Making Adolescence – part three
In the final part of our look at the making of Netflix’s Adolescence, the show’s creative team dissect the post-production process behind the one-shot drama, discuss its social message and reveal why they’d do it all again.
When it comes to making a one-shot television series, spare a thought for the network executives who are unable to influence the editing process with a raft of notes – because there is no editing process.
After filming wrapped on Netflix’s four-part drama Adolescence, with numerous single takes of each episode in the can, the production team gathered together to decide which versions were their favourite. Then when the best were identified, the series was on the verge of completion.
“The execs at Netflix were trying to get their head around it,” director Philip Barantini tells DQ. “Usually you get into the edit and then they give notes and they say, ‘Can we get rid of that scene? Can we get rid of that line and go with this?’”
With no chance to edit anything after the cameras stopped rolling, it meant the streamer’s reps were instead brought onto set during the show’s technical rehearsals, so they could see how the finished episode might look and invite suggestions at that stage – rather than when it was too late to effect any changes.
“They would give a load of notes and I’d have to implement them with the actors and the crew, and you almost edit as you’re going along, really,” the director continues. “Then by the time we came to the shoot week, there were times they’d watch and say, ‘Can we change this?’ You’d be like, ‘It’s a bit tricky now.’”
Some last-minute changes were made – including a soaring ending to episode two. But with the editing process removed, all that was then left to do was add a little “polish,” says Jack Thorne (Help, His Dark Materials), who penned the series with actor Stephen Graham (A Thousand Blows). “There are bits we can take out and there are bits we can do with words, but not much.
“There’s stuff they’re doing to the picture and there’s stuff they’re doing to sound. There are some lines you can shave off. But we’re not doing much ADR [automated dialogue replacement]. It’s just a sound and picture polish.”
“It’s not easy. It’s different,” says Barantini of the post-production process behind Adolescence, having previously filmed one-shot short film Boiling Point and the extended feature film of the same name. “Obviously there’s no edit, so we’re immediately into ADR, sound design and music. So all of that stuff that would happen way down the line [after the edit] has been brought forward.”
“It’s a strange process,” agrees Thorne. “Normally, at this point, you’d be looking at multiple edits and going, ‘Well, should we lose this? Should we lose that? This meanders a bit here.’ With this, we’re just kind of like, ‘OK.’”
As for deciding which single take to use for each episode, “it was a very interesting discussion each time,” Thorne continues. “It was about finding consensus each time, and each time it surprised me. It wasn’t always the one I thought at first, but then when I look back, I see why we went that way.”
Exploring 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.
As well as developing and writing the series, Graham also plays Jamie’s father and ‘appropriate adult’ Eddie Miller, with Ashley Walters as Detective Inspector Luke Bascombe and Erin Doherty as 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, as does Hannah Walters, who is also an executive producer. Husband-and-wife team Graham and Walters’ Matriarch Productions produces the series with Warp Films and Plan B Entertainment.
Having worked in a one-shot format before, Barantini knew what he was getting himself into. But he describes the finished show, which launches on Netflix tomorrow, as one that has exceeded all his expectations.
“Everybody just stepped up to the plate – actors, crew, even the town we shot in,” he says, praising the collaborative support from South Kirkby, near Pontefract in West Yorkshire, where set builds were constructed inside a production studio. School and house locations were then identified within a short drive to allow the camera to move between locations with the actors.
“We built a couple of sets, like the police station, but because it’s all shot in one take, we needed to find a house nearby – everything needed to be within a five-minute drive,” he says. “That was the challenge we faced. It’s been the most challenging experience of my career so far, but in an amazing way.”
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Making Adolescence – part two
In the second part of our look at the making of Netflix one-shot drama Adolescence, the show’s creative team take DQ inside the rehearsal and filming process for the cast and crew, who had a strictly limited number of takes to achieve the production’s ambitions.
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.
Heating up
Set in a British restaurant, one-take feature film Boiling Point caused a sensation on its release in 2021. As a small-screen sequel heads to the BBC, DQ speaks to star Stephen Graham and fellow executive producers Bart Ruspoli and Hester Ruoff about what’s in store.
Problems would be solved during weekly HOD meetings involving Barantini and DOP Matthew Lewis, but they never laid down exact plans for how the series should be made. “It’s a collaboration,” the director says, “and it’s also about empowering people to have a voice and be like, ‘What about this? Should we try it this way?’
“It’s ‘best idea wins,’ especially in a situation where it’s not like you’ve got time to go, ‘OK, let’s go again. Let’s do this scene again. Let’s try this angle, let’s try that angle.’ All the work needs to be done in rehearsals. Then once that’s done, once we start the take, then we’re off to the races and you can’t stop and go, ‘No, go back and do that again.’ It’s a mad process, but once you get your head around it, I imagine it’s like theatre. I’ve never done theatre, but I imagine that’s what it’s like.”
Yet for all the challenges posed by shooting each episode in one take, Barantini never considered incorporating hidden breaks, if only to make his job and that of the cast and crew slightly easier. “I wouldn’t have done it otherwise. I don’t see the point,” he says. “If you’re going to do a one-take, do one take. Don’t pretend to do it, because then it becomes a bit of a gimmick.”
