Warning: This article contains spoilers for Adolescence.
Adolescence director Philip Barantini is lifting the lid on one of the show’s most iconic sequences.
Each episode of the hit Netflix drama was famously filmed in one long, continuous take, with the fourth instalment centring around the Miller family a year after teenager Jamie kills a girl from his school.
Much of the action sees Stephen Graham’s character at the wheel of his van, after he discovers it has been defaced with offensive graffiti by local teens.
This has led many of us to question exactly how the cast and crew managed to film these driving scenes so seamlessly without ever breaking the continuous shot – and who actually did the driving?
Speaking on Edith Bowman’s podcast Soundtracking, Barantini confirmed that the episode’s lead actor didn’t actually do his own driving.
Instead, the van was rigged so that someone was steering from the vehicle from the roof, where they would be out of shot.
“We never drove the van,” he explained. “We had someone on the roof, actually driving.”
Barantini continued: “We had to swap the vans out. So, when he first comes out the house and you see that thing painted on the side of the van, you can see it’s a normal van.
“When he goes back into the house, we have to do a quick swap with the vans. So, it’s the stunt van with someone in a ‘go-kart seat’ literally driving it, and it’s like a camera rig on the front on the stunt van. There wasn’t one on the other one, so we had a clean van and then a stunt van. But you’d never know.”
Since the show began streaming earlier this month, the team has been candid about how it pulled off some of its most impressive stunts – as well as what happened if anything went wrong while they were filming the hour-long episodes.
Episode four also features a heartbreaking moment involving Stephen Graham’s character that wasn’t actually in the original script.
All four episodes of Adolescence are now streaming on Netflix. Listen to Soundtracking here.