British screenwriter Jack Thorne is promoting his adaptation of the literary classic, Lord of the Flies, at this year’s Berlinale.
The screenwriter revealed that Lord of the Flies was shot during the same summer that his Netflix breakout, Adolescence, was filmed.
“We were working on them at the same time, and we shot them the same summer. The only difference is that Adolescence didn’t have a very long edit process,” Thorne said this morning during a Q&A session.
“They both definitely fed into each other, particularly, a lot of Lord of the Flies fed into Adolescence, but it is about a different period of time,” he said.
Lord of the Flies follows a group of young boys under the age of 12 who get stranded on an island without any adult supervision. The story follows their descent into chaos.
Adolescence, on the other hand, was a one shot show that follwed disturbed pre-teen Jamie who committs a crime after consuming hateful content online.
Highlighting the similarities and differences between the two, he said, “The difference between boys aged 10 and 12 compared to 13 and 14 is huge. All the boys in Flies are negotiating the people they’re going to become, whereas Jamie has made decisions about the person he is when we meet him in Adolescence. So there are similarities, but there are vast differences,”
Thorne also explained how working on two projects at once helps him.
“That’s all I ever do,” he said. “And I need two projects because if I get stuck, I stop sleeping. I need the ability to switch because if I’m writing Adolescence and I can’t fix something, it is a nightmare. So being able to swap to Lord of the Flies, I can get a little bit of confidence back.”
