I sat down with Jack Thorne, the Emmy-winning creator and writer of HBO’s His Dark Materials and Netflix’s Adolescence, to discuss his latest show, Netflix’s Lord of the Flies.
Synopsis:
A plane crash strands a group of British boys on an unoccupied tropical island, where they gradually slide into anarchy as social conventions disappear and attempts at responsible rule divide them into warring factions.
This has been a passion project of Thorne’s for many years, and although there’s obvious crossover in the subject matter to Adolescence, he actually conceived of and wrote Lord of the Flies well beforehand*.
Thorne shared what compelled him to adapt author William Golding’s dystopian vision of British boys whose flight crash-lands on an island, forcing them to form their own society, where law and order become undone:
“[Golding’s] not talking about what we are at our essence. He’s not talking about inner evil or any of that. He’s talking about boys playing at being grown-ups. And the grown-ups that they play at are the grown-ups that they’ve seen, that they’ve witnessed, that they’ve been… They are war babies”
At the beginning of the series, when the boys first find themselves on the island, they are infatuated with talking about their fathers and how their fathers will save them. But once this wish fulfillment falls apart, the group fractures, and something darker emerges.
Thorne stated:
“We define ourselves more by what we’re not than what we are. And I think that’s the age that Golding was writing about, obviously, a much more extreme time. But I do think this book has so much relevance for now.”
And that’s what makes Thorne’s vision so powerful: his children inherit the adult world’s rituals of fear, hierarchy, and violence, and mistake it for civilization.
In this interview, Thorne gives a masterclass in adapting iconic material. And how he conceived, executed, and realized his own childhood vision of making Lord of the Flies a reality.
Here is the trailer:
Now streaming.
