Writer-producer Jack Thorne reached national treasure status last year in the U.K. with Netflix hit Adolescence, which finished its year-long victory lap with four big wins at the BAFTAs last month. Without missing a beat, Thorne returned almost immediately with his take on William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, in which a plane packed with evacuating schoolboys crash-lands on a deserted island. Directed by Marc Munden, who ratchets up the tension as the boys’ attempts to self-govern go violently wrong, the BBC four-parter couldn’t be more different to his current project: Sam Mendes’ four-POV biography of The Beatles.
DEADLINE: When did you first read Lord of the Flies, and why have you continued to be so fascinated by it?
JACK THORNE: I didn’t study it at school. I read it when I was 11 or 12, and it was a copy that, rather beautifully, my mom had stolen from the English department at the school. She was a supply teacher at Portway English Department in Bristol. And so my copy was this beautiful, orange copy that had stamped on the inside cover: “Portway English Department.” I remember it very vividly.
There were two books that were really, really important to me at that time. One was The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper, a beautiful fantasy novel, and the other was this. I remember just feeling seen, that Simon felt like me in some mad way, but a lot nicer than me. I felt profoundly moved by who he was and how he didn’t quite manage to be what the other boys needed him to be at any point, and yet he was still so interested in them and so caring about them. I think, as an autistic kid, there was something about him that I just instinctively understood.
So, you’re reading this book and you’re going, “I don’t know quite what will happen. I don’t know quite how this will end…” And then suddenly the character that you feel close to is murdered, and your whole relationship with the book changes quite profoundly. I never was able to forget the description that Golding gave of his body sliding out to sea. I remember reading that passage again and again and again, because I hadn’t taken it in. And just that beautiful way that he disguised what was happening, whilst making what was happening so clear. I fell in love. I tried to make it once before, for Channel 4, and I tried to get the rights from the estate and they said no. Then we got this second opportunity, and this time I was determined to make it happen.
DEADLINE: Why did they say no?
THORNE: Initially, I think they just didn’t see anything of worth in me or the way that I wanted to do it. And, looking back, I don’t think I had a very clear conception. I wasn’t the one that talked to the estate. The production company talked to the estate, but I don’t think I had a very clear conception of how television could meet the book. I don’t think I’d thought that through clearly enough. But with this take, I was absolutely certain of what TV could do that other mediums couldn’t.
DEADLINE: How did you hit upon the idea of telling the story from four different points of view: Piggy, Jack, Simon and Ralph?
THORNE: From reading it again and again and again and feeling that if we didn’t get an opportunity to spend time with Jack, then I wouldn’t have told the story properly. There were lots of different ways we could find to sit in his shoes, but none were quite working for me until I thought, “Well, Jack is Episode 2.” And then as soon as Jack was Episode 2, it became clear how to proceed. There was a wrestle within me, whether Episode 1 would be Ralph or Piggy. And then I was like, “Well, no. Isn’t it more interesting if Ralph is the last episode?” This lead character around whom the world revolves isn’t given the spotlight until the final episode. And then Simon, obviously, was always Episode 3.
After that, it was just a case of working out how everything fit together with the story, and this is the bit that I kept on saying to the Golding estate as we were having multiple conversations with them about it: Actually, it feels like a way of being really loyal to the book, because you’ve got democracy through the eyes of Piggy, you’ve got things starting to break down through the agent of change that is Jack. Then you’ve got chaos through Simon and his chaotic mind, and then you’ve got all-out war through Ralph.
DEADLINE: Peter Brook’s original 1963 film version had a strange introduction, with still images of a boys’ school, and there seemed to be a nuclear war going on. Obviously, you dispensed with all of that…
THORNE: Well, we didn’t dispense with it — we just brought it in at different points, and you can see the war taking place at different moments, far in the distance. You can see that there’s something going on out there that the boys don’t quite have an eye on, but there are a number of different moments. When the parachutist arrives, it’s because of an air fight that happens above them. So, there are bits of what Golding intended with that.
It’s interesting. I saw the Peter Brook version many years ago but decided not to watch it again because I didn’t want to take any aspect of it into this storytelling. I also saw the 1990 film too. Marc did watch it, because he wanted to make sure that his vocabulary wasn’t in any way using Brook’s vocabulary, and so he needed to watch it, he felt like, to be sure of that. But my memories of the film are very hazy.
DEADLINE: It’s obviously problematic these days to have a main character called Piggy, but you handle that very sensitively. Is his real name ever mentioned in the book?
