When Adolescence, created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, dropped on Netflix in March, the psychological drama series quickly took the world by storm. There weren’t many people who weren’t talking about the four-episode series that follows a 13-year-old boy, Jamie, played by Owen Cooper, arrested for the murder of a girl at his school. At the forefront of these conversations was the captivating cinematography by Matthew Lewis, who shot each episode in one continuous take.
With two-week rehearsals for each episode (and 11 weeks of prep for Lewis ahead of production), the cast (composed of Graham, Cooper, Ashley Walters and Erin Doherty) and crew filmed two takes a day (save for false starts or technical difficulties that stopped the shot). “Every moment was a fucking challenge,” Lewis tells THR.
Lewis, whose 2021 film Boiling Point is known for being captured in a single, continuous 90-minute take, spoke with THR about working with Cooper on his first acting job and challenges they faced filming.
Each of the four episodes was shot in one continuous take. Was there ever a conversation that it wouldn’t be shot that way?
It was always the idea. There were little conversations that I had with Phil [Barantini, director] about what we do as a safety net. We started with episode three, which I was like, “How are they going to remember all these words? This is nuts. Do we need to split it into sections?” Also, one of the actors in that room is a kid, and this is his first acting job — obviously, he’s great — but I didn’t know that beforehand, so I said to Phil, “I’m just going to plan in a couple of little moments where, if we’re getting toward the end of the week and we haven’t got the take, we can use that moment to stitch a couple of shots together.” We didn’t need to because [Cooper] was better than the adult cast. He knew all his words from day one. So that idea went out the window pretty quickly.
Cinematographer Matthew Lewis filming episode three.
Courtesy of Ben Blackall/Netflix
Given that this was Owen’s first acting gig, did you have conversations before you started shooting?
What was really unique for him was that he didn’t have anything to compare this to, so that played in his — and our — favor. We didn’t have to overly explain what the one-shot thing was. Essentially, I was just in the room the whole time, and you perform the whole thing from start to end. Quite early in rehearsals, I brought the camera in because we wanted to show him what it was going to be like when we get to it. I had the rig on me, and I just moved around in front of him, and we just practiced him ignoring me. The first time I did it, he wanted to lean away, and I was like, “No, just keep looking. Don’t you move an inch. Pretend I’m not even here.” And then once I’d explained that, he was away with it. From that point on, you can never feel him changing his performance for the camera. If I look at the behind-the-scenes again, it’s me dressed in all black, sweat dripping from my brow onto the fucking table in front of him, and he just took it in stride.
How much rehearsal time did you have?
I had about 11 weeks of prep. I came on really early on this because it was very much about the camera. If a location wasn’t going to work from a technical perspective, I needed to be able to flag it, and I didn’t want them to fall in love with something that I couldn’t make work later on. We would map out all of the locations, and we would plot all the routes and all the camera turns, and every single little beat — including cast positions — would be mapped out on an animated top-down view of the location. And we split it into sections, whatever made sense — maybe going into a building or leaving — and we’d have that master plan going into rehearsals. Rehearsals for each episode would be two weeks. The first week wasn’t really touching the camera — it was more me with my iPad, moving around the space with Phil and the cast, working out performances and us all collectively working out blocking. And then once we had that in a good place, camera would come in, and we make sure that practically, we can achieve a lot of the shots that I could do on my iPad. There were a thousand problems to work out every day. That second week was camera rehearsals with the cast, and we just kept repeating sections over and over again until we got it to a place where we were doing large sections. And then toward the end of that week, it would be like, “Let’s try and maybe do the first half of the episode.” Then the third week of each episode was shoot week.
How many takes did you do a day?
We had two attempts a day because it’s exhausting. It’s kind of like a play: You wouldn’t do more than a matinee and an evening thing. We did one in the morning, one in the afternoon so that everyone had time to rest because it’s physical for the operators and really physical and emotionally exhausting for the cast. And there are big resets for our department: For throwing paint on a van, they’ve got to wipe the van down and be ready in a couple of hours, and the shop that they pull up at has paint all over it now, so you hose it all down. When we did episode three, I thought maybe we could do three a day, but I’m glad I didn’t because it was really tough. I operated that one solely, and it was exhausting. There’s no edit, so they have to be fully locked in, giving it everything they’ve got because this might be the tape that is used. … Two takes a day for five days, so we had 10 attempts. Sometimes there were false starts, so on some of our episodes we had like 16 takes.
Erin Doherty and Owen Cooper in the show’s third episode.
Courtesy of Ben Blackall/Netflix
What were some reasons you had to stop a take?
Name and shame! I’ll start with my team. On episode one, the computer that controls the lighting crashed and reset the lights. They turned off in the police station, and there wasn’t a quick reset because it was a whole line of cues and it reset from cue 30 down to one, so to get back to 30, you have to slam this button 30 times to get back. I walked into a wall in one take, but we didn’t cut. We’re right near the end, and the gimbal clipped the frame of a door as we turned the corner out the medical room, and the camera sort of went, “bloop, bloop.”
What was the biggest challenge?
The fight at the school was pretty intense because we had to push through the crowds, and each time, it was a different child that had to move out of the way. My grips were leading me, tapping people on the shoulder to get them to move as I crabbed sideways through the crowd. That was tricky because every time they came out [into the schoolyard], they would all just be in a slightly different [formation], especially when they rushed over for the fight. People just had to be really aware of the camera. Episode two, where the drone happens, that was a real challenge because it was basically too windy almost every day, apart from the last day. … Every moment was a fucking challenge.
But the scariest thing in the whole thing was, how do we apply the one-shot to episode three [which consists of Jamie and a psychologist talking]. Typically, one-shots work really well when there’s more movement because it always gives you an excuse to change the framing. There’s energy there to work with. … I thought, “If I’m just mindlessly spinning around these two people, it’ll be like a Michael Bay moment that lasts for an hour,” which no one wants to watch, as good as those moments are in the right context. It had to be really delicate, vulnerable and in tune with the headspace of the characters. I thought that episode could have sucked, but I’m really proud of it.
This story first appeared in a May stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
