_n_S1_E1_00_13_01_10.jpg?trim=0,0,0,960&width=1200&height=800&crop=1200:800 "Adolescence: How Netflix’s one-shot wonder came to life – UK Times")
Twelve-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) is in his pyjamas in a space-themed bedroom, when armed police smash through his front door in a dawn raid.
We, the viewer of Netflix’s Adolescence, follow the officers with bulletproof vests and guns in real time, as the schoolboy and his family are left shocked and terrified. Up the stairs, and into the bedroom, back down and into the van. “Did this really happen?” wrote confused social media users as a behind-the-scenes trailer for the show was released this week.
He is then driven to the local station, where his fingerprints are taken (we experience each one complete with beeping machine and officer instructions: “And the next one, and the next one…”). Medical tests are conducted, and a strip search is resisted by his father, Eddy Miller (played by the show’s co-creator and co-writer Stephen Graham). Jamie is accused of the brutal murder of a 13-year-old girl who is stabbed to death and left to die in a car park.
While a murder mystery is familiar ground for TV, Boiling Point director Philip Barantini’s decision to shoot each episode of this four-part series in one-take breaks new ground. With no editing, no outtakes, bloopers or re-dos, we watch as every minute adds to our understanding of the lives of its lead characters played by Graham, Ashley Walters, Erin Doherty and 15-year-old Cooper.
“It was quite difficult, but it was fun as well,” Barantini tells The Independent. “It was meticulously planned.”
Part of that planning included weeks of rehearsals, with one week for cast and one week for tech crew. Co-writer Jack Thorne, who has worked with Graham on multiple projects including This is England, was on hand to make changes to the script alongside the actor and director.
“[Tech rehearsals] would be an opportunity for the sound team to put the booms where they needed to be. And, we had all the support and the runners and ADs all dressed in police uniforms in the first episode and teachers in the second episode so they could be on camera and cueing things,” Barantini explains. “It was technically challenging, but a huge collaboration.”
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The show features real locations as well as ones created solely for production, like the police station and DIY store. Footage released by Netflix shows the sheer physical challenge of the feat; a cameraman in his shorts jogs along with police as they break down the door, before the camera is clipped onto a crane for the next sequence. It’s even strapped on to a drone to get a birds-eye view of the fictitious town. Each of the camera positions were meticulously mapped out with cinematographer Matt Lewis . With the foundation in place, Barantini says, from there it was “sort of a dance really”.
Barantini has previously explained that the one-shot approach to filming is an intentional device used to demand the attention of time-poor viewers. He used the technique in his 2019 film Boiling Point, although the series posed a bigger challenge than the one-location backdrop of the restaurant in that movie. But beneath the clever directing and the scrupulous technicalities lies something far more terrifying. “Really what it’s about is looking at male rage and looking at our own anger and looking at who we are as men,” says Thorne.
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“We’re all three very different types of men, but we all have a relationship with anger and, and I think that’s what I’m proudest of in the show is that we looked at ourselves and I think that honesty shows through on the screen.”
Predicted to be an “instant classic” by industry professionals, the idea was the brainchild of A Thousand Blows star Graham, who portrays Jamie’s hot-headed father. “I read an article about a young boy stabbing a young girl,” he says. “And then maybe a couple of months later, on the news there was [another] young boy who’d stabbed a young girl, and if I’m really honest with you, they hurt my heart. I thought that this would be a really interesting thing to look at for many aspects but, as a society to maybe ask the question why.”
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Adolescence does not deal with Andrew Tate or incel culture directly, an intentional decision by writer Thorne to shed light on the complex influences impacting young people. “The kids aren’t watching Andrew Tate,” he says. “They’re watching a lot more dangerous stuff than Andrew Tate. We were trying present a portrait of complexity of this kid that had been made by all sorts of different influences and the thing about incel culture is there’s a logic to it.”
Cooper, the show’s breakout star, is now set to star as the young Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights alongside Margot Robbie. Graham reveals that the team behind Adolescence were adamant about “creating opportunities” and says that Cooper’s success is one of the show’s “biggest achievements”. Hailing from “a normal working class family from a normal council estate” he describes Cooper’s family as “just wonderful, beautiful people”. Everyone unsuccessful in the audition for the role of Jamie was recruited as an extra in school scenes.
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The challenge of weaving sensitive topics with industry-defying technical routines kept Barantini up at night, and gave Hannah Walters, Graham’s wife and executive producer of Adolescence, “dry mouth and heart palpitations”.
But after one week of filming, which included doing two takes every day, there weren’t any “major mistakes”, says Barantini. The team selected the best take of 10 options for the final cut, though there were some minor mishaps.
“One time the camera was knocked on the door, so the lens shook a little bit and we wouldn’t be able to fix that,” he says. “And the other time the lights just went off in the studio in the police station. So it was like, we can’t shoot this now, we have to stop.”
Yet the pressure was palpable. “The actors are in it. There’s no room for error and everyone has the ball and you’re passing the ball to each other and it’s trust. All the actors are trusting each other and if they mess up a line, someone else will come in.”
Adolescence is available to stream on Netflix now.
