Terrifying parents around the world – an image from series six of Skins.
Across last week, Every Cloud Productions ran a workshop in Byron Bay which matched six young writers with a group of local teenagers to develop the basic elements of a drama series. Deadlock is based on the true story of a savage car accident and its spreading aftermath. We covered the producer’s point of view here.
The workshop was led by Bryan Elsley, the Scottish writer and producer who developed Skins with his son Jamie Brittain for the family firm, Company Pictures.
Skins ran for seven series, and focused on teenagers in their last two years of school. Every two series almost the entire cast changed, which emphasised the storyworld of the age group but created enormous challenges in retaining an audience who identified with particular characters. It also forced the creators to build an enormously complex world, to prevent the growth of stock figures and internal clichés.
The phone interview was fascinating and worth reading in full as it moves naturally from the development methods on Deadlock to a wider discussion of television. I’ve edited it lightly in the usual way.
The development of Deadlock:
SH : My guess is that the storylines for skins are deliberately melodramatic but you’ve collided them with very naturalistic characters and responses. Is that a fair interpretation?
ELSLEY: Yes. I think that’s pretty fair. A lot of the stories came directly from the experiences of the young people who are helping us. There are lots of teenagers around who characterise their lives as though they’re very melodramatic – that’s the way they see the world.
Huge things happen all the time which are mostly to do with their friends and their parents and that kind of atmosphere infuse the stories. That’s the way the young people liked it and I just went along with it because it seemed to be coming from them.
SH : how did that work in the context of the Byron Bay workshop?
ELSLEY: The environs of Byron Bay are very, very interesting. The young people we met up there were 17 or 18 years old and we had quite a few of them with us during the week describing their lives.
Byron Bay is in many ways a very particular place because it is so full of people coming and going with the population swelling and contracting. There is a kind of underside to Byron which young people get to see which is something to do with parties and to some extent drugs and gangs. They have a very intense shifting kind of lifestyle which these young people were able to articulate very clearly and a great deal of vividness.
SH: Your writers were probably ten years older than the teenagers in the project. Were they scrabbling back into their own pasts?
ELSLEY: Yes. As a general rule writers before their early 30s still have some kind of direct line back into their youth. After all they are only five or six years out of university, they are often still single and they’re leading a more moderated, more refined version of the life they had when they were teenagers.
Once people have children things change. But there isn’t actually that much difficulty in having young writers and teenagers together in the room. They get on tremendously well.
SH: I must say I admire the concept of authenticity that you’re working with. This looks to me like a really sophisticated game about point of view.
ELSLEY: To be honest it’s quite easy to do with this subject matter – it’s a matter of getting very close to it and being alongside it. One of the great things about youth culture is that it is readily identifiable – you can be told and hear stories about youth culture simply by having young people in the room and young people are everywhere.
I’ve done workshops and explorations like this in America and the UK, and now in Australia, and it is extraordinary the similarities between the concerns and anxieties of young people.
SH : I was expecting you to tell me that a bunch of Byron Bay teenagers would be really different from kids in London and New York. But you are telling me the opposite.
ELSLEY: I was remarking to Deb and Fiona, who are the producers of Deadlock. that Byron Bay teenagers rivalled the Manhattan teenagers in the sophistication.
One might imagine that to an outsider like me teenagers from Byron Bay would basically be country kids – seaside town kids who hadn’t seen that much of the world and maybe were fairly limited in their outlook. Nothing could be further from the truth – mainly because of the constant influx of different kinds of people and the vaguely countercultural atmosphere of the place, Byron Bay teenagers are really complex and have grown up very very fast. Some might say too fast.
Reaching an international audience:
SH: It seems to be a particular example of the theory that if you go for carefully research localism you end up reaching an international audience.
ELSLEY: I think it’s always the case that if you drill down into the particulars of a place, if you really go into detail, you eventually hit universality. The modern television drama is often based on a great deal of detail, particularity about a place.
