The idea for the Netflix limited series “Adolescence” was born in the back of a car. On the way home from the BAFTAs, where their 2021 film “Boiling Point” had received four nominations, filmmaker Philip Barantini and his creative partner, actor-writer-producer Stephen Graham, were discussing ways to collaborate on a television project.
The conversation turned to a recent string of stabbings that teen boys had perpetrated against their female classmates—a pervasive issue that was spreading across the U.K. “Why are these boys picking up knives and stabbing young girls? What’s driving them to do that?” Barantini recalls thinking as he sifted through the headlines.
During that auspicious ride through London, he says that the pair dug into those questions and “looked deep inside ourselves.” They examined their own upbringings, the ways they dealt with adolescent rage, and how they might have fared had they been born a few decades later at a time when social media is shaping and warping how young men think about themselves. As they talked, Graham started to conceive a story about a family grappling with the immediate consequences of these societal issues.
“We wanted to spark a conversation about kids—and certainly boys—and what it’s like to be a young teenage lad in this day and age,” Barantini says. That initial idea morphed into an engrossing four-part series—and, eventually, a global phenomenon—co-created by Graham and screenwriter-playwright Jack Thorne and directed by Barantini.
“Adolescence” begins with the detainment and interrogation of Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), a 13-year-old accused of stabbing and killing a teenage girl at his school, and follows the complicated aftermath of the event through various perspectives over the next 13 months. Barantini captured each episode in a single, unbroken take (much like “Boiling Point,” which is set at a London restaurant). The technique turned a heavy emotional endeavor into a real-time narrative, which presented a lot of technical challenges.
Barantini says the reason for this formatting choice was simple: “It immerses the audience. It is about forcing the audience to focus on a specific perspective and be slightly uncomfortable with it. There’s no respite.”
His commitment to filming continuous takes presented both limitations and creative opportunities for the cast and crew. The production staff started by mapping out manageable locations—a police station, Jamie’s school, a detainment center, his family home—as well as the arcs of each episode and the influential people in the character’s sphere.
The story also needed to emphasize the sensitivity surrounding the crime without overexplaining the particulars of the case. “You don’t have much time to tell these stories, and I don’t like to be too expositional. Audiences are very smart,” Barantini says.
With so many young, first-time actors on set, the director had to learn how to shape raw talent. That started with the 15-year-old Cooper, who only had a few acting classes to his name. But after six rounds of auditions, Barantini began to understand Cooper’s personality and intuitive acting choices on a deeper level. “I found very quickly that he was someone who instinctively just listens and responds,” he explains.
Barantini’s interest in his teenage actors extended beyond their ability to emote and react in front of the camera. Much of Thorne and Graham’s scripts center on teenage lingo and the way Generation Alpha thinks. “I thought I was down with the kids at 45 years old, but I’m clearly not,” the director says.
In one instance, Alfie Ward, who plays Jamie’s crude classmate Moray, offered up some off-color, off-script slang: “You just got banged by a girl, you sausage.” Barantini felt the line was important to keep because of its authenticity. “I always wanted them to bring an element of themselves to their roles,” he says. “You don’t want them to be pretending when they don’t really have any experience expressing themselves as another person.”
Capturing every episode in one take—no stitching or cinematic tricks involved— was an exhaustive undertaking. It involved weeks of planning between Barantini and his longtime cinematographer Matthew Lewis; two weeks of blocking and dialogue rehearsals; and a final week of technical run-throughs for the camera operators, some who needed to pass off cameras mounted on drones.
On shooting days, Barantini filmed each episode twice in full so that by the end of the week, he had 10 versions to choose from. “If it’s going to be a oner, it needs to be a true oner,” he says. This meant including small dialogue and choreography mistakes. “Ultimately, the most important thing is the performances, because if the audience is not invested in the performances, then we’ve lost them.”
Since its debut in March, “Adolescence” has provoked a lot of hard conversations similar to the one Barantini had with Graham, both online and in British schools. The discourse has also reached beyond the U.K. “It’s just blown my mind,” he says. “And then you sort of realize: Oh, yeah; actually, this is a global issue.”
For his next project, “Enola Holmes 3,” Barantini is taking a break from oners. “I don’t want to do it all the time,” he says with a laugh. “It’s exhausting.”
This story originally appeared in the June 12 issue of Backstage Magazine.
Barantini Credit: Fred Duval/Shutterstock