Thorne also found the collaboration on set “really energising,” and he even lifted lines for the show straight from the crew. “I’ve loved it. I’ve absolutely loved it,” he says. “Normally on set, I feel like a spare part. On this set, you could talk to anyone on that set about what story we were telling and why we were telling that, and everyone would have a thought about this, that and the other. There’s a line in episode two that was from the makeup truck. We’re just this gang, and there was this real sense of this gang working together to do something everyone believed in.”
If there were ever the chance to repeat Adolescence, “I’d do it again in a heartbeat,” exclaims Hannah Walters. “It’s joyful, absolutely joyful. Stressful and joyful. But I’d do it again.”
“I’d love to do it again,” echoes Graham. “I’d come up with a completely different story between us and tell a different story, but using the same format.”
The married creatives give special mention to “the mighty, wonder woman” Jo Johnson, the series producer, who “was absolutely phenomenal and made everything go smoothly.” Graham says: “She kept it all away from us, from Phil particularly. Hannah, Jo and Mark [Herbert from Warp Films] kept all of the chaos [away], so Phil was allowed to sit in his little bubble with us and create.”
On set, “genius” first assistant director Sarah Lucas had to orchestrate all the actors’ cues to ensure they were in motion ahead of the camera arriving. “Usually when you’re doing scenes, you’ve got your first and then you’ve got your third and you’re getting cues from them. But Sarah had to orchestrate six other ADs each time, especially on episode two, and they had other ADs under them and then six or seven runners around them as well,” Hannah Walters reveals. “It was an unbelievable task that she took on, and she did it absolutely meticulously. She was incredible.
“But again, everybody feels part of the team because it’s so intense for that hour [of filming]. An hour [take] in the morning, then you stop for lunch, a couple more hours, reset, then you do a take. You do two takes in that day, but everybody was so on their A-game because you’re in it as a collective. And as producers, not just performers, we’re very inclusive. We always try to make everybody feel as important as each other when they’re on set, because they are.”
While Netflix executives Toby Bentley and Mona Qureshi may not have been able to give notes in the edit, Graham praises them for giving the show’s producers the freedom to make Adolescence as they wanted. “They always allowed us to be creative,” he says. “They allowed us to push the boundaries. I’m not being disrespectful in any way, shape or form, but I don’t know if that would have happened with different people.”
Should he get the chance to repeat the technical feat behind Adolescence, Barantini says he wouldn’t do anything differently. However, he would try to give everyone “a bit of a breather” between episodes, instead of rolling from shooting one episode straight into the rehearsal week for the next.
“We’d literally wrap on one episode, have the weekend off and then come in and start the cast rehearsals on a Monday,” he says. “So maybe I’d give a few days to just chill. But again, it probably made it work that way because you were just non-stop.”
It’s a testament to the scripts and the powerful performances by Graham, Cooper and others that the story at the heart of Adolescence and the themes it explores never feel secondary to the way it is shot. “There was no sense of the technical,” Thorne says about writing the scripts, each of which view the fallout from the central tragedy from a different perspective. “It was actually us all working together to find the soul of the show. So actually it was them feeding story to me, me feeding story back to them and there being this great big circle all the way around. It was amazing.”
He continues: “It’s so easy to sit back and just go, ‘Wow, this is just us showing off with the technical,’ but this has got such a soul to it and it’s got soul in every performance. For the actors, they’ve got control in a way they don’t usually have. And when you’re dealing with why men are in this place, why there is this male anger right now, there was something really liberating for Owen, Stephen and Ashley, all of whom were telling aspects of this story – and that’s what made it like theatre. It was the closest I’ve ever come to seeing theatre not on a stage.”
As a father of a young boy, Thorne has certainly asked himself the questions the series poses, such as how young men can grow up in a world where they are being fed opinions and information by incredibly powerful figures online.
“And if they are lonely and lost and a bit of a mess, and they hear these thoughts and they make sense of something, how on earth do we expect them to survive?” he wonders. “Stephen had this thing of, ‘We can’t blame the parents’ [in the show]. I hope what we do with this is we don’t blame anyone. I hope what we do with this is just go, ‘This is a mess and we need to talk about it.’ All of us need to talk about it and help break this repetitive pattern we’re in.”
Barantini certainly hopes the show can start a debate about the prevalence of knife crime, and lead families to ask what their children are doing and watching online. “Back in the day when I was a kid, you didn’t have social media. You’d go home and you wouldn’t think about what happened in school,” he says. “Say, for example, a kid’s getting bullied in school. They go home and it wouldn’t be there. But nowadays it’s just constant.
“Hopefully it will send out a message about society, and especially the young generation and what they’re being fed online. Just look after your kids and make sure they’re alright.”
tagged in: Adolescence, Hannah Walters, Jack Thorne, Matriarch Productions, Netflix, Philip Barantini, Plan B Entertainment, Stephen Graham, Warp Films