of a family was because we want the majority of the audience to connect so instantly with them that they actually go, ‘Oh my God, this could be us,’” she says.
“It’s the tiniest little things. ‘Are we taking our eyes off the kids just a little bit too long? Do we need a little bit more involvement? Do we need to be looking at their social media?’ Just little things that people can really relate to.”
Graham picks up: “When we were at school, there was bullying and things happened, there were fights and stuff. I’m not saying things were rosy; far from it. They were very difficult times being an adolescent, irrespective of where you’re brought up or where you’re from. Now we’ve seen many horrific incidents of young boys, young girls, being constantly bullied and manipulated by this” – he points to his mobile phone – “to the extent where some of them have taken their own lives, because you can’t shut it off. It’s there, it’s with you, and we wanted to raise that kind of point.”
The drama, which debuts on Netflix on March 13 – doesn’t just show the struggle teenagers face today from Jamie’s perspective, but also from the point of view of his friends and his parents. Hannah Walters adds: “Adolescence, in this time, it’s really, really a hard thing to navigate.”
Next time: How cast and crew prepared to film the four one-shot episodes, the challenge of marrying technology and story, and why the acting experience was the closest TV can be to performing on stage.
tagged in: Adolescence, Hannah Walters, Jack Thorne, Matriarch Productions, Netflix, Philip Barantini, Plan B Entertainment, Stephen Graham, Warp Films