Warning: This post contains spoilers for all four episodes of Netflix‘s Adolescence.
Netflix’s new crime drama Adolescence is an absolute knockout, a stunning look at a horrific crime… and it’s even more stunning when you realize how it was made.
Each episode of the UK series — which centers on a 13-year-old boy named Jamie being accused of murder — was filmed in a single take, with some running for more than an hour of continuous action, with school fights, foot chases and multiple location changes all included. So how did they do it? Well, it took a lot of work. “You see a swan glide gracefully across the water, but its legs are flapping like mad, and that is basically what each one of those episodes are,” co-creator and star Stephen Graham, who plays the boy’s father Eddie, says in a behind-the-scenes video posted to Netflix’s official Tudum site.
Netflix has released behind-the-scenes videos for each of Adolescence’s four episodes, giving us an inside look at how they pulled off such a technical feat. And indeed, it looks complicated, with the crew handling complex rigs and dollies to follow the actors as they walk (and sometimes run) through their scenes. It’s an immersive technique that makes the episodes feel like they’re taking place at the pace of real life, and it’s immersive for the actors as well. “You kind of feel like you’re in a theater space more than a TV space,” Ashley Walters, who plays detective Bascombe, says. “Once the train starts moving, no one can stop it.”
The cast and crew had three weeks to shoot each episode, Walters explains, “so the first week is spent literally walking through scene by scene.” Director Philip Barantini recalls that during the first week, they’d go over the script “over and over again” with the cast, “so it becomes muscle memory.” Then in the second week, they’d do a tech rehearsal with the crew, seeing what works and what doesn’t from a technical perspective. Then in the third week, “we get ten chances, two a day, to shoot in one take,” Walters remembers. (Episode 1 was captured on the second take they attempted, the videos reveal, but the three subsequent episodes were all captured on the very last take.)
Episode 2, set at Jamie’s school, offered some unique technical challenges, like the crew trying to wrangle 300 kids who were working as extras and then following Bascombe as he chased after a student fleeing on foot. They wanted the final shot of the episode to move from the school to the site of the murder, but they weren’t sure how to achieve this — until Barantini told co-creator and writer Jack Thorne, “I think we found a way to make the camera fly.” What they did is use a drone and attach it to the camera at the end, so it could float the camera from the school over to the murder site.
Episode 3, which saw Jamie in a battle of wills with child psychologist Briony, played by The Crown’s Erin Doherty, was actually the episode they shot first, and the producers were nervous about young actor Owen Cooper, who plays Jamie, jumping right into an hour-long scene. Barantini remembers giving Cooper notes on set, and then feeling “like ‘Is he listening to me?’” But “then he’ll go and do a take” and “every single note will be nailed.” In the end, the intense dialogue with Doherty “just took Owen into another place, and it took Jamie into another place,” Thorne recalls. “And actually, it was the best start we could’ve made for him.”
Episode 4 took a somber look at the effect Jamie’s ordeal had on his family, especially his father Eddie, and we see in the video that to capture Eddie’s trip to the hardware store with his family, they rigged a camera to the front of the van, and a crew member actually drove the van from a rig attached to the roof. With only one chance to get it right and so many things that could go wrong, the pressure was intense on every member of the crew. “Before each take, my heart is pounding,” director of photography Matthew Lewis admits. “Absolutely everyone feels it, because everyone knows how important their job is.” But Barantini credits his crew with banding together to pull off this remarkable achievement: “It takes a real army of people to put together… because without every single person, it could all collapse.”
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