As well as its incredible acting performances and tough subject matter, Adolescence has generated plenty of conversation thanks to its unique way of storytelling, with each episode of the drama being filmed in one continuous shot.
This approach has led to countless stand-out moments in the show, but arguably none of those are as impressive as the final moments of episode two.
Much has already been written about how the sequence – which takes viewers from one end of town to the other, where Stephen Graham’s character was laying flowers in memory of the girl his son had been accused of killing – came together with the use of a drone.
However, what you might not have realised was that the shot almost didn’t happen at all.
In a new interview with Screen Daily, director Philip Barantini revealed it was actually a Netflix exec’s idea for the episode to end with a return to Stephen’s character.
“The drone was meant to fly off and stay in the air and just slightly tilt over the murder site before flying away into the distance,” Barantini explained, admitting that the “hairs on the back of my arms just stood up” when it was suggested that a shot of Eddie Miller could be a poignant way to end the episode.
In fact, filming was already underway when this idea was proposed, with two days’ worth of takes having already been shot.
Elsewhere in the interview, Barantini admitted that weather conditions almost put the brakes on the idea altogether.
“On Thursday, we woke up and the wind was so bad that we couldn’t even fly the drone so we had to come up with another plan to end it,” he recalled.
“We thought, ‘We’ll still have Stephen in it but we’ll have him just stood at the school gates and he’s got the flowers, which is still a powerful moment’. On Friday, we came in in the morning and it was windy but we tried with the drone anyway, and it didn’t really work.
“On the final take on Friday, it was lovely. The wind had gone, and we took off the drone. Once the drone took off, my monitor lost the signal. All of the monitors lose signal because we can’t get the feed from the camera that far away. The only people that can see it are the drone operator and the follow vehicle who are following the drone to then land it.”
He continued: “There was about 10 minutes after it took off where none of us knew [if it had worked]. Someone said it had landed and we were all silent. Then they went, “We got it, we got it, we got it!” The whole room just erupted.”
It was recently revealed that this sequence was also one of the only instances in Adolescence in which VFX were used.
This wasn’t related to the drone footage, though, but rather a moment in which a teenager jumps out of his classroom window to avoid police questioning.
All four episodes of Adolescence are now streaming on Netflix.