Not your average Joe

As the writer behind Giri/Haji, The Lazarus Project and Black Doves, Joe Barton has worked across multiple genres while retaining his trademark humour and style. He discusses creating characters, casting and the things up-and-coming writers should focus on.

Back when he was an emerging writer, Joe Barton adopted a “laissez-faire” approach to his craft, writing anywhere at any time of day. Now, he says, “the older I get, the more entrenched I am in my home office,” where he’s currently penning the second season of Netflix spy drama Black Doves.

The series, which debuted on the streamer in 2024, is described as a sharp, action-filled and heartfelt story of friendship and sacrifice. Keira Knightley stars as Helen Webb, a quick-witted, down-to-earth, dedicated wife and mother – and professional spy. For 10 years, she’s been passing her politician husband’s secrets to the shadowy organisation she works for: the Black Doves.

In the first season, when Helen’s secret lover Jason (Andrew Koji) is assassinated, her spymaster calls in Helen’s old friend Sam (Ben Whishaw) to keep her safe. Work is now underway on a follow-up, with filming on S2 due to begin in September.

Earlier this month, Barton took to the stage during SXSW London to lift the lid on his writing process, the collaboration behind making Black Doves and how he builds the worlds in which his stories are set. His previous credits include Sky’s time-travel drama The Lazarus Project, Netflix YA fantasy The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself, and Giri/Haji, a BBC-Netflix crime drama set between London and Tokyo.

Writing can be a solitary experience, but that changes as soon as a project is commissioned.
If you’re lucky enough to write something that gets made, then before you know it, there’s a whole building full of people who are wading through your scripts or gently nudging you about deadlines and budgets. I remember the early part of my career when it was just me and nothing I wrote got made. It was just me. But if you sell something then you’ve got a producer or a script editor and then you’ve got commissioners and you’ve got all these people.

Now he’s more established, Barton has frequently returned to work with the same people and companies, not least Sister, the producer behind both Giri/Haji and Black Doves.
I like working with the same people as much as possible. That’s one of the things you learn. There are a lot of independent production companies, there are a lot of channels as well now. There are all sorts of different people, and some of them are good and some of them are not as good, and you learn the ones you like as you go along. As you get a little more say in the process, you try to work with people you enjoy working with a bit more. So I try as much as possible to keep the same team.

Barton finds ideas for series anywhere and everywhere.
Quite often, it’s just real-life stuff that’s happened to me, little ideas, things that people have told me about, little stories, personal anecdotes or something that I feel, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’ An experience or something you try to extrapolate out into a broader idea or broader narrative. It really depends.

Something like Black Doves was a mixture of ideas in the back of my head. I’d read about the ‘spy cops’ scandal, about police officers who went undercover in this environmental group and pretended to be environmental protestors. Several policemen formed relationships with some of the women [among the real protestors] and got married, had children and had lives with these women.

I’d been reading about that, and I had read in the newspaper about this woman who had written in about her problem – her lover, the man she was in a relationship with, had just died so she was grieving her partner, but the twist was he’d been married to someone else. I thought that was an interesting predicament, and we took those two things and then combined them with a bunch of other ideas from my life to turn into this spy thing. Inspiration comes in instalments, rather than one lightning-bolt moment.

But the spy organisation in Black Doves was very much a work of fiction.
It was a very quick process. Keira’s playing a spy for this pretend thing. It’s very heightened and fictitious. For the second series, we are doing more research. But for this one, because the process was so quick – I wrote the script in December and we were filming in September – there wasn’t time to properly do that stuff. The second series, I’m talking to some spies.

Two scripts for S2 have been written, with a continued focus on the character relationships and dynamics at the heart of the story. But Barton admits he doesn’t know how it will end.
Different writers have different processes. I didn’t for this one know how it was going to end [in S1]. And the second series I also don’t know how it’s going to end. We’re hopeful an idea will be had along the way. We’ve got some ideas.

I know some people map out every beat of the story beforehand, which I think is also helpful. But I prefer doing a little bit of that but more a method of discovery through the writing process. I find it very hard writing treatments, breakdowns or beat sheets, when you write story beats in prose. ‘So-and-so will meet and fall in love’ – you can write that on a Post-It and put it on the wall, but if you don’t believe it in the script and the dynamics in the characters, it doesn’t work. I prefer just sitting down and writing.

Character backstories and breakdowns can be useful for writers and actors, but Barton likes to find out what might happen when two characters end up in a room together unexpectedly.
In Black Doves S1, there’s a character called Williams, who’s played by Irish actress Ella Lily Hyland. She was originally intended to be the villain of the whole series, because in episode one Ben’s character kills her partner. And then you’re like, ‘OK, so she’s going to keep popping in and she’s going to try to kill him throughout.’ I wrote a scene with them in the second episode and it was instantly just really fun writing them together and the idea of making them work together. Then we cast Ella and Ben in those parts, so the whole dynamic of those two changes and the scope of what that character’s going to be changes in writing and discovery.

While Barton enjoys writing for specific actors, he didn’t have Knightley in mind for the lead in Black Doves.
With Black Doves, I didn’t write specifically for Keira because I wrote it on spec at the beginning. But she came on and then I knew it was going to be her from very early on. For me, there’s usually a process where you’ve started filming before you’ve finished writing. For other people who are quicker and more organised, that doesn’t happen. But for me, we’ve started and I’m still writing, so you get to see the different actors’ dynamics and what they do, so you can start to write to that. You change it based on what you’ve got and what their skills are.

