Yahoo Lifestyle “The Camera Doesn’t Blink In This Show”: Jack Thorne & Philip Barantini Lift Lid On Netflix’s First One-Shot TV Series ‘Adolescence’
EXCLUSIVE: Jack Thorne has penned more projects than the internet can handle but Netflix’s first ever one-shot TV series Adolescence generated a fresh challenge for him.
“Jack had never written anything like this,” said director Philip Barantini of the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Help and This is England 88 scribe. “He’s done amazing theater but with this there is no curtain call. The camera is always following someone.”
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Adolescence, which reunites one-shot connoisseur Barantini with his Boiling Point star Stephen Graham, tells the story of a 13-year-old who is suddenly taken into custody one early morning for the murder of a teenage girl who goes to his school. Audiences are thrust into the action immediately via Barantini’s one-shot style, made famous by BAFTA-nominated cooking movie Boiling Point and its TV spin-off. The show also stars Top Boy’s Ashley Walters and The Crown’s Erin Doherty, along with Graham, who co-created Adolescence with Barantini.
Thorne said Adolescence, which is produced by Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment, Warp Films and Matriarch Productions, was one of the great tests he’s faced across a storied career. “My resting heart rate was really high,” he said of being on set. “It was very complicated to write. I’m not allowed to cut away to go anywhere else.”
Barantini detailed the immense amount of work and preparation required for the one-shot approach. Featuring around 320 extras, each episode was filmed in a four-week block that mostly comprised technical practices and rehearsals. The final week would feature two takes per day, leaving the team with 10 to choose from at the end of the week. During takes, Barantini would mostly watch on from a vehicle disguised as a police van for the purposes of the show.
“I’d done it before with Boiling Point but the difference was we wrote Boiling Point with the location in mind so we would sit in a restaurant and write scripts,” he added. “This time it was all in Jack’s head then I’d have to go away and find these locations.”
Of particular difficulty were scenes featuring characters moving between locations. “A really fun day was working out how long the car ride takes from the house to the police station and walking that route,” said Thorne.
Thorne was required on set far more than most projects as scenes needed constant re-writing between takes. He said he learned quickly that certain scenes would need a completely different approach to normal as the camera can’t cut away during dialogue scenes and set pieces like car chases would need extra thought. “The cinematographers thought a chase scene I had written would look like a computer game and instead I got this call from Phil who said, ‘Imagine if the cameras could fly.’ So we strapped cameras to drones that took off over traffic lights and then suddenly you’re at the murder scene. Emotionally it kicks you in the stomach.”
“The camera doesn’t blink”
The one-shot style is so much more than a gimmick and Thorne and Barantini both stress how much the innovation brings to a story about the thorny issue of teenage knife crime.
“The camera doesn’t blink in this show and by being unblinking it allows for a certain rawness and honesty,” said Thorne. “The inability to cut away, the idea that all four episodes are partial, that allows you to tell a more complex story than if we were able to be inside the justice system.”
He added: “There are lots of ways of telling these stories and looking at knife crime but what we wanted to do is spend a lot of time thinking about our relationship with rage and talking about things that we struggle with as people. What has resulted is a piece that uses the technical to unlock the emotional.”
Barantini joked that he “doesn’t want to be known as the one-take guy” but revealed he is using the technique in smaller doses in some scenes for the upcoming Enola Holmes 3, which is penned by Thorne.
“It doesn’t work with everything but it can make people sit up and pay attention,” he added.
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