Interview: ‘Adolescence’ Director Philip Barantini on Navigating Those Single Shots and Exploring Toxic Masculinity
Adolescence dropped on Netflix earlier this year to universal praise and attention, which isn’t surprising since it’s four of the most tense hours you could spend with a television this year.
It’s a four episode limited series where each episode is one continuous take that films in real time as the camera follows the unraveling of a young girl’s murder case. Young Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) is at the center of it all, accused of taking his classmate’s life – the series follows Jamie and his family’s life as everything comes undone after the first episode’s police invasion of the Miller’s home. Each episode is a different moment in time after the initial arrest that showcases the goings on of the family, Jamie’s time locked up, and how the lives of everyone in the town are changed. There’s a raw emotional pull to the series because of the tension that never lets up, it allows the audience to feel connected to everything happening while not shying away from the darker moments. The camera doesn’t pull away as the tension rises, only pushing closer and holding on the characters in the worst moments of their lives. It’s a precise feat of directing to pull off every episode this way, which director Philip Barantini knew going in.
I spoke to Barantini about his work on the series, jumping on in the early days before there were scripts, the challenges of the continuous shot, and how masculinity is explored in the limited series.
Tyler Doster: What was your first directorial decision after reading the scripts and what was your reaction to reading the scripts?
Philip Barantini: Well, I joined the project way before that. I sort of spoke to Plan B about the idea and we went off and developed it together with Matriarch and Warp Films and Jack Thorne obviously. But I think the idea came from Stephen and I in the back of a taxi. But the idea that we had in comparison to the script that Jack wrote for the first episode at least, was pretty much page for page. It was exactly what we’d had in our heads.
And so when we read it, it was, and obviously Jack is such an incredible writer and he just put so much nuance in things. So we read it. I had an idea in my head about how I thought it was going to be, and then when I got the script, it was just exactly that, but so much more. And I remember reading that first draft, and I don’t usually, when I’m reading a script, I read it as open as possible. Because I used to be an actor, so I read things and I hear the characters and things like that. But with this, I was doing that, but then I also just got lost in it and it flew so quickly. And I remember at the end of episode one I was in bits. I put the script down and I was so emotional for a long time afterwards actually. And that first draft that got sent in was pretty close to what we shot.
TD: Speaking of shooting, how long was the shoot and was there any one episode that took longer than the others for any particular reason?
PB: No, no. We planned on 12 weeks in total for the whole series. Prior to the 12 weeks, we did five months, I think prep, five or six months prep. So the way that we’d set it out was each episode was in a three-week block. So the first two weeks were rehearsals, and then the final week was the shoot week. So we would shoot twice per day, so we’d have two full takes per day. So each episode, but the aim was to have 10 times the episode by the end of the week. And we never went over that week because we didn’t want to eat into the following week, which is the next episode. But there were times when we had to stop midway through a take and start again, or if we had time, we’d start again. If we didn’t, we’d have to wait till the next day. So I think in total, we did the most, like 16 takes, I think, something like that, because we had to stop, start. But yeah, no, we never went over. It was stressful, but yeah. Amazing. Exhilarating. Exhilarating is the right word.
TD: How do you think masculinity not only relates to the story specifically, but is explored by this story?
PB: Oh, massively. Massively. And when we were researching this toxic masculinity and the incel culture and all of those things, both me and Stephen, actually, me, Stephen, and Jack, we delved deep into our own masculinity and our own pasts and what it means to be a man when we were growing up, but also what it means now. And it’s kind of different. We’re so… Look, social media is an equally fantastic tool, but also a really dangerous tool. And I think what social media in a lot of areas tells these young boys what they need to be to be a man, what they should be to be a man is quite frankly terrifying. And it’s not just the masculinity thing, it’s everything really. It’s like this is how you need to look. This is how you need to, this is how you should have your hair. This is what clothes you should be wearing. If you want to fit in, this is what you should conform to.
And I think we’ve only touched the surface really in the show, in Adolescence because you’re very limited and we are focused on this one particular family story. But I think we’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg really in terms of how dangerous this is, social media, incel culture, all of those things, toxic masculinity. When Jack was researching this show, he went on a deep dive into the dark web and all of those places where we touch upon Andrew Tate in the show. But Andrew Tate actually is not the big problem. It’s a lot, lot darker than him. And the access to this stuff is easy.
