Joe Barton’s new series The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself arrives today on Netflix, based on the Half-Bad book series by Sally Green. It’s an intriguing coming of age tale told against the backdrop of a world very like our own – but where witchcraft is all too real. Paul Simpson caught up with Barton to discuss its creation and challenges…

 

How did you get involved with The Bastard Son…?

Years ago, I was approached by Imaginarium who I’d just made The Ritual with. They had just got the book rights [to Half-Bad] and they wanted to do it as a movie. I read the book and liked it and I thought, ‘OK, we could try and make it a film.’ I wrote a feature script for it and it didn’t really get anywhere – films are so hard to get made.

So I put it aside and forgot about it until a couple of years ago, they got back in touch. I’d just had a TV show called Giri/Haji come out and Imaginarium wanted to pitch [Half-Bad] as a TV show just because everything’s a TV show these days. So we basically loped the first 60 pages off the feature script and turned that into episode 1, and used it to go round town to pitch it to a couple of places – and Netflix bit, which was lovely.

So originally it was a film and then it surprisingly came back to life years later which is nice.

You’ve created possibly one of the nastiest characters that I’ve seen in a long time in Jessica – not just in Isobel Jesper Jones’s performance but in little Jessica, who scared the hell out of me. The little girl [Kitty Anderson] was amazing taking Nathan apart, verbally.

She was really good. The character of Jessica is in the book and she’s horrible. And yes, that little girl’s amazing.

There’s a scene that didn’t make it into the show where someone nails a crow to the family’s door and we used an animatronic crow. That poor little girl, she just completely freaked out. But she was brilliant and that scene is just super creepy.

Then Isobel was amazing: this was her first ever acting job. It’s really remarkable, she’s incredible. Jay [Lycurgo] and Nadia [Parkes] have done a few bits of pieces already, Emilien [Vekeman]’s done some stuff in France, in Europe. For Isobel to come out of drama school and have a scene with Paul Ready who’s obviously a brilliant, experienced actor and completely hold her own… She’s got this great presence. Now she’s in the new Hunger Games movie. She’s going to be huge, she’s a really special talent.

What was the attraction of this particular story, for you? What spoke to you about it that you thought ‘Right, I know how to take this, from this medium into a visual medium’?

Well I hadn’t really done Y/A [young adult]. I’d done a film called iBoy which I guess was Y/A but I hadn’t done anything that was magic or in the fantasy realm. I liked that it was sort of that but not as well – it was quite grounded, which spoke to me.

I liked the character arcs: I saw the potential of having this quite complex emotional coming of age story and found family and all this stuff with these three young people. Essentially it’s them against the world, really; they only have each other.

There’s a sort of road trip aspect to the series: from episode 4 onwards, they’re on the run across Europe and it’s almost that Lord of the Rings kind of thing, which I love, that idea about leaving home and going on an actual adventure, so that was really exciting to me.

It just seemed like yes, it’s magic and it’s Y/A but it definitely felt done in a way I hadn’t really seen before, quite grounded and edgy. So yes, I was excited by that opportunity to do some spells.

In that first episode we have a flashback to the murders but it’s done without us seeing the participants. We just get blood appearing, an X appearing… Was that something that came up during the preparations of the visuals or was an idea that you had that’s in the script from the start?

It was about trying to find interesting things that we could do with magic. That’s the thing, when you’re doing a show about magic or witches  you’re thinking ‘What is something you can do that you haven’t seen before?’

There’s stuff in there which you think ‘Oh OK, that’s a version of something I’ve maybe seen’ whether it’s Harry Potter or whatever.

We knew that we wanted to tell this story of an attack, which in a normal show you would just have a flashback or CCTV. How could these witches present it to us? And then we’re like, ‘OK, so you just recreate it, so you’re watching it.’ But what if you took away a key element – the bodies – so you’re seeing it just with sound and the blood? That was part of the fun of doing it, trying to find these innovative ways of presenting magic and horror mixed together.

Yes, it was incredibly effective. It felt as if it was taking the best elements of audio horror.

Yes, that’s it, like the podcast stuff you can listen to. It’s almost, in another way, scarier. I want to release the footage from that day’s shooting though, with the two guys in the green bodysuits, who were just running around, throwing bags off and jumping on things. Very not scary when we filmed it! But yes, I think in the end, it’s pretty good.

When you’re writing something like this, how far through do you plan it? Do you actually work out what every episode is going to be before you start scripting or, obviously in this case, you had the movie, so you had certain guide points, or were you allowing this to take the time to tell the story, it needed?

It’s a combination, really. Yes, you do plan as much as you can; there was the book, we had the feature script but it’s changed. The TV show ends in a different place to both of those, I would say, although there is shared DNA.