Often they’ll come to you about ideas for line changes. Sometimes you write a scene you spent months and months perfecting, and then the actor has some ideas about it in the taxi on the way to set, and maybe that’s better. It can happen! We can try things as long as we make sure we get the results.

Writing a spy thriller like Black Doves, Barton was sure to include numerous action scenes, but each one must have a purpose and play a part in the larger narrative.
You’re there to develop the character, whether it’s a car chase or a conversation. The purpose of any scene is you want to learn about the character. You have to build character moments and development into that sequence. Some times that’s easier than others. Ben and Omari [Douglas, as Michael] going down the stairs [in a scene in S1], that was always like that because it was the moment when Ben’s boyfriend discovers he killed someone. So you’ve got this great characterful moment between the two of them and it lends itself to that.

But other times it’s less characterful and more plot-based. There’s a scene in series one when Ben, Gaby [Gabrielle Creevy as Eleanor] and Ella storm a nightclub, and that’s a big shootout, but the purpose of that scene is they have to find this other character. So you try to fill that full of character moments. You’re always looking for the humanity and the character in these sequences.

In terms of plotting and planning, you put as much as you can on the page. The process then is you get the locations manager to find somewhere for you to shoot it, or you build it. Then you get the stunt people in. There are dozens of people, and through that process, what you’ve written will change through the practicalities of shooting.

Writers should always put specific details in the script, to better inform collaborators of their own intentions for a scene or location.
One of the worst pieces of writing advice you ever hear is that you shouldn’t direct on the page, which is a lie because when you’re writing something, your job is to create this entire world.

But whatever the genre he’s writing in, Barton’s shows are unmistakably his.
The longer I’ve been doing it, I just have one way of writing. That’s what I do. So it [Black Doves] was always going to have the tone it has. It wasn’t an intentional thing, but if you’re writing something that has quite dark themes, you have to find that levity. You have to find that humanity. This one was always going to be a bit more silly. The situations and scenarios in the storytelling are plainly ridiculous anyway.

Filmed in London, it was important that Black Doves showed the city in a new way.
It’s an incredibly cinematic space. If you’re telling a story that’s set in government, it has to be London. That’s the other challenge, finding a way to put the city on screen in a way that feels new. There’s no shortage of films and TV set here so you’re trying to find new places. There’s nothing original about the South Bank, which is by the river where everyone goes. But, within that, you try to find a particular corner of it.

I did this show years ago called Giri/Haji, which was very Soho-based, and we made the decision early on that this would all be Soho and we’re going to actually film there. So what is your version of the city? Where are you based? In that, you’re talking to the cinematographer and director and finding out their visual influences for interpreting the space.

Barton sees his job as creating characters that viewers feel they could meet. It’s just that their conversations are more interesting and heightened.
You have to try to layer them with everything from their backstory and history to where they are currently, what are their predicaments, what are their challenges, what are the challenges to those relationships, all that kind of stuff, all that texture and depth of human interactions, and try to capture that. This show [Black Doves] for me was always, beyond being a spy show, about a friendship, more than anything else, that came out of this woman I read about whose partner died. That just felt so interesting, having that as your core character. She’s grieving a lost love, so from that point your story’s not going to be romantic.

I wanted it to be a dynamic between two characters, so the obvious thing was to make it about a friendship, and how a friend would help another friend in that situation. Platonic friendship is such an interesting relationship. In your life, platonic friends are some of the most important relationships you’ll ever have. But in storytelling, we so often concentrate on romantic relationships or family relationships. I often watch things and it’s the friendships that interest me. I remember watching Bridget Jones and her mates, just people hanging out, and that’s what I wanted to do. It came from that; Keira and Ben and how [their characters] love each other.

Good chemistry on screen needs a little bit of luck.
You can’t audition Keira Knightley. There is a certain amount of, ‘OK, we’ve got Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw.’ You just assume they’ll be able to do it and you give them the material. They do have a spark and a chemistry. They’re great together. On certain jobs, you put actors together and it’s not there; it doesn’t work and there’s nothing you can really do about it.

Barton always wants to write about morally complex characters.
[Black Doves] started from the story of someone who’s been having an affair and she’s lied to her husband and children for years, so she’s already a morally interesting person. We just lent into it, and it’s more interesting if you take away any kind of safety blanket from what she’s done. She is who she is. Let’s explore that.

When you’re watching, you can forget you’re watching characters who do despicable things. So often, we’re encouraged not to think about it, like James Bond, Jason Bourne or any of the myriad action heroes we watch who are just mowing people down left, right and centre and you don’t really bat an eyelid. So it’s interesting to dig into that and what effect it has.

There multiple aspects to being a screenwriter – but aspiring scribes should never forget that writing is the most important part.
If you’re trying to become a writer, there are two sides of what you need to control. One is the creative, one is the business side of it. You can do all the work in the world on networking and writing emails to people, and that stuff’s really important as well, but sometimes you forget that, without the writing side, there’s no point to any of it.

So my best piece of advice about becoming a writer is just to write and to develop your voice and your craft and your ability to do the job you eventually want to do. Constantly write the kinds of stories that excite you and don’t try to write something you think has a bigger chance of getting made. Just write what gets you out of bed in the morning. If you’re not giving it on the page, the rest of the stuff doesn’t really matter.

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tagged in: Black Doves, Giri/Haji, Joe Barton, Netflix, Sister, The Lazarus Project