One of the things that Jack says, he said when he was researching this stuff and looking at all of this stuff, he imagined himself, he went back to him being a 13-year-old boy and he’s talking about Jack Thorne here, himself. The stuff that he was reading and that he could see made complete logical sense to him. And that is the scariest thing, because it shouldn’t make sense because it’s toxic and it’s not nice. But him being, when he was a boy, if he’d have read that, he would’ve believed it. And that terrified him, he said.
Tyler Doster: You said that you feel like you guys just really hit the tip of the iceberg. Do you think there’s room to keep exploring this on the show or if the show ever continued?
PB: I don’t think we should. I mean, look, of course there is. There’s room to explore this subject forever, in my opinion, but I don’t think we should. I think this was Jamie’s story. This was the Millers’ story. I think we’ve told that story now. I don’t know. We’d all love to work together again within the same format. Whether that’s a different story or not, who knows. But yeah, and certainly the Miller story is done. That was a slice of life and a slice of moments in time. So yeah.
TD: How did you work to keep the tension built throughout the four episodes while consistently broadening the emotional scope?
PB: I think you have to be very, like what I said earlier, the five months, six months that we had in prep, myself and Matthew Lewis, my cinematographer, we would break down the script into sections and we would talk about things like in this moment, do we focus on the person talking or do we focus on the person listening, or are we on a wide for this moment, or do we hold on this shot for just that little bit too long to make the audience feel uncomfortable? All of these things that we would talk about through the prep before any actors came on set. So when the actors were on set, we could then play with the performances and it’s about performance, it’s about timing.
And then when we’re in post, obviously there’s no edit. So we have the full episode ready to go. We just then play with sound and we play with music. When do we need music? When do we not need music? I don’t ever like to spoon-feed an audience with music and go, you must feel this right now. I think sometimes if you hold back on music and you could hear a pin drop in a room, sometimes that makes an audience sit up and hold their breath. And I think it was just, we were really conscious about playing with those moments. You don’t want an audience to go into each episode, which is an hour long and it has to be 11 the whole time. You wanted to have ebbs because even though my goal was always to make an audience put their phones down and sit up and pay attention for an hour or four hours, it still can’t be at one level the whole time. It can’t be tension, tension, tension. There has to be moments of just like a breather, and then you go back into the tension.
So it was really meticulously planned out in terms of, it started with a beautiful script and then we would tweak the certain moments. And even just like someone being on the phone, for example, and not hearing the other side of the conversation makes an audience lean in and just like, I wonder what’s being said on the other side because in real life you don’t hear the other side of a conversation. If someone’s on the phone, unless they’ve got it on loudspeaker, you can’t hear the other person. So I always like to play with realism and things like that. And I think when you play with realism, like documentaries for example, like crime documentaries, you’re on the edge of your seat because it’s real. So I think for me, I wanted this to feel as real as possible.
TD: Why was it necessary to do the continuous takes and why did you decide to do it that way?
PB: It was the very first thing. Plan B came to me and said, “We want to make something with you and Stephen, and we want to do it all in one take.” Because we did a movie called Boiling Point. We want to do it like that, but we want to do it in the TV space because we don’t feel it’s ever been done before. Obviously there’ve been episodes or parts of episodes or things like that, but not the way that I like to do it, which is a true one take, no cuts. And so they said, “Go off and think of an idea.”
So the technique came before the idea, and we thought about it very hard, about like what, because when you do it that way, one takes, you have to be very careful about the story. And for me, I never want the one take to overshadow the story or the performances. It always needs to feel like a secondary subconscious feeling. You know what I mean? So it’s a very conscious thing for me and Matt and all the team. We make a very conscious decision to try to make it feel subconscious for the audience, if that makes sense.
TD: Yeah, to keep a fluidity there. I definitely understand what you mean.
PB: Yeah. And also I wanted to tell these four moments in time in an overall timeline of 13 months. I wanted to dive the audience in at the beginning of this moment when all hell breaks loose, lives are changed forever. Then we go a couple of days later, we figure out what’s going on with the friends and then we take the audience out and then we’re later, six months later. And so it’s all about dipping the audience in these moments in time. And there’s something for an audience to have to fill in the blanks essentially and understand and really pay attention to what’s being said. And so you can be like, oh, actually so, oh, so he’s been in there for six months, this is his last thing, so he must have had a few meetings with the psychologist. So audiences are very smart, very smart, and you need to treat them that way.
