Adolescence
Netflix
Netflix has a new hit show, British crime drama, Adolescence, with only four episodes, which is unusual even for the genre. But you will quickly learn why this is, as each hour-long episode was filmed entirely in one take.
But was it really?
Yes, yes it was. We have sometimes seen “one-take” shots in film that use a bit of cheating to keep the shot going even if there’s secretly a cut, like a brief clip past a wall or something. But according to its cinematographer, absolutely none of that took place here, and what you see is what you get. These episodes actually were filmed in one-take through a laborious, almost technically impossible process that also demanded an unprecedented set of performances from its cast. Some spoilers follow.
Variety has an interview up with Matthew Lewis, the cinematographer on the show, where I’m not sure how many tougher bits of TV cinematography you can even imagine than Adolescence. And yes, it’s all one-take: “There’s no stitching of takes together,” says Lewis “It was one entire shot, whether I wanted it to be or not.”
How did this work in practice? What was the prep like? He’s got an answer for that as well:
“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.”
Then, there was a “nightmare” episode, the second one, that takes place entirely in a high school with dozens and dozens of children:
“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.”
Adolescence
Netflix
One of the great mysteries of the show was how total newcomer, Owen Cooper, who plays murder suspect Jamie Miller, was able to perform the way he did in this series, including episode three, a one-take that’s an entire interview of just him and a psychologist, which ranges from pleading to intimidation to tears, again, all in one continuous shot.
Apparently a big reason he was so good at this, in addition to being a great actor at baseline, was because this was his first onscreen acting role, so he didn’t know any other way of filming. They’d ask him to do something and he’d just do it with no real notes, thinking the way it was supposed to be done. “His naiveté was a superpower,” says Lewis.
So yes, everything you’re seeing here is real, including the final shot where they had to hurriedly attach a literal drone to the camera so it could fly up over the landscape. What an achievement.
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