AGE OF CHANGE
NEW NETFLIX SERIES THE INNOCENTS IS A TALE OF TEEN LOVE WITH A TWIST. AS NICK SETCHFIELD DISCOVERS, SHIFT HAPPENS...
Hania Elkington has a fitting confession for a show about secrets. “When we first sent out the script we said to our agents, ‘Don’t tell anyone it’s about shape-shifters’,” the showrunner smiles. “We didn’t want them to think, ‘this is a genre fantasy piece.’ We wanted them to go, ‘this is about families and young lovers and secrets and lies’ – and then go, ‘oh my god, what the hell just happened?’”
as netflix bingers are about to discover, The Innocents is more than a modern spin on Romeo And Juliet. harry (Percelle ascott) and June (sorcha groundsell), the show’s star-crossed lovers, are caught in an international conspiracy that spans Viking mythology, a clandestine project named sanctum and, yes, the power to attain a “shift-state”, transforming your physical appearance into someone else entirely. But for all its fantastical, body-warping trimmings this tale of teenage runaways is, its showrunners insist, a romance at heart.
“We wanted to tell a human story,” says Elkington, who created and scripted The Innocents in partnership with simon Duric. “We always said – and this is very important to us – if you take the shape-shifting out, does it still deliver emotionally? Does it still work as a story? We want the shape-shifting to be an added lens on adolescence, growing up, finding out who you are and where you belong. shape-shifting is a wonderful meme to put alongside two young lovers coming of age.
“in broad strokes simon really loves muscular, intelligent genre. i really like dark but warm family secrets, domestic with a twist. We realised that whenever there was a space where our taste intersected, we were obsessional about that movie or that tV show. it’s a very unusual tonal space where we intersect. so we said, ‘let’s try to think of something that can exist in that spot and develop it together.’”
TEENAGE KICKS
Duric previously worked as a storyboard artist on such hollywood heavy-hitters as Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Sherlock Holmes.
“i am incredibly visual, that’s just hard-baked into me. i tend to have quite a clear grasp on the look of something. it’s definitely helped in terms of forming this world and the visuals of it.”
“simon created an extraordinary lookbook to go along with it,” says Elkington. “it was about 30 pages of every character, every location, moods, atmospheres, which helped hugely in helping people understand what shifting might not only look like, but feel like, and to create a visual identity and flavour for the world.”
“i’ve worked on a lot of genre projects and i see how directors have to solve that world,” Duric adds. “i knew that would be key to this. the shape-shifting was the hardest sell, of course…”
crucial to the conspiracy that powers the plot – a conspiracy that connects June’s absent mother and an island commune in norway, linked to guy Pearce’s enigmatic halvorson – the transformations are presented as agonisingly physical experiences.
“We wanted the process to feel real and not fantastical,” Elkington explains. “not something with colours and strange scaly textures that suggested it was an unhuman experience. simon and i spent a lot of
time looking at octopuses and cuttlefish and animals in the natural kingdom that transform their shape, just to try to get a bead on something that felt organic.” “i remember talking a lot about An American
Werewolf In London, The Howling and The Thing,” Duric tells SFX. “obviously we’re talking about crazy, crazy creatures in those films but what i always admired about them ever since i was a kid was the feeling of ‘that’s really happening.’ not just the in-camera practical effects but the muscles, the bones, the sense that something physical is coming from inside. and that felt important to this show.”
“We also wanted to avoid the horror,” Elkington adds. “We didn’t want it to be body horror, something disgusting or repulsive. Uncomfortable, yes, but not where you’d go ‘that’s gross!’ no bones snapping, or any of that! there were a lot of conversations…”
the “shift states” also drive the show’s dramatic beats, Duric reveals. “Each shift represents either a turning point for June or another character or an emotional turning point in the story, or an exploration of a theme that’s relevant to that part of the storyline. it was never, ‘let’s just have a shape-shift for the sake of a shape-shift’, or, ‘What’s the shift of the week?’ We were always asking, ‘What does that shape-shift mean in terms of that moment in the story that June and harry are exploring and experiencing?’” FIRE AND ICE
there’s a pinch of scandi noir aesthetic in the show’s bleakly photogenic norwegian backdrops, but as Elkington tells SFX, The
Innocents isn’t chasing a tV trend. “norway is incredibly cinematic and scandinavia has become quite fashionable. for us it didn’t come from fashion or wanting to shoot there for the look of it. it came from developing the mythology of shape-shifting and we found this scandinavian history around the berserkers, who were old Viking warriors who shape-shifted into wild animals in battle. We wanted to lock our mythology onto cultural history, and it happened to be scandinavia and so we went to norway. We built backwards.”
“there’s an inevitable thing as well with scandinavia,” Duric shares. “it’s ridiculously beautiful. all of a sudden you’re out there and it changes the way you approach filming. We never thought, ‘oh, let’s throw in a scandi noir element’, but when you get out there you can’t help but have an element of it.
“Weirdly, though, i feel like we’ve made a scandi-Western. When you get onto that island, just the tone of it, the mood of it, the look of it… that just kind of developed organically as we explored what the island was. it wasn’t intentional but obviously something happened magically as we went there.”
harry and June’s story is told across eight episodes. Will there be more adventures for the pair? “i think anyone who has built eight hours of tV would hope so,” says Elkington. “We’ll see how people respond to it. as writers our brains are on fire 24/7 but we just want to find an audience that connects with it.”
THE TONE AND MOOD MAKES IT FEEL LIKE WE’VE MADE A SCANDI-WESTERN