TD: Who surprised you the most out of all of your performers when you were working with everybody?
PB: Oh, hands down Owen [Cooper]. Look, all of the young performers, all of the young actors surprised me because most of them had never worked before, but for them to come on a project like this where it’s like doing a play, it’s not like a regular TV job where you can sit in your trailer and you can hang out, and then you get brought to set and you do your scene and then you go back to your trailer, you have lunch. This was like, you’re on set. You’ve got to be in character for one hour the whole time. And Owen was somebody that just impressed me on a daily basis. I would push as far as I could every day and just push him and push him and push him. And every time he’d push back and he’d be like, he’d really push himself. And then there were moments where I would give him notes and he would stare at me with this blank look on his face and I’m thinking, he’s not listening to me, he’s not taking any of this in.
And then he’d go, “Yeah, okay.” And then he’d go and we’d start and every single note that I gave him he’d hit and he wouldn’t just hit it. He’d put his own little spin on it as well, and he got really confident. So it was an incredible experience watching him grow. But everyone. I think, I don’t know if surprised is the right word, but every day was brand new, we weren’t coming in and going, “right, we know what we’re doing today. Okay, everyone ready? Let’s go.” It was like, yeah, we know what we’re doing today, but anything can happen, so let’s live on the edge a little bit. And everyone just stepped up to the plate. There wasn’t a single person that was half-assed, being like, not wanting to come to work or it’s just another job. Everyone came to work with this energy and it was palpable and it was just a beautiful thing to experience. And so everyone excited me. Every single member of the cast and crew every day was just exciting, it’s just a real camaraderie and passionate family that we created.
TD: Speaking of anything can happen, is there anything major that you had to, or decided to, pivot on during filming?
PB: Yeah, there was. There was a huge thing in episode two with the drone. Basically on the shoot week on Tuesday, we’d already shot two takes on Monday. We came in on Tuesday, we shot one take, and then we were just about to do the second take in the afternoon. And Toby Bentley, who was one of the Netflix executives, came up to us and said, “I feel like we need Stephen in this episode somewhere.” I was like, “Oh, great. Nice one. Where’s he going to go? It’s Tuesday. We’ve already started filming the episode.” And he was like, “What if he’s putting flowers down on the murder site or something?” And I was like, “Oh, yeah, that’s a great idea. Let’s do that.” Because the idea originally was for the drone to take off, and then it just flies and hovers over the murder site and then it flies away.
So it never landed in the original script, the original idea. And then he was like, “We’ve taken off on the drone. Do you think we could land it again and take it off the drone and walk with it or something?” I was like, because the way my brain works and the way that I am, I was like, I knew I wouldn’t be able to go another few hours without trying it. So we wrapped for the day and everyone went home, and then I was speaking to everyone. I said, “Right. Tomorrow what we’re going to do is we’re not going to do a take in the morning. We’re going to practice this move all morning to see whether we can do it.” And we did it once out of four shots, and it worked once, and I was like, “Yeah, that’s enough for me.” So the following day, we tried to do the take on Wednesday and in the afternoon and it didn’t quite work, and I was like, “It’s all right. We’ve got a couple of days. We’ll get it. We’ll get it.”
We came in on Thursday and the weather forecast was the strongest gale force winds we’ve ever had in the UK in years, so we couldn’t even take off on the drone on Thursday, so we had to pivot again. So now we decided that Stephen was just going to be across the road at the school. We’re going to walk across the road with the camera. He’s going to be standing there with some flowers. Lovely, really emotional. I was like, “Yeah, but it’s not what we planned. Let’s see whether we can get it on Friday, see if the weather changes.” Came in on Friday. The weather was perfect. We did it once in the morning. It was okay. The final take of the whole week was the take that we used, and it was perfect, but it was stressful, that was the most stressful episode, the most stressful week I’ve ever had.
TD: Was there an intense relief after that was over?
PB: Oh, honestly, it was like, I could only describe it as what I would imagine winning like the Super Bowl for you or for the World Cup football for us, and being the goalscorer. That is what I can imagine it felt like.
Philip Barantini is Emmy-nominated for Outstanding Directing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie for Adolescence.
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