If you think about the two series of True Detective and maybe the films of the Cohen brothers there is always that incredible sense of familiarity and ease with the rhythms and traditions of a geographical setting. It’s partly that which I think audiences find thrilling – it’s in the particular that the international can be realised and I kept saying to Debbie and Fiona all week that the story we are trying to tell here is a really international story.
Audiences all over the world would love to see a well honed Australian drama in this vein because it’s speaks of the place and it also speaks of Australia but there is a universality to it as well.
A car is a dangerous object and a teenager is in some senses somebody with a lack of judgement. If you put the two together, all over the world you can have the same disastrous outcome.
But if you build outwards from that teenagers may have a lack of judgement in some ways but in other areas they are incredibly nuanced and making very great value judgements.
If they complied with every anxiety that society visits upon them they would literally sit at home playing chess with their parents or through the teenage years. And it’s the horror of that which drives young people out into the world and causes them to get into cars when they shouldn’t get into them.
SH: You had a week of development in a very energetic context. How far did you get?
ELSLEY: A great deal of development work took place through the week. At the end, each of the professional writers pitched their vision of the series to Fiona and Deb and they did that alone, away from their peers and away from me.
We did quite a lot of work through the week trying to work out what those individual visions were, and what the common themes were. A lot of scenes were written, not just by the professional writers but by the teenagers as well who showed, as is always the case with teenagers, an astonishing affinity with film drama. They write in that vein incredibly easily without any great adaptation whatsoever.
At the end of the week I hope that Fiona and Deb felt they had a team of writers who could work on such a show and possibly some suggestions as to which of those writers might lead. And good honest relationships with teenagers who were very, very keen to continue to be part of that process going forward. So I guess mainly it was a kind of clarification of the project in the minds of the producers.
SH: Can you make this method work with other projects, or is it specifically built around teenagers?
ELSLEY: I think this way of working with teenagers is probably quite specific. It taps into the aspirations of young people to communicate their concerns, and as we get older we get more secretive and less open to interrogation.
But I think the general principle of getting close to the subject matter and understanding the universal elements of it works in a more adult context. It is just a question of how you cover the ground and pick your subject area.
The reinvigoration of television drama
SH: Do you think this is a way of reinvigorating the medium?
ELSLEY: I think television drama is in the act of being reinvigorated at the moment. This is something to do with the possibility of the new platforms which are opening up over the world and there is an exponential increase in production value in television drama and there is money in television drama.
London is full of British and American movie directors who are trying to work on television because they’ve understood that in television there is at least a possibility of not having to write Marvel super heroes or to write big blockbuster movies that are basically a panoply of flashing lights and special effects.
I think that invigoration is spreading across the world – I think it started in America and it’s passing to the UK now. And I think that opening up is almost inevitable in Australia because you have such a depth of talent and production expertise in Australia.
To some extent in Australia, and in the UK, we are held back by very conservative network broadcasters but gradually the ground will shift underneath them and things will change.
SH: Fiona Eagger told me the chances of a network sale for Deadlock here are just zero. Whereas you got Skins up with Channel 4 in 2006.
ELSLEY: You could probably argue that skins would not be commissioned by a network in the UK now but will be much more likely be on one of the alternative platforms like Netflix and Amazon.
UK broadcasters have themselves become more and more conservative as they try and protect entrenched industry practices and entrenched ownership of the transmission airways. In a way it’s very natural for traditional networks and broadcasters to take up those positions – they are like King Canute trying to hold back the tide.
Sooner or later change will come. The spectrum of weird and wonderful and crazily original web series shows the burgeoning originality in Australian film and television writing.
Those series are like a pressure valve to stop the Australian industry having to really think about itself – but sooner or later that creativity is just going to bust out, and that will herald a very interesting and exciting time, I feel.
Reasons to be afraid, one more time..
SH: When you talk about the networks defending themselves, what are they defending themselves against?
ELSLEY: I think that across the world are protecting themselves against the loss of their network audience – that is to say the middle-aged audience with middle-class aspirations who are reliable clients for advertisers.
And they are terrified that the benchmarks by which they are judged – which are audience numbers – will disappear overnight and their advertising model will no longer hold water.
