Writer Executive Producer Jack Thorne Talks The BBC’s New Adaptation Of William Golding’s Lord Of The Flies

Telling A New Version Of A Classic Tale

Writer executive producer Jack Thorne talks about the BBC’s new adaptation of William Golding’s Lord Of The Flies…

What drew you to this story?

It’s something that I’ve always wanted to do. When we pitched it to the William Golding estate, it was very much a four-parter with the idea of writing it like a relay race. Finding that structure of telling the story via Piggy, then Jack, Simon, and Ralph. There was a very easy transition from book to screen, because of that structure.

I think, as a society, we’re having a conversation right now about boys. We’re losing a generation of boys and we’re losing it because of the hate they are ingesting – because it is an answer to their loneliness and isolation. The interesting thing about Lord of the Flies is that, I think, it’s a really loving portrait of boys. When I read it as an adult, I thought of it as a tender portrait of a lot of very complicated boys having a complicated relationship with their status and anger.

It’s the perfect distillation of our contemporary problem I think, in terms of looking at the male condition.

What have been the biggest hurdles in adapting the story?

There were moments where I needed to sketch in story, and trying to do that in a way which felt like Golding was sometimes very hard. But truthfully it was a joy, because I knew the book so well. As someone that adapts, so much of your job is to have ingested the book and be able to feel your way around it.

With Lord of the Flies, I knew where I need to be and that’s because I’ve been reading the book since I was 11 years old, so I’ve been reading it for 35 years. It’s a different relationship to any other book that I’ve adapted.

Hopefully in this adaptation people will understand that the complexity of the book is far greater than they usually give it credit for.

How did you feel about the visual representation of the story on-screen?

I love it. Our director Marc Munden is an astonishing artist. He doesn’t think like a director, I think he almost thinks like a painter, despite the fact he’s a brilliant director and can get incredible performances out of people. There is something about the way that he chooses colour, and the way that he tells the story, in space, that is so distinctive.

Marc has the ability to disappear, in terms of not making the camera the focus; there’s scenes of kids playing with crabs, sand or with creepers in the water, where it has an almost documentary feel of just watching kids and how they would be on an island.

What do you hope viewers will take away from the series?

I think Golding’s brilliance and complexity is often dismissed. “It’s all gone Lord of the Flies” is used as shorthand for the most obnoxious things. I hope it takes people back to the book, and I hope it allows people to lean into what the book really is, in my opinion, a difficult and dangerous account of who we are and what we’re capable of.

Do you think someone who has read the book will take away something different from this TV adaptation?

I think that’s the whole point of adaptation so I hope so. There is a joy to seeing a person breathe as a character, think as a character and these young actors are all sensational and so committed to the parts they played. In terms of what I did, it is faithful, I think, to what he wrote, and I think Judy and the estate regard it as faithful too. It’s not full of dialogue, it’s very spare, and the dialogue used is a mixture of what Golding wrote and what I thought he might and where my instincts took me.

When Jack and Simon talk, all they say is taken from clues within the book, but it’s an extrapolation that is probably influenced by me too but where I felt myself pushing in too much I pulled back. I didn’t want to hear the voices in my head, I tried to bring out the voices in his.

I hope I’ve kept his magic, I consider it a huge honour to have been given this opportunity.