We did a writer’s room. We had a bunch of other writers on and we planned as much as we could do then inevitably it’s a reactive process as well. We had production issues, budget stuff: we filmed it during Covid so we couldn’t leave the country, we couldn’t have more than seven extras at once. There’s all these sorts of restrictions that you wouldn’t usually have to deal with, so there was a big element of just reacting to the challenges that were put in front of us. I would say the second half of the series changed quite a lot from the original scripts. So you plan as much as you can and also expect everything to change.

Were you fully scripted through before you started shooting?

Well, we had scripts… I did a lot of work on it whilst we were filming. It was a really difficult show to make, one of the most difficult things I’ve worked on, partly just for the reasons I said, Covid and the production stuff so we were rescripting throughout.

There’s some quite clear chemistry between some of the characters, both positive and negative…

Yes, we set up those relationships and the actors are so good at bringing them out. The way those characters interact with each other is always what we wanted; we wanted the friendships, the romances, the hatred and all that.

[The changes were] honestly more sort of scale – the original ending involved hundreds of extras – and the budget. The whole show probably cost as much as two episodes of The Witcher or something like that. In the pantheon of this stuff, there’s a lot of fantasy out there at the moment, this is absolutely the cheapest and smallest!

With the relationship between Nathan and Annalise, it just had a natural feel to it that you often find missing in this sort of drama.

Oh good, I’m glad that you think that.

Listen, it’s a combination of all the elements. Whenever you’re making anything, it’s so easy for it all to fall apart because if just one thing isn’t working right… You can have the best script in the world but if the actors don’t have chemistry, then they don’t have chemistry, or you can have a good script and good actors but the director doesn’t know how to get it out of them, or it falls apart in the edit or it just doesn’t happen on the day. With anything, it’s about covering your bases.

We always wanted it to be primarily about the characters and about the relationships, so we did chemistry tests. We worked really hard to make sure we cast good actors and then it’s just about hoping it works out.

I do think a huge amount of that is just Jay and Nadia have great natural chemistry and are fantastic young actors who can do that, can bring that out.

I think the scene where I realised ‘OK, this is slightly different’ was where Nathan faced off with the two brothers then he basically flirts with them. I thought ‘If you’d written that scene ten years ago I’m not sure it would have played out like that.’

No, it’s a different generation, it’s a different world now and a big part of the book, a big part of the series, is about the characters and their identity and who they are. There’s stuff about sexuality, about finding out, essentially, what kind of person you’re going to be in all sorts of different ways. You’re trying to be authentic to characters that age and I’m not that age! But yes, it’s all about authenticity; especially when you’re writing about young people, I think that’s the golden ticket that you’re chasing.

With this, The Lazarus Project, Cloverfield, all of these are very different challenges and I would assume that there are different things you’ve learned through the creation of them. What came from this that you a) wouldn’t have expected and b) you’ll be able to take forward into a second series of this, if it happens? Or into the other shows that you’re involved with?

I think the thing I’ve learned throughout my career so far is that whatever it is, audiences really primarily care about the characters. That sounds like an obvious thing to say but I think the mistake that people make – and I think the mistake that audiences make as well – is that sometimes when we’re watching something we think, ‘Oh I’m here for the special effects’ or ‘I’m here for the genre over anything else.’ And that’s all well and good but if you haven’t grounded it in characters that people care about, they’re not going to care. You can give them as many spells or monsters or effects – and there’s still a pleasure from that – but it has to be about the characters. Like you say, you have to believe in Nathan and Annalise and Gabriel and all of them. You have to be invested in them.

I always think that about Game of Thrones, which is a series I really loved. When you think about it at its height, at its best, it was a show that took different combinations of characters – whether it’s Arya and the Hound or Cersei and Jamie or whoever – and just put them together and let them bounce off each other. I think that was what got people to love that show, more than a dragon setting fire to a city or whatever, as great as the huge battle scenes are, as great as the special effects are.

That same philosophy works whether I’m doing The Lazarus Project or I’m doing Giri/Haji or this. Other stuff matters – plot, special effects. You can do all that. But if you haven’t got those characters people care about then you’re lost. It’s the same for Cloverfield, it’s the same for everything: you’ve got to have that grounding in the characters.

Is there a specific scene you’ll look back on in ten years time and think ‘yes, that’s what sums this up’?

The final scene of episode 3 for me kind of sums up the whole show. It’s got magic and surprise and violence and humour and it’s in a location you wouldn’t expect a fantasy show to be in – it’s got all of the elements, and it ends on a big sort of cliffhanger which makes you want to keep watching. I think that is the show summed up.

All eight episodes of The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself are now available on Netflix.

Thanks to Kate Bain for assistance in setting this up.