THORNE: His name is our invention. He’s never given a name by Golding, but the estate were cool with the fact that we decided to give him a name. It felt like we would be avoiding things if we didn’t go there with that, but it also felt like there was a really interesting journey in terms of Ralph moving from calling him Piggy to calling him Nicky, his relationship changing over the course of those four episodes, and the name helping him as he learned the true value of the boy, aside from the nickname.
DEADLINE: The kids are amazing. Where did you find them?
THORNE: Well, Nina Gold and Martin Ware looked everywhere. I had nephews audition for this, so it was very weird for me, in that they were being asked questions about who they want to be with on a desert island. They went out all over the country to try and find these boys. And then the auditions were absolutely rigorous. If you spoke to the cast, they would probably complain about how long and how much was required of them through it, but we were constantly testing them.
DEADLINE: Were you there for the whole of the shoot?
THORNE: No. I’m a) not a brilliant traveler, and b) it’s the fourth time I’ve worked with Marc, and I trust him. And I feel like when I’m on set, I’m sometimes not a useful presence for him because I’m very nervous and nervy. And so I’ll see something that doesn’t work and I’ll be like, “Oh, we need to do that again.” And he’s like, “No, no, no, you didn’t see it. We just captured something so true.” You know what I mean? The way that he can knit things together in his mind is extraordinary, and I don’t have that gift. I’m just a worrier. I’m better off not being there, for his sanity, and so it proved.
DEADLINE: Is that because of his documentary background, you think, or experience?
THORNE: Yeah. Maybe, maybe. I don’t know. He’s extraordinary, Marc, because he doesn’t present as a supremely confident person, and then he makes the most confident decisions of any director I’ve ever worked with. Running the film backwards — doing strange things like that. You go, “I don’t understand the thought process that’s brought you here, but I love what you’ve done.” He’s a remarkable guy and a remarkable director. I’m in awe of him, to be honest. Authorship in telly is ascribed to the writer. It’s seen as being the writer’s medium, sometimes unfairly. In this case, supremely unfairly. I would say that the authorship by Marc is as important, if not more important than anything I did for this show. And I love that he just took those free reins and made something magical.
DEADLINE: While you were there, did it ever seem that art might begin to imitate life? How do boys left to their own devices behave?
THORNE: Well, they weren’t quite left to their own devices. They were quite carefully managed, that’s the truth of it, and they were quite carefully supported. I don’t think what Golding’s talking about is boys in the state of nature. That’s not what I take from the book. What I take from the book is the way that we socialize our boys is the way that they then behave in the world. There’s a lot of people that were made angry by Adolescence, who then got a bit angry about the casting of Lord of the Flies and delighted in sending us the same story again and again, about a group of Tongan boys who lived very harmoniously on an island together.
But what that shows to me is that there’s a difference between boys that are socialized in a time of war, that are nurtured in a time of hate — as these boys all were — and then go out and they play games that revel in that hate, and boys that are brought up in a different culture. And the truth is that the time that Golding was reflecting was a time of almost bewilderment, in terms of what humanity was capable of. And the idea that boys wouldn’t somehow reflect that extremism and that mental disease, I think, would be extraordinary. It’s a story of how we bring our kids up, rather than what our kids are without us.
DEADLINE: There’s something of that in the scene where Simon tells Jack, “Your father’s not coming for you.” It’s a very elegant and economic piece of writing, in terms of explaining their very similar backstories.
THORNE: This is important, because a few people have said this about the show. What I’m saying is because Jack is unloved, he becomes the person that is capable of the most hate. But, actually Simon and him are from the same background, and yet are both capable of completely different things. It’s not being didactic about how we parent and what we do and what’s produced from us. It’s actually trying to be a lot more interesting than that, just taking clues and threads from the book and pulling them out in terms of the relationship between Jack and Simon, which is complicated in the book. Perhaps not as complicated as I make it in the show, but it is already a pretty complicated relationship.
DEADLINE: Piggy’s arc is a little bit more heroic in this version.
THORNE: Oh, David [McKenna] is beautiful. He’s a beautiful boy and he’s lovely to be around too. They had a game when we were in rehearsing, they were all in the same hotel and they had a large swimming pool and they played a game called “Save David,” which was him flat on his back and them trying to navigate through different adventures in the pool while keeping him alive. He’s had a difficult time. He’s had health troubles all his life. He’s just effortlessly charming.
DEADLINE: Did you add the scene where he’s reading a story about Simon?
THORNE: I added that in, and it’s a story that I’ve told a version of to my son Elliott. A lot of storytelling and lots of ways that Piggy behaves around the boys, I think, I’ve stolen from my own parenting. We had characters that we return to again and again when I would make up stories for Elliot. So I used a few of those bits.
