THE THIRD DAY

The Third Day’s 12-hour live event was one of the most audacious feats of television ever — here’s how they did it

The series that saw Jude Law digging a hole in a field on live TV. Sounds like an Alan Partridge pitch, but was one of the highlights of the year.

IT HAD BEEN in the works for a decade. Yet weeks away from The Third Day’s 12-hour live event, it seemed dead. And then, just in the nick of time, echoing the plot’s own Christ allegory, it was resurrected and completely reconfigured, resulting in a truly pioneering piece of television, the likes of which we’d never seen.

Felix Barrett, artistic director of interactive theatre company Punchdrunk, had been toying with the idea for ten years, wondering, he tells Empire, “if television could be a portal into something live and then back out again. I’ve always loved watching telly, or watching a film, and imagining if it was actually real, as if you could go into it.”

He landed on that format — three episodes of a series followed by a live event, before returning to TV for the final chapters — and tapped up Dennis Kelly, writer of Channel 4’s Utopia, to write a story for it. Happening upon Essex’s Osea Island, Barrett found a place “rich with pregnant atmosphere”, and Kelly wrote about Sam (Jude Law), a man taken in by Osea’s dreamlike pull, and by a twisted community looking for a leader.

Marc Munden, who had directed Utopia, was hired for ‘Summer’, the first three episodes, taking us up to the point where Sam accepts his place as Osea’s new Father. On 3 October, we were then treated to ‘Autumn’, a 12-hour, single-camera live event, in which Sam undertakes brutal, quasi-religious tasks at the island’s initiation festival. It was bizarre, gobsmacking, transfixing television, fiction and reality blurring throughout. But not without hitches. Here’s how they pulled it off.

THE ORIGINAL PLAN WAS HUGE

Initially the live event was a very different prospect, not due to be filmed at all. With Osea’s islanders staging their festival, 10,000 people would be invited to participate and bring it to life, integrating with Punchdrunk’s improvisational troupe as well as the key cast. “No-one would have the same experience,” says Barrett. “The more curious you were as an audience member, the more you were welcomed into the bosom of the community. For example, someone might have been asked to take a bit of food to the guy in the big house and would have been given a tray and the keys and go in, and there’s Sam [Law] waiting.”

Over the years, Law, approached by Barrett at the start, was kept in the loop, and was enormously enthusiastic. “We were always talking about where you could take a character to for a 12-hour show,” says Barrett, “and he was pushing us to really go for it. He was saying, ‘This is where everything changes, and if it’s about endurance we need to see that and feel it.’ He had a hunger.”

COVID NEARLY KILLED THE LIVE SHOW… BUT BRAD PITT SAVED IT

With Munden’s ‘Summer’ episodes ready to broadcast in May, Covid-19’s onslaught spelled near doom for the live show. It quickly became evident that 10,000 people would not descend on Osea. Barrett instead decided to present the festival as a filmed show, with a more modest throng. Tasked with directing it, Munden suggested doing it in seemingly one shot, making for a more immersive endeavour. “It had to give you what Punchdrunk present live,” says Munden. “And that’s not only breaking the fourth wall — it’s

seeing your cast in a more real setting. With Punchdrunk, you’re not quite sure what you’re participating in — if people are actors or real.”

The Third Day’s broadcast was delayed, but HBO wanted to begin it in July. If that went ahead, with lockdown at its peak, there couldn’t have been a live show at all. “It was going to be rushed on,” explains Barrett. “It was, ‘There’s a need for programming, and there’s a captive audience at home in lockdown, let’s go for July.’” Step in Brad Pitt, head of Plan B, one of the show’s production companies (along with HBO and Sky). “Brad said, ‘Wait a second. This piece is incomplete without the central section,’” explains Barrett. “‘To complete The Third Day, there has to be that middle section.’ And HBO were wonderful and then gave us the slot we ended up in.”

THE REHEARSALS WERE HECTIC

The crew only had the budget for two weeks’ worth of planning on Osea. They’d always intended to have some spontaneity — but on the day there ended up being quite a bit more. “The sheer scale of the task, and rehearsing a 12-hour show in two weeks was so vast that we had to do at least a couple of hours of the 12 blind,” says Barrett.

