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.
When Hannah Walters looks back on her experience filming Netflix one-shot drama Adolescence, she can still remember the same nervous energy she felt on set.
The four-part limited series 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 from his school. Each episode picks up a different stage of the story, from the initial police raid of the Miller family home and an anxious day at Jamie’s school to a meeting between Jamie and the clinical psychologist assigned to his case, and a day spent with the Miller family still reeling from what has happened.
Each episode of the series was filmed in one continuous take – a process Walters and her husband and co-star Stephen Graham liken to performing a stage play. Both also have experience of filming in this way, having previously teamed up with Adolescence director Philip Barantini on his 2019 one-take short film Boiling Point in 2019 and the extended feature film of the same name, released in 2021.
“I get little butterflies in my tummy [thinking about it],” Walters tells DQ. “It’s excitement and fear. It’s like when you stand in a line waiting to go on a rollercoaster. That’s what it feels like for me.”
“For an actor, it’s the most – and I don’t want to sound pretentious – but it’s the most zen I’ve ever been on set because you’re in that moment and nothing else exists,” says Graham, who plays Jamie’s father Eddie in the series and also co-wrote it with Jack Thorne. “You can’t have any distractions from anywhere else.
“We’re all actors and we love the stage and the live performance of being on stage. But to marry that with the craft of meticulous acting for film and television, where everything’s natural, truthful and real, is just beautiful.”
Once Graham and Thorne (Help, His Dark Materials) had locked in the scripts, filming on Adolescence took place across 12 weeks from June to September 2024, with the same three-week routine undertaken for each episode. First, there was an “intimate” weeklong cast rehearsal, which would generally involve the actors and Barantini with the key heads of department, executive producer Walters and producer Jo Johnson. The series is produced by Warp Films, Plan B and Walters and Graham’s Matriarch Productions.
Barantini’s advice to actors contemplating a one-take show is to “know your lines.” He also wants his cast to “be in the moment,” to react naturally to what is unfolding and not worry if they forget a line.
“You can sense if something’s gone a bit awry, but just go with it and see what happens,” he says. “The audience never knows what’s coming next, but we do, so you might get something really special.
“We did have a couple of moments like that where it wasn’t exactly what was in the script or what was rehearsed but they just went with it and it actually worked better. So it was just a case of be in the moment, be present and don’t think about acting, just be in it.”
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The second week is the tech rehearsal, which would involve the actors – by now well versed in the script – running each episode beat by beat to allow them and the crew to find the right choreography. Often, adjustments would be made where the camera might be stuck in the same place for too long, just as in episode three when psychologist Briony (Erin Doherty) steps out of the interview room after talking to a increasingly heated Jamie.
“You would do the first beat, the second beat, then we’d go back to the first, second, third, then first, second, third, fourth… We keep moving forward because we broke the script down to those beats,” Barantini explains. “It’s almost like you’re building up to start shooting. We’d have the camera on it and it would be stop-start so the sound team could come in, and then they would ask questions. It’s so important that everybody’s on the same page and they’re not just doing their own thing.”
By the Wednesday of the tech rehearsal week, the ambition was to start running the episode in full twice a day, which mirrored the schedule during the subsequent shooting week. By the end, the aim was to have 10 takes from which to choose the final version.
“And that worked,” the director says. “We did two a day. But, for example, one of the episodes was like 16 takes because we’d start it and there’d be a slight tech problem or something. So after the first five minutes, we’d stop and we’d go back. Even if you start and then something happens within the first two seconds, you’ve got to re-slate it. So now you’re on take 14 or whatever on day three and you’re like, ‘Oh my God.’”
With such little time to record as many takes as possible, there were strict rules as to when and why a take could be stopped. Most importantly, Barantini was the only one who could stop a take, barring a critical safety issue.
If there was a performance issue or a slight technical glitch, it would be up to him to judge whether it was something that could be fixed in post-production, or if shooting could continue without straying too far from the well-rehearsed plan.
“Luckily, we didn’t have any of that really. There were a couple of tiny things, but nothing major; no safety issues or anything like that,” he says.
Thorne was on hand during rehearsal week to observe and work with the actors, and was also available during each tech week to tweak the script where needed. Then once takes were being recorded, he would be among the executive team scrutinising each one as they played out.
“There’s little point being on set because you can’t follow the camera, so we’re all watching simultaneously [remotely],” he notes. “We’re talking with Toby [Bentley] and Mona [Qureshi] at Netflix and we’re talking with each other quite a lot. Then certain takes will be released and everyone will discuss it while there is still stuff going on.”
For that reason, “it was the most exciting set I’ve ever worked on because everyone was engaged with the question [of making the show],” he continues. “There was no one sitting back and going, ‘What’s lunch?’ It was all like, ‘OK, we need to fix this. How are we going to do this?’ It was a constant discussion.”
