BTS: Adolescence

IBC

Shooting each episode in a single take is no gimmick but additive to the intensity of Netflix hard hitting drama. IBC365 speaks with creator Stephen Graham and director Philip Barantini.

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Single shot drama have become easier with the advance of lightweight and light sensitive cameras but there is still something bravura about the ambition. The team behind Netflix series Adolescence are past masters having made intense restaurant drama Boiling Point in one 90-minute sequence but the subject matter this time is altogether more serious.

“We didn't want it to become about the one take. The story drives the movements of the camera. That’s what we always wanted,” says Stephen Graham, who conceived the story, co-wrote it and is an executive producer along with Brad Pitt.

He also plays the role of Eddie Miller, a plumber with a wife and two teenage kids, whose regular life is upended when the police barge into his house one morning and arrest his son. We learn, later in episode one, that the charge is murder, more specifically a knife attack on a girl who also attends the local school. What follows is less a murder mystery than a social enquiry into why such an event could ever happen.

“I’d just read an incident about a young boy stabbing a young girl to death and then a couple of months later I saw another shockingly similar incident on the news,” Graham tells IBC365 of incidents including the murder of Brianna Ghey in Cheshire and another in South London of a girl stabbed to death at a bus stop. “If I'm honest with you it really did tear my heart. What kind of a society are we living in where this is becoming a regular occurrence? Why is this happening? Why are these boys picking up a knife and doing that to another girl?  The incidents that I'm talking about were at opposite ends of the country, one north and one down south. I wanted to raise awareness of this particular subject.”

Graham says he grew up loving the social commentary in drama and plays from writers like Alan Bleasdale and Jimmy McGovern. I thought, ‘why can’t we do that here and have a look at what’s happening?’ I knew straight away that Jack [Thorne] would be the person to help me pluck the four different episodes out of my head.”

Thorne, who collaborated with the actor on This is England and The Virtues, knew that Graham didn’t want this story to sit in Boiling Point’s shadow. Part of his task was to tell the four perspectives on the story as Graham had envisioned but work how they could connect to produce the final drama.

Set over a 13-month period, the four episodes each have different backdrops and time frames. Episode one focuses on the boy’s traumatising arrest and the superficially mundane yet deeply harrowing procedures he faces at the local police station.

“The whole project was very collaborative,” Graham adds. “By its nature it had to be.”

Thorne’s experience as a playwriter also came in handy since the format is acted like theatre but the audience – via the camera – can go to places no theatre audience can, such as into and out of cars.

Director Philip Barantini (who co-created Boiling Point and its BBC series spin-off) describes the process as a constant back and forth. “There moments when I’d realise logistically that we were not going to be able to something, given that we had one take, so we had to adapt.”

Also on board was director of photography Matt Lewis, who had masterminded the single-take for Boiling Point. He operated camera with Lee David Brown, carefully passing the camera from one to the other at points such as entering and exiting vehicles.

Production designer Adam Tomlinson built models for the team to place figurines and move them around to help plan the camera moves. Barantini and Lewis also spent a lot of time walking around the set minutely planning the camera so that when they finally pressed record nothing had been left to chance.

Barantini says he and Graham were asked after Boiling Point (the feature) if they would be interested in doing a TV series with each episode shot in one take.  “My initial response was like, are you mad? We've gone through Boiling Point and that was an experience, to say the least. Initially we were asked if we would do eight episodes, and we felt that was a bit too much, so let's focus on four episodes.

“It was Stephen who come up with the idea when we were travelling together in a car. He just went through each episode so enthusiastically and it just felt so organic to shoot it in a single take.”

A key aspect of the drama is the toxic masculinity of influencers like Andrew Tate who is not mentioned but referred to as a motivation for violent teenage behaviour. Graham stresses that Adolescence does not set out to be a polemic against social media. “I didn’t want to stand on a mountain preaching about anything,” he says. “I wanted us to make a thought-provoking drama that people were captivated by and couldn’t switch off.”

Barantini’s one take approach felt vital to that goal. “These days all of us - and especially the younger generation - are so used to watching short clips on their phones or on YouTube and getting a quick fix. But watching one continuous take demands that you don’t pick up your phone or go. It brings you into that real time element where you’re watching events unfold. It demands that you sit up and pay attention.”

The actors had two weeks of rehearsals for each episode during which Thorne was also in the room tailoring the script. Barantini encouraged the actors to play the scenes in as many different ways as possible. With a script honed to their performance they’d rehearse and rehearse, shooting twice a day with the director occasionally suggesting a tweak to one actor without the other knowing, to deliberately keep the performances on edge.

“He wanted to create something that felt electric and alive,” is how actor Erin Doherty describes it. “So we had a roadmap for the story but there were lots of surprises.”

The story was always going to be set in the North of England but the casting of Owen Cooper, who lives near Warrington, ultimately dictated where, albeit an identified suburbia. Making the 14 year old first time actor do any accent other than his own would have been unfair considering the other demands on him, Barantini says.

They shot at Production Park studios near Wakefield which has large stages frequently used as practice spaces for touring musicians from Beyonce to Metallica. Here they built the police station which features in episode one and the interview room for episode three.

Most importantly and crucially, adds the director, the studios were in real time distance from all the locations that the camera needed to travel to in the story.

“The police station needed to be a real time distance from the housing estate and the same for the DIY centre, the car park where the girl was murdered, and the school.”

Episode two was filmed at Minsthorpe Community School, minutes from the studios, and presented some of the production's biggest challenges in part because they were working with 320 boisterous child extras - all of them pupils from the real school - over a two-week period.  Barantini watched much of the shoot from a production vehicle disguised as a police van.

The camera is indeed rooted to the drama as it unfolds that only occasionally do you pause and wonder, ‘how are they doing that?’

A move at the end of episode two is one such moment. After 45+ minutes of intense drama in and around a school, the camera lifts up and you think the show will end high up on a crane shot overlooking the houses. Instead, you realise it is being carried by drone over houses, roads, an industrial estate then down, down onto a car park and the scene of the murder where we see Eddie (Graham) emerge from his van. This sequence required the expertise of drone experts The Helicopter Girls to smoothly move the camera from operator to drone and then caught to be carried by operator for the final few seconds. Remarkably, it was all planned and executed at the very last minute.

“We had a week to shoot each episode and two takes a day and we’re on the Wednesday afternoon when someone came up with a suggestion of flying a drone in order to see Eddie again,” says Graham. “Could we do that? Could we make the drone come down in one smooth movement? This was on the Wednesday and we were scheduled to finish on the Friday. We couldn't go into the next week because it's all a well-oiled machine.

“We had an amazing art and camera department and it was just phenomenal what they achieved. But for all of us this is a collective. It was a case of could we make it happen on the day.”

Barantini’s brother stood in for Graham in test runs. “Then we come to shoot it and we couldn’t because the wind was too strong,” the actor-producer-writer says. “We only had two proper takes to achieve the whole episode and the final take was the one that that worked and that was we used.”