The story of William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” isn’t that complicated, at least in terms of plot. A group of boys, ranging in age from five to twelve, gets stranded on a deserted island after a plane crash with no adults (or rescue) in sight. They try to survive, organize themselves, hunt a pig, all that rot. Eventually, darker, wilder impulses propel them into conflict with each other.
But how you show that, the visual ways to emotionally represent that profound descent into darkness, is the name of the game for the “Lord of the Flies” Netflix miniseries adaptation.
Having a propulsive, percussive, and very alive visual style was key for both writer Jack Thorne and director Marc Munden, as they discussed on a recent episode of IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. Both understood that the island itself would be a fifth character, alongside the main quartet of Ralph (Winston Sawyers), Simon (Ike Talbut), Jack (Lox Pratt), and Piggy (David McKenna), and that it needed to be difficult terrain.
Munden wanted a landscape where it’s hard to even move around easily, where every blocking choice and every gesture that the boys make toward each other would come with a cost. It couldn’t look like a tropical holiday. It had to look like the boys had tramped through jungle to places where no human has been for a very long time.
Some of that sense of a primal, demanding natural landscape comes from shooting on actual uninhabited islands in Malaysia, braving torrential downpours and the extreme logistics organization of short shooting days (three hours per day with boys aged five to eight; five hours with the older boys), on-set schooling (15 hours a week at least), and the small flotilla of boats to get everyone to and from set each day.
“ Generally, every sensible production would’ve made the opposite decisions that we made,” Munden joked. “But there was no place ever where we could turn the camera around and see the car park or the hotel or anything like that. We were really in the wild. I can’t think of it being filmed anywhere else. And it has the most incredible ancient rainforest, some of the oldest rainforest in the world. I think that all really, really helped the piece.”
Getting into nature and being attuned to it are related, but still separate skills. When the production couldn’t have its young actors in front of the camera, they did a lot of what Munden called “Coconut Time,” shooting b-roll that they could then take and give an emotional resonance or sharpness to it in the edit. “Lord of the Flies” cinematographer Mark Wolf started his career working with David Attenborough on “Blue Planet” and other nature documentaries. “He really understands how to shoot nature, and we used every inch of his brilliance in this show,” Thorne told IndieWire.
Wolf and Munden find opportunities to shoot the children in the same way, creating portrait shots that somehow have a sense of wildness and detachment, and increasingly blurring the line between the boys and their environment. The inclusion of these, and of striking infrared shots turning the lush island greens blood red, and of still photography, all help fracture the toxic order (plus one conch) that had been holding the boys together.
“I was trying to use non-narrative elements, and also different [visual] grammars, in order to unpack what Jack had written in the story. … It was almost always my intention that I wanted to disrupt the narrative with [experimental] stuff,” Munden said. “A big touchstone for me was ‘Walkabout,’ the Nicholas Roeg film; I thought it would be really good if we could do a similar sort of disruption. ‘Come and See’ is another reference for me.”
Thorne had an altogether different reference in mind for the end of the miniseries, when Jack leads most of the boys after their former chief Ralph and his right hand man, Piggy: He wanted it to feel like Peter Berg’s “Lone Survivor.” Coordinating bombastic, gritty action sequences was not something “Lord of the Flies” could necessarily do on its time and budget, and while shooting at remote locations.
But nature, once again, provided. Munden injected tension and something even more primal and powerful than tension by punctuating Ralph’s efforts to navigate the island with stills of trees.
“It became like an invocation to some sort of Rainforest God in some sort of way,” Munden said. “[Ralph is] quietly counting, and we’re seeing all these extraordinary trees, and we realize what they’ve been living with all this time. They’re magical,” Munden said.
“I think ‘Lone Survivor’ is a great film. Just saying,” Thorne joked. But being able to use the environment in surprising ways matched the surprising depth and detail with which the actors were able to realize characters that could be somewhat archetypal.
“The thing that I was trying to do was treat it the same way that I would write adults, which is that the subtext is more important than the text,” Thorne said. “ But the inflection [the actors] placed upon the lines surprised me. I would say that was particularly true of David McKenna, where I think we both saw Piggy as slightly more of a victim than David ever played him. … There was a lot of stuff I did, little details and maneuverings and dances that happen in the script that then, the inflection they placed upon that really surprised me.”
All episodes of “Lord of the Flies” are now streaming on Netflix.