Throughout prep and production, Barantini was always confident the feat of filming four one-take episodes could be achieved, even working to a television budget and schedule. “The scripts were so good that I could see it visually straightaway,” he says. But the difference between Adolescence and Boiling Point was that on the latter, the production team knew the feature would be filmed at London establishment Jones & Sons, so the script was written with that in mind.
On Adolescence, Thorne wrote the first scripts “blind” before the locations were identified, or sets built, based on what was written. “So that was a bit trickier,” Barantini says. “But again, Jack was so amazing. [Whenever] we were like, ‘Look, we can’t find this. We’re going to need to change it slightly,’ he would always be open to it.”
The police station in episode one was built at the production’s studio base near Pontefract, Yorkshire, but the locations team had to find a house within a three- or four-minute drive that would double as the Miller home. Episode three was also shot in the studio, where the secure facility housing Jamie was built, while an old warehouse building was turned into a hardware store for episode four.
In episode two, Thorne had written the script with one school in mind, which then differed from the final location. “So there were certain things we had to change and just adapt to,” Barantini says.
Despite the technical achievements of the series, he and DOP Matthew Lewis never wanted the story of Adolescence to be overshadowed by its one-take format. “The reason we did it in one take really is because we wanted to just throw the audience in this vignette of a moment in time in this specific story, and then pull them back out again,” he says. “I don’t want the audience to watch and go, ‘Wow, this one shot is really clever, isn’t it?’ Inevitably, they’re going to do that because that’s how we’ve done it, but Matt is amazing. He’s always about story. It’s not like, ‘Look at this fancy move.’”
There were numerous technical challenges to work out to ensure the one-take format could be as effective as possible. Early on, Lewis knew he couldn’t be the only camera operator on the show. He was joined by Lee David Brown for episodes one, two and four so they could take turns holding the camera as it moved between locations, often attached to the front or the side of a car. Lewis shot episode three – which is largely a two-hander between Cooper and Doherty – on his own.
There was also the feat of attaching the camera to a drone and sending it into the air at the end of episode two, as viewers leave the school and fly over the town towards the murder site, where the camera picks up with Eddie (Graham). That wasn’t the original plan, however, as the camera was initially set to fly off into the sky.
Barantini recalls: “Midway through the shoot on that episode, [Netflix exec] Toby messaged and said, ‘The drone flying off looks incredible. What if Stephen was in this episode? What if he’s at the end where the drone is supposed to fly over and [instead] we land and take the camera off [the drone] and then go into his face?’”
This note landed on the Wednesday of the shooting week for episode two, with several takes already in the can. Graham wasn’t actually supposed to be working on that episode, so while contracts were agreed, Barantini’s brother stood in for the actor during rehearsals.
“Then the whole thing was fine and Stephen could do it – and we got it on the very last take,” the director says. “That’s the take we’ve used and it’s the only one that worked because the others just didn’t work. It was too windy and the drone was a bit shaky and stuff.”
Securing the take was all the more satisfying for Barantini considering he was watching the recording via a remote video feed – until the picture cut out just as the drone flew off towards Graham.
The director describes that moment as “the most stressful experience I’ve had on a set,” but adds: “It was so rewarding when we got it at the end. When the drone flew off, we lost the signal, so we didn’t know whether it had landed. It was about 10, 15 minutes later when I got the call saying it worked. It was stressful.”
The experience was similarly nerve-wracking for Graham. He was listening to an audio feed in a van at the location of the murder scene, waiting for the moment the drone would take the camera into the air. That was also the signal for him to get into character and wait for the drone to arrive.
“So I’m listening and I can hear everything’s going well,” the actor recalls. “It was our last go, our last chance. It took off, the drone’s in the air, I’m listening to the radio. Then I can see it and it’s coming down. Then in my head I’m like, ‘Oh shit, I’m in it.’ And I had to get straight into character, open the [van] door and step into the thing myself, because I’m there as a producer thinking, ‘This is great, we’ve got it. This is fantastic.’ Then it’s like, ‘Hang on, it’s your turn now.’”
Graham and Walters credit Lewis for conceiving the whole idea of a one-shot back when they filmed the original Boiling Point short film – a favour they did for Barantini to help him secure an agent. That led to the expanded feature film and now Adolescence, which debuts on Netflix on March 13.
“If you look at the trajectory of our journey within the concept and the boundaries of that one-shot short, we went from doing a favour for a mate to sitting at the Baftas nominated for best film, and then the next minute [we’re doing] four episodes of this drama,” Graham says.
“The thing is, we know what we’re doing with it,” Walters adds. “And we’ve got a team that works really well. We’ve got a good shorthand with each of them, we know what works but, equally, we know what doesn’t work. It really is like a very close-knit family on the set.”
Previously: Making Adolescence – part one
Next time: What does post-production mean for a one-shot series, the show’s “social mission” and why each member of the creative team would do it all again “in a heartbeat.”
tagged in: Adolescence, Hannah Walters, Jack Thorne, Matriarch Productions, Netflix, Philip Barantini, Plan B Entertainment, Stephen Graham, Warp Films