Meanwhile, Law, mid-filming the third Fantastic Beasts film, arrived just three days before the live show. “Part of the beauty of what Jude was doing on the day was that he didn’t know what was going to happen a lot of the time,” says Munden. Doing the live event in a break from filming Beasts meant that Law had to keep Dumbledore’s considerable facial hair. “Beardgate was a thing,” laughs Barrett. Having the show shift to October, though, aided the narrative. “We used it to our advantage — the idea of Sam not having left for weeks, in this sort of mania.”

Covid regulations made for further mania. Everybody had to be tested, and people were put into different zones — green for all the Covidfree. Then, just under the wire, with all the results through, everybody was free to mingle. “It was only on the last day that we all turned green,” remembers Barrett. “That shift was just electric. Part of the energy was because we’d got there, we’d made it, and the cast could go for it.”

TECHNICAL TRICKERY PROVED… TRICKY

Presenting the show as a single-camera perspective was never meant as bravado. “We weren’t trying to make this seamless feat,” says Munden. “But nevertheless, we wanted it to be one camera’s point of view.”

Technical limitations meant they had to fudge it anyhow. “You can’t do single-camera for 12 hours, because there’s not enough memory in those memory cards,” he says. “So there had to be changes from one camera to another.” To make it work, they lined one camera up next to another, switching when someone crossed the frame. “We had about four operators anyway because no-one can hold a camera for 12 hours. That was how we did it. Most of those switches were car crashes.”

Munden and Barrett spent all 12 hours in a truck, directing the show, watching on a screen.

“We spent the whole time with our heads in our hands thinking, ‘This is disastrous,’” laughs Munden. “We were live mixing the sound on top of it,” adds Barrett. “We had a set of noises and effects to elaborate and colour and paint on top of, and if something was bad, a few of those became our saving graces, like if you could hear someone chatting in the background: ‘Cue a distant explosion, quickly!’”

UNPREDICTABILITY REIGNED

As 3 October approached with a bleak weather forecast, Barrett thought he might have to pivot again. “We had a contingency plan where if it was too rainy we would have to put up marquees, which would have totally ruined the atmosphere,” says Barrett. “In the end, we decided not to do it. We said, ‘This is the day the festival’s landed on for the community — let them deal with it.’” The lenses fogged up, but that only added to the atmosphere.

The biggest crisis hit with them “almost getting taken off the air,” says Barrett, explaining a moment where the on-screen action suddenly rewound a few minutes. With the show being broadcast on Sky Arts, it was technically daytime television, and as such, there was someone watching the action ready to kill the broadcast if anything was deemed “unfit”. At one point George Jaques, the actor playing the young man going through the initiation ceremony alongside Law’s Sam, falls off the pole he’d been perched atop of, next to Law doing the same. Alas the camera missed Jaques’ fall, and the compliance monitor said it might be perceived that he’d actually drowned.

“He said, ‘I’m so sorry, you’re going to have to go back and shoot it again,’” says Barrett. “We couldn’t communicate with Jude, so Jude was just on the post, shivering, broken, after all those hours of endurance, and we had to get the jet-ski out, get George up there to do it again. It was crazy.”

IT ENDED WITH A PARTY

When the show ended at 9:30pm, Barrett and Munden emerged from their truck, stunned by the on-set atmosphere. “Marc and I had been in our little box, seeing all the flaws,” remembers Barrett. “And then everyone was wide-eyed and as full as adrenaline as you could be. We’d made it.” Munden was similarly surprised. “We thought it was a disaster! So it was so nice coming out and everyone was going, ‘Wasn’t that amazing?!’”

Let alone the fact that they were in a Covidfree paradise. The rave that ended the show continued off-screen. “The wave of euphoria and relief was really astonishing. And that was on the back of, out of the entirety of the UK, we were probably the only place that was safe to have an all-night party,” says Barrett. “So we basically re-ran the last four hours of the show into the wee small hours. It was very sad coming home.”

But what a success story to return to. They’d created a truly original, unprecedented piece of television. Who knows where they go next.