No Cuts, Pure Tension: “Adolescence” Director Philip Barantini on Crafting Netflix Thriller in Unbroken Single Takes

British actor Stephen Graham is so reliably intense he played Al Capone for Martin Scorsese in Boardwalk Empire, stared down Al Pacino in The Irishman, executive producer and co-starred in the bare knuckle boxing drama A Thousand Blows, and earned the prestigious Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) award for his contributions to UK television. Now he’s co-written the acutely tense Adolescence (streaming on Netflix on March 13), a four-part series that centers on Graham’s character Eddie Miller, the bewildered father of a 13-year-old boy who’s been charged with killing a female classmate after he was bullied on social media.

Director Philip Barantini filmed each episode as a single unbroken take, coaxing taut performances from veteran actors, including Erin Doherty and Ashley Walters, both of whom worked with Graham on A Thousand Blows. But the series’ most explosive star turn comes from teenaged newcomer Owen Cooper as the rage-filled Jamie.

Barantini, a former actor (Band of Brothers, Chernobyl) teamed with DP Matt Lewis to meticulously prep the shoot with production designer Adam Tomlinson, who built models and miniature action figures that enabled filmmakers to choreograph all the action in advance.

Speaking from London, Barantini, who earlier directed Graham in the drama Boiling Point, talks about his attraction to one-take storytelling and explains how he steered 14-year-old Owen Cooper toward one of the year’s most spellbinding acting debuts.

You filmed each episode of Adolescence in a single unbroken take. Why?

I didn’t ever want the one-shot to be at the forefront of the show as a spectacle, like, ‘Look how clever we are,’ but there are just many distractions nowadays and we’re all so used to watching TV or film even at home with one eye on the screen, and one eye on the phone. With Adolescence, I wanted the audience to go on an immersive journey that unfolds in real time just as it’s unfolding for the actors in real time. [The single-take] creates a tension and forces a perspective on the audience to where they can’t look away, even if they feel anxious or awkward. [The one-shot] doesn’t lend itself to all genres, but for this show, we wanted to dip the audience in for an hour, and we pull them out. The next time, it’s a few days later or 13 months later, and it’s up to the audience to figure things out for themselves. ‘Hold on, where are we now?’ So that’s the why.

What about the “How?” Three out of four Adolescence episodes move through multiple locations and shift focus among numerous characters with no cuts. How did you coordinate all of that?

By filming each episode like a choreographed dance. It took extensive planning and rehearsals, not just with the actors and myself. We had to bring in certain pieces at certain times, and the dance is moving, and then you bring in this part, and then you bring in that part [swirling his hands around in the air]. Yes, I’m dancing with my hands! So we plan all of that way in advance and made each episode in three-week blocks.

What kind of process took you through each of these “blocks”?

When we get to set the first week, we rehearse with the actors and gently ease into it beat by beat, slowly getting to the end of the episode. Then we go back to the beginning and do it again, stopping and starting, tweaking as we go along.

Then what?

Second week we do tech rehearsals with every single member of the crew, all of the extras, everybody’s there because again, it’s like a dance and everybody has their part to play so they need to be watching at all times. And then, the final week is shoot week. Everyone comes on set at 10 in the morning, in costume, makeup, everything. I call action. An hour later, I call cut. By then, most of my work had been done in prep and rehearsal. I watch it play out live, but as soon as I call action, I can’t stop it.

Since you’d spend only one hour to capture an entire episode in a single take, why did you need a full week to film each show?

Because we’d shoot each episode twice every day! We’d have an hour in the morning. Then a three-hour break to give notes, then we’d come back in the afternoon and shoot it again. By the end of the week, we’d have ten [versions] of the same episode. We’d choose which one we wanted to go with. Sometimes, it was really difficult to decide, but for me, it’s always about performances. If the audience is focusing on the one-shot or what the set looks like or the costumes or anything like that, then I feel we’ve lost the viewer.

This 13-year-old was just arrested on suspicion of murder, flipping his family’s life upside down.

Adolescence is now playing. pic.twitter.com/beBq4VJIhB

— Netflix (@netflix) March 13, 2025

The actors’ performances in Adolescence make it easy to forget the technical achievement. Stephen Graham, in the final episode, for example, takes Eddie on a wildly emotional journey from a man enjoying his birthday breakfast to a sobbing heap of humanity.

SPOILER ALERT

Stephen’s magnificent. He doesn’t pay attention to what he’s doing himself but soaks up his environment and listens to everybody else. In that episode, Eddie’s trying to hold it together for his family, his family’s trying to hold it together for him, but we witness them all falling apart. At the very end, Eddie is exhausted and emotionally drained and so is Stephen. One of the notes I gave Eddie’s wife Manda (Christine Tremarco), and Stephen as well, is that when Jamie makes the phone call [from jail], imagine that your child has been a life support machine for all this time, and that phone call is the doctor telling you that they’re going to switch the machine off. Now you have to get out of the van and go into the house with that. And certainly Stephen’s reaction. There was not a single one of us who had a dry eye. It was gut-wrenching.

Stephen Graham landed precisely in that dark place at the 58-minute mark every morning and every afternoon for five days in a row – that’s impressive. But the big discovery in Adolescence has to be Owen Cooper as young Jamie, who cycles through a frightening range of emotions within the confines of the interrogation room while being questioned by a child psychologist. You must have rehearsed the heck out of that scene!

The amazing thing about Owen is, he’s never acted before.

What?

He didn’t come to us with any preconceptions about how he should be acting, so I was able to give Owen the freedom to just be natural and in the moment. Erin Doherty, who played Briony, is such a reactive actor that early on, I said to her “I’m not going to give you any notes. I’m going to give all the notes to Owen” because I knew whatever he did, she would react to it naturally in the moment.

What was it like directing a kid who had no professional training?

Owen came to the set on day one of rehearsals, and he was completely off the book. He knew all his lines and didn’t need the script, which blew me away. I was like, “Okay, we’re good here.” I just needed to jump in the boat with him, like we have one oar each, and I’ll guide him in a way that is also Owen guiding himself.

How did it feel when you came out the other end of this hyper-focused method of TV making?

For me as a filmmaker, Adolescence is the most collaborative experience I’ve ever been a part of. We hope it sparks conversations between parents, teachers, adults, and children because we want the show to almost be holding up a mirror to society in terms of what’s happening to young boys, certainly in our country, but globally as well.

Adolescence is streaming on Netflix now.

Featured image: Adolescence. (L to R) Owen Cooper as Jamie Miller, Stephen Graham as Eddie Miller in Adolescence. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2024