Ready for action
Stephen Graham reunites with the director of Boiling Point for an unflinching new one-shot drama
Netflix
- Benji Wilson
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It is the smallest of bumps but it consigns 45 minutes of hard work to the bin. I’m on-set in South Kirkby, West Yorkshire, watching filming on Adolescence, an extraordinary new Netflix drama starring Stephen Graham and Ashley Walters. Each of the four episodes is one continuous take. In the first, playing out here before my eyes, 13-year-old Jamie (played by newcomer Owen Cooper) gets a knock on the door at his house. Police officers pile in and the boy is arrested for murder. His father Eddie (Graham), shocked and bewildered, joins Jamie in the police car on the journey to the police station.
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The house, a real location, is just minutes away from a studio, where the production team have built an entire walk-through police station set. The camera follows Jamie and Eddie in the car – it is literally passed through the window at one end and passed out again when it arrives at the police station – and then the cameraman walks backwards as Jamie is led to be checked in and charged.
But then the cameraman nudges a doorframe, ever so gently… “It was a beautiful take,” says Graham afterwards, “but there was a bump. So we can’t use it.”
They will do it all again. In fact, the team filmed each episode around ten times before choosing the best take. The end result is a series that is as immediate and bracing as the shocking story it tells.
Phillip Barantini, Owen Cooper, Ashley Walters, Stephen Graham on the set of Adolescence. Netflix
“Where it came from, for me,” explains Graham, who co-created and wrote Adolescence with Jack Thorne (The Virtues, Toxic Town), “is there was an incident in Liverpool, a young girl, and she was stabbed to death by a young boy. I just thought, why?
“Then there was another young girl in south London who was stabbed to death at a bus stop. And there was this thing up North, where that young girl Brianna Ghey was lured into the park by two teenagers, and they stabbed her. I just thought, what’s going on? What is this that’s happening?”
Graham, who has two teenage children of his own with his wife, actor Hannah Walters, was adamant from the outset that the story shouldn’t play into stereotypes. “I wanted him to be a kid from a working-class background whose parents were hard-working. You know, his mum wasn’t an alcoholic, his dad wasn’t violent, and he hadn’t been molested by his uncle. I didn’t want there to be a reason we can go, ‘Oh, well, we blame it on this.’ I think we’re all accountable in some way. We just wanted to throw it out there, ask the question why, and see where it lands. And if it can create debate within living rooms with people watching it with their families, our objective is completed.”
It's the most zen and in the moment you can be as an actor
Stephen Graham
Graham and his longtime friend and collaborator, director Philip Barantini, with whom he previously worked on two continuous-shot
Boiling Point films as well a TV series, pitched Adolescence to Brad Pitt’s production company Plan B. “Brad was on the phone with us and he was so enthusiastic,” says Barantini, before pausing and laughing at himself talking about how much Brad Pitt loves his work.
Barantini is by no means the first film-maker to use continuous takes, but he sees the immersive nature of one-shot filming as an antidote to the way television is consumed these days.
“Personally, I find myself watching things, and it could be brilliant but I’ve got one eye on my phone, so you have to really grab me,” he explains. “I think what the one-shot does is makes you sit up and you can’t take your eyes off it, because if you do blink for a second you miss something. It draws the audience in.
“It’s like going to a play. If you go to a play, you can’t be on your phone, yeah? And so you’ve got to pay attention to everything.”
Making one-shot television requires meticulous planning and oversight. Barantini and his director of photography Matthew Lewis (see panel right) ran the movements of the camera and the performers again and again until it became muscle memory. For each of the four episodes they gave themselves a week for cast rehearsals, another week for tech rehearsals and then a third for the shoot. For the actors – Graham is joined by his A Thousand Blows co-star Erin Doherty, playing the clinical psychologist assigned to Jamie’s case, as well as Walters, who plays one of the investigating officers (see right) – filming in one long shot is exacting. It requires learning a lot of lines and staying switched on for the entire 45 minutes that the shoot takes. There are no opportunities to film reaction shots, no time to take a breather.
Mark Stanley as Paulie Miller, Owen Cooper as Jamie Miller and Stephen Graham as Eddie Miller in Adolescence. Netflix
“Doing this you combine both disciplines, theatre and television,” says Graham. “Without sounding too pretentious it’s the most Zen and in the moment you can ever be as an actor. You have to be ready and in that moment to carry it right the way through – the intensity, the ups, the downs, the highs, the lows. You have to have worked it out with your director and with your other actors, and you have to really have an understanding of where it may go and what it might be, but also allow different things to pop in or pop out, like someone forgetting a line, or doing something unexpected.
Graham and Barantini’s friendship was forged on the set of Band of Brothers in 2000. Barantini was an actor himself at that point, but from there their careers diverged. Graham powered on to become a major screen star; Barantini, by his own admission, remained a jobbing actor who had always wanted to direct but had lacked the self-belief.
It was Graham agreeing to star in Barantini’s 2019 short film Boiling Point, about a chef struggling with addiction issues – and do it in one continuous shot – that set their working relationship in motion, as well as jump-starting Barantini’s directing career.
“It took a lot of hard work for me to get to where I am,” says Graham. “But if you have that, you have to put your hand out to help other people get up on the ladder. Otherwise, there’s no point being there.
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“I mean, it started with a short film and now we are doing a massive four-part Netflix thing that’s strong and visceral and important. Two kids from a council estate! You know what I mean?”
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Benji Wilson
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