And in the case of the BBC and the ABC their public funding or licensing models will seem to be on shaky ground as well. And in many ways they are right to be worried about it because those concerns are real and require considerable innovation to think one’s way out of these binds over the next 5 to 10 years. And it is unclear going forward whether for example the BBC is going to survive the next decade of development in the industry.
SH: we tend to say here that the audience is fragmenting, and that the bogeyman is the Internet. Do you think there’s something about the nature of that middle-aged audience in itself which is under assault?
ELSLEY: Yes. I think broadcasting has depended ever since it began in the 1950’s on a mainstream which can be brought together in one place in order to enjoy entertainment.
When that starts to fall apart there are very, very real dangers for those organisations but I think sometimes they forget is that as society fragments, our ability to comprehend and enjoy that fragmented society grows so we are becoming more accepting.
I am about to make a show for one of the American platforms and my show is gonna be an openly British show – I’m not making it an American show. Even three short years ago, it simply would not have been possible – I would have had to convert that show into some kind of American setting. So there’s a kind of acceptance in the worldwide market that everything doesn’t need to clump together into a kind of mainstream centred around the country or a national interest.
Forms of resistance
ELSLEY: These are very confusing times and it requires innovation and leadership and daring to take things forward. Our industries, both in the UK and Australia, are not borne aloft by the huge conglomeration of money that drives the US industry.
That allows them to take risks in the market that seem very difficult for us because we don’t have 300 shows to succeed or fail. We have seven shows to succeed or fail. I don’t have the answer, but I think people inside those Big Brother broadcasting networks need look at the talent that is out there and think about how to utilise it.
The six young writers Australian writers that I had with me this week in Byron Bay were absolutely of the first rank. They were very, very talented young people – and I think the problem for a small country is if you don’t give the opportunities to talent like that they leave and they go and find places where their creativity will be recognised. And that is a terrible shame and it’s a loss because it seems to me so obvious that there is an upsurge of innovation and talent in the Australian filmmaking at the moment.
SH: when you talk about the need for change are you also talking about production methodologies?
ELSLEY: That is a very interesting question because it costs $10m to make a television series well, and there’s no way to make that not true. Useful creativity can take place in an unregulated Internet atmosphere but at the end of the day very large sums of money need to be invested and that is never going to come from Youtube.
Over the last three years, modes of communication have come into being between the unregulated internet and the broadcasters. And platforms like Hutu and Netflix and Amazon have this international flavour to them.
Driven as they are by American money and by the economic need for the American market we can’t rely upon them too heavily going forwards. But they can be exploited to develop talent.
Crucially, we should be working out the alternative UK a net based large-scale platform, and the Australasian version of that. I don’t know why the French have not organised around Canal Plus to resist what they see as the cultural takeover by Netflix, but I think investment is probably the answer, along with the move away from constricted broadcasting models. Which of course is very radical but if you want to beat the Americans at their own game you have to be as innovative and as daring.
A different kind of internationalism
SH: How do you factor in the conservatism of the American audience? Is that enormous ice flow of sterility breaking down?
ELSLEY: I am say it is breaking down. We are seeing the moment when a television series set in a seaside town an hour’s flight north of Sydney full of tourists and international characters can be seen not only as an Australian television show but as an international television series with real commercial value.
I think that might not be here yet but it’s coming real fast. The strange accents and ways of Australians, which is the very thing that Americans throw their hands up at, will become the thing they’re most interested in.
If you are acquiring your numbers worldwide as Netflix are, instead of inside national markets, the bottom line is a different place. The accumulation of 4 million people at 9 o’clock on a Tuesday evening of really quite marginal importance in the grand scheme of things. It’s that [need for large scale television audiences in one time and place] which I believe stands in the way of progress.
I understand how difficult it is it is for these very, very money conscious organisations with their very carefully worked out management practices to step away. I’m not criticising, I’m just saying it’s really tricky and difficult and it does require a bit of a vision to steer a steady path.
I don’t think revolution is what’s called for – it’s people who can step back and take a vision and a view of what’s happening and navigate a path forward which is which could take 5 to 10 years to achieve.
