SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for “Adolescence,” streaming now on Netflix.
Netflix’s “Adolescence” is a four-part limited series that uses one continuous shot per episode to create intense emotion as it follows 13-year-old schoolboy Jamie Miller, played by newcomer Owen Cooper, who is arrested on the suspicion of murdering his classmate.
The action unfolds in real time, from the police conducting an early morning raid, taking him in for questioning and interrogating him to finding out what really happened to his classmate, and did he do it? Cinematographer Matthew Lewis worked with Philip Barantini to deliver the director’s signature one-shot style throughout the four episodes. That meant no invisible edits. Lewis confirmed with Variety, “There’s no stitching of takes together. It was one entire shot, whether I wanted it to be or not.”
Lewis and Barantini shot everything as one continuous scene to create a feeling of tension and nervousness as the story, and Jamie’s intentions, reveal themselves.
Collaboration, finding the right locations and finding the right camera gear were all key to pulling it off. Here Lewis breaks down his prep process, how he did it, and which mess-ups occurred.
It came down to “Does the script work in its entirety for this format?” It’s so specific, and you don’t want to force something into working. Our writer Jack Thorne was super collaborative and wanted to know where it didn’t work. Phil or I would email him and say, “The camera travels too far by itself, and we need motivation to get from here to here.” He would write additional moments. During rehearsals, he would be rewriting stuff and coming up with ideas. I think it was a unique challenge for him once he knew that we weren’t mental and that we were going to do a good job with his script.
It’s a lot of planning. You can’t do a shot list, so we didn’t have one. We mapped the area we were using and looked at how the camera would move within it, and we rehearsed it like a dance, between me and the cast. But even before that, Phil and l were looking for locations, and once we had that, we’d plot the route and move all the puzzle pieces until it made sense. The biggest challenge was how to go from a real house to a fake police station. So, we had to find a studio near suburban homes, and we eventually found an area in South Kirkby, Yorkshire.
I didn’t want it to be handheld, and Phil agreed. I was concerned that four hours long would just be nauseating. In a small environment, like a kitchen, it worked, but traveling around and moving up and down long corridors, you’d feel every footstep, and it would feel like a documentary.
The other challenge was what do we shoot it on? If a person is holding a camera, they need to hold it for an hour. It needs to not be super heavy.
We tested the Ronin gimbals and shot on the DJI Ronin 4D. It had its limitations, but in the ways we needed it to work: being a small gimbal that you could pass between operators, one that you can hold out in front of you without having to attach it to a person, and at the click of a button, you can go handheld, or click it onto a drone.
It was an absolute nightmare. All of the kids are from the school we were filming in. The AD did a fantastic job of coordinating their movements. Every teacher was an AD, when the camera wasn’t pointing at them, they were ushering people through.
From a crowd perspective, it was very ambitious, but the kids were game for making it work.
From a technical standpoint, the video team connected 10 or 12 receivers around the school that all fed back to a main video village. That meant that there was always a signal. They would select the strongest signal and switch between the different inputs so the director and the AD could see an image the whole time – and we’re covering a really large area, including going up a road. In all the episodes, the boom operators are always over my shoulder, or Lee’s shoulder, my other operator, so they’re also learning the dance. They’ve got people hidden behind walls and everywhere you can imagine. The blocking couldn’t change so we knew exactly where we were looking. It was never any guesswork. There are very few moments that could stray from the path.
At the end of the school episode, we connected to a drone, which flies away, and we land again at a car park. It was a last-minute request from the execs. We were originally going to take off and fly and stay up in the air, but they thought it would be a nice beat to go back and find Stephen Graham at the end of the scene, so we had a couple of days to work that out, but we got it.
One-shots work best when there’s movement, and this was never going to have movement. It was always going to be around the table – but the camera feels like it’s just floating around for no reason.
We built a rig that could make our camera work in that way. I couldn’t pass it off to anyone because it was just attached to me on an arm.
Essentially the choreography all the way through was mirroring every single beat. We went through the script and started working it out. “Okay, we start moving because there’s energy here, and there’s a lull here, so we need to be still.” We found those moments, and looked for what would be the next impetus to move. It would be because he picks up his water, or he takes a bite of a sandwich – that micro change in the energy of the room would give us enough of a reason to slowly move from our markers and spiral around them.
I don’t know how much of it was him fully understanding what we were doing, and how much of it was him coming at it from an approach of never having done this before. He never had any other experience of a set. So me spiraling around him at a table was him thinking, “This is what we do? Fine.” His naiveté was a superpower. I didn’t have to speak to him very much other than making him to not be aware of me. I said, “You move how you want to move. I’m going to be dressed all in black, and I’ve got this black camera, and I’m not there.” He got it.
To start, there were moments where I’d poke the camera over the table towards his face, and you could see him slightly leaning away or moving his head just slightly away, but once we had the conversation, he got it.
There were a few. The lights going off was the iPad that controls the lights just crashed, and everything reset. I didn’t know it was happening, because I was waiting somewhere to take the camera, and it wasn’t where it was being affected, and the rooms went dark.
There’s a take where I walked ino the wall. I turned a corner out of the medical room, and as I was turning the corner, the inside of the door frame hit the gimbal. It twitched left, and came back to the center. It was half a second, but there was nothing that could be done. That was half an hour before the end of one of the takes. The take was dead. But that was a humbling moment, for sure.
In episode 4, Lee had a similar moment, but the gimbal went floppy. It’s when Stephen chases the kid on the bike and gets to the wrestling moment, and the gimbal just looks at the floor for a second and back up – there’s nothing you can do with that.
In episode 3, there was something about the room, and the signal would freak out and we would lose focus. I thought I was pushing in on Owen as he’s being wrestled out of the room – to the right of my monitor, I have a chart so I can see the focus wheel moving up and down, and then it wasn’t moving. I was moving in on Owen and I could see his eyes go soft. I was like, “Oh, shit. What’s happened?” I tried to override the focus, and focus pulled for a bit, but I clicked it onto autofocus, and it snapped to his face really quickly. He gets pulled out of the room, and it pulls to the wall, and he’s banging on the windows, and I pull back to find Erin Doherty. As I’m pulling back to her, as she’s crying, it lost its mind and started to pull all over the place, and the focus went crazy. It was midway through the week, and I thought that was the one. So when we lost that, I thought “We were so close.” Alas, we got another one after that.
The VFX is stuff for when we went through a window in one of the episodes. We couldn’t do that in real life. But there was no stitching of takes together – it was one entire shot in its entirety, whether I wanted it to be or not.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