DEADLINE: Were there any things that you thought that you could not change?
THORNE: I wanted to be faithful. I try and go into these jobs asking, “How can we do the best job for the book that we possibly can?” Sometimes I don’t. I can do a version of A Christmas Carol where I don’t really care about what Charles Dickens said, because I figure he’s had enough of his shows on. He wouldn’t necessarily be bothered about my version. But with this, we took the honor of being the first time that Lord of the Flies was shown on TV very seriously, and we wanted to showcase the brilliance of Golding’s work. It wasn’t faithful because I felt like I had to. It was faithful because I really, really wanted to.
DEADLINE: How about the violence? The killing of the pig is especially bloody. Was that Marc’s choice or yours?
THORNE: Marc definitely made that more bloody than I was expecting. We were clear with the BBC when we were making the show: This is a 9 o’clock show, not an 8 o’clock show, because we can’t get rid of the darker elements in it and it’s going to involve kids behaving traumatically. I didn’t expect that a teenage audience would necessarily stick with it, because the show has a certain pace to it that requires a bit of staying with us, certainly in Episode 1, but they really did. I’ve heard loads of people coming back to me saying, “Yeah, I watched this with my teenagers and I didn’t expect them to stay on the sofa, but they did.” So, that’s been lovely.
DEADLINE: Did anything from Adolescence ever filter into this script at any point?
THORNE: I would say it was probably more the other way. We filmed them both in the same summer — it was Adolescence in Pontefract and Lord of the Flies in Malaysia, so it was a very weird summer. I would say that it was probably more a case of Adolescence being influenced by Golding than Golding being influenced by Adolescence. The other thing that I think is really important is we deliberately avoided teenagers. There is no element of puberty in this story. They’re pre-pubescent, it’s 10 to 12-year-olds, and they are cast exclusively as 10 to 12-year-olds.
And so, Jamie in Adolescence is in a slightly different place than these boys are. They’re not quite at the same stage as he is. Jamie was a boy in an adult world. Every conversation he had in the show, you never saw him talking to other children. Every conversation he had was framed within that world, and he was someone that was grappling with adulthood before he was ready to, because he’d been pulled into it by others. This, on the other hand, is about boys amongst boys.
DEADLINE: Now that the show is out there, what are people taking from it?
THORNE: A lot of people talk about the aesthetics of it. A lot of people were surprised by how Marc told the story. A lot of people are talking about the themes of the book. The manosphere aspect of Adolescence became so overwhelming, that’s what everyone wanted to talk about, and I reached a point where I said, “I really don’t have answers. What I’ve got is a series of questions.” And that’s all that Adolescence tried to do, pose those questions. With this, it’s much more about the power of the book and that sense of engagement. The question “Do you think kids would do that?” has come up an awful lot. And “What do you think Golding meant?” has come up an awful lot too. But it’s less like, “What do I do about my kid on social media?” — which is what Adolescence became. No one’s going, “I’m a bit worried my kid’s going on holiday to Malaysia.”
DEADLINE: Did Golding ever talk about his book?
THORNE: Yes, he said a lot of things about it and he said a lot of things about the character of Ralph, which was really interesting. That he felt like Ralph’s choices on the island are the most interesting choices. But I tried to avoid all that and not get involved in it because I know from my own stuff that what I write, I’m happy with, but what I talk about afterwards, I’m never as happy with. I always feel like I’ve sold myself short or not explained things properly or explained things too properly. So, I just stuck with the book and took every lesson I could from the book and trusted the estate.
DEADLINE: What are you doing next?
THORNE: I’m doing this show called Falling for Channel 4, and then I’m not going to be on TV for a while, which is a good thing for everyone, I’m sure. The truth is, The Beatles took over my life. And I’ve been working extremely hard on those films and loving working on those films. And so, I haven’t been writing much else.
DEADLINE: Is there anything that won’t get you into trouble that you can say about the Beatles project?
THORNE: Nothing at all. There’s a marksman on high that’s looking to take us out at any moment. It’s wonderful. What Sam’s doing is wonderful, but I can’t say any more than that.
DEADLINE: As a subject, is it particularly close to your heart?
THORNE: We had three tapes in the car when I was a kid. We had ABBA Gold, we had Jean-Michel Jarre’s Zoolook, and we had The Beatles’ Revolver. The Beatles played a huge role in all our lives. They told stories about our country in a way that no one else has before or since. And so, to be able to be part of that is just extraordinary.
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