Reading Lord of the Flies while sweating it out over your GCSEs is haunting enough, so much so that the William Golding novel has become a shorthand for the tipping point between civilisation and savagery.
Saying, ‘it all turned a bit Lord of the Flies,’ is a vivid way to enliven any old anecdote.
The BBC’s new adaptation of the novel takes that bracing reference point and brings it to barbaric life, as we watch those small boys, aged five to seven, turn feral and murderous while stranded on a desert island.
Orchestrating it all on a humid, Malaysian beach was director Marc Munden. Conducting a horde of 40 sun-baked boys in vicious scenes for hours at a time was as difficult as it sounds.
He told Metro after the four-parter premiered on iPlayer: ‘I think Ben Rogers, the first assistant director, would say this as well: it was absolute chaos.’
He painted a picture of classic schoolboy tomfoolery: ‘People turning their backs to the camera, looking into the camera lens or goofing off in the back of shots.’
There are two big assembly scenes, anchored around Piggy’s conch, which Munden singles out as the most unwieldy to shoot, in part because of Jack Thorne (the scribe behind the Adolescence phenomenon as well as this) and his habit for writing lengthy, verbose scenes.
‘He’s brilliant and they’re always brilliant,’ Munden said of the set pieces. ‘But it was a particular challenge to try and get all those in the can.
‘Although, I must say that for boys that have never acted before – there was maybe one or two that had been on a set before – they always knew their lines.’
They all understood aggression, those boys. They all understood those feelings.
The Lord of the Flies production didn’t quite follow the meta-narrative you might imagine; instead, Munden describes actors with a maturity beyond their years, all while playing a prepubescent cohort sinking into atrocity.
‘I’m not sure that you have to have any political overview of society to be able to understand Lord of the Flies,’ the director said of the fable. ‘They understood their own characters very, very well.’
Munden’s camera zooms in on the horror of the island from the jump, whether it be rotting vegetation or the decomposing body of the pilot still strapped in his plane seat.
As if we didn’t already know this story goes nowhere good, the boys’ subdued reaction to this sight is a harbinger of what’s to come.
Marc Munden unpacks the Lord of the Flies close-ups
‘I wanted the island to become a sort of microcosm of the self-destructive society that those boys have left,’ he told Metro.
‘The book was written in the 1950s, height of the Cold War, and they’re being evacuated.
‘It’s almost as if the island continues to haunt them with that. You hear ghosts of radio broadcasts coming into the ether. Are they storms or is that warfare on the horizon?
‘I wanted to encode the island with that sense of unease.
‘We filmed so much in the rainforest. It’s an incredible place with all sorts of life squeezed into it.
‘I wanted to try and integrate that state of nature into the piece, in a way that it really comes out of the pores and creates a sense of unease as it goes on.’
As for the faces? ‘The portraits, as I call them, were really a way of capturing these little souls on camera,’ Munden said.
‘At the very beginning, it’s about their clean, pristine innocence and by the end, particularly in episode four, it’s almost as if they’re lost souls in the jungle.
‘I’m quite interested in interrupting the narrative and throwing the audience and making them look at something in a particular way. You see that everyone is lost in this.’
With the lightest of spoiler warnings for a book that was published in 1984: fewer boys make it off the island than the total that survive the crash landing. And it isn’t the scarce food or little’uns propensity to take a leak in their water supply that does it.
Given the subject matter and the age of the boys, the production had stringent safeguarding in place.
There were chaperones, working hour restrictions, stunt doubles for certain scenes and mental health support. Munden says the younger contingent of boys were ‘shielded’ from the violence and kept off set for certain climactic scenes.
‘It wasn’t a worry,’ he said. ‘They all understood aggression, those boys. They all understood those feelings, I think.’
Each episode focuses on a different boy, with David McKenna up first as bespectacled, rational Piggy (arguably the most evocative character of the novel), who is the subject of name-calling and fat-shaming from the moment he finds supposed school chums on the island.
Casting directors Martin Ware and Nina Gold scoured UK schools in search of this crop of young actors, which counts soon-to-be Draco Malfoy star Lox Pratt as the villain of the piece, but McKenna came fairly late to the process.
‘As soon as I saw him and he started acting, I just thought, this is our Piggy,’ said Munden, still audibly impressed with the 12-year-old’s abilities, since he had only acted at school before this starring role. ‘He’s just a remarkable little boy.’
Even if you’ve read Golding’s book and know what’s coming, it isn’t any easier seeing Piggy’s heartbreaking fate – but Munden assured us McKenna himself remained unruffled: ‘He absolutely bounded on set every single day to do all these things.
‘He just loved it. I’m glad that people feel the need to ask about his welfare as a child rather than as Piggy. But he really is acting.’ And doing so tremendously well.
All episodes of Lord of the Flies are available on BBC iPlayer now. The series continues Sunday 9pm on BBC One.
Got a story?
If you’ve got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the Metro.co.uk entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@metro.co.uk, calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we’d love to hear from you.