Film, screenwriting, and theatre: A masterclass with Jack Thorne
By MetFilm School
24 March 2025
MetFilm School students in Manchester, Leeds, and London – along with theatre and acting students from our sister school, Performers College – were recently treated to an exclusive masterclass with multi-award-winning screenwriter, Jack Thorne.
Jack Thorne has received a vast array of awards, including five BAFTAs for his screenwriting for National Treasure, This is England ‘90, This is England ’88, Don’t Take My Baby, and The Fades. He has also won four RTS awards for his work on Help, This is England ‘86, and two for National Treasure. Jack’s work on Help also won him an International Emmy Award and the coveted Rose D’Or for Best Drama. He has also written for Skins, Shameless, and several theatre plays.
Jack’s candid discussion covered everything from breaking into the industry and navigating different mediums to his advocacy for accessibility in television and his thoughts on the future of storytelling. We are pleased to share some of Jack’s expert insights in his own words.
Getting started in scriptwriting
Your career trajectory has been remarkable, spanning theatre, television, and film. How did you first break into scriptwriting?
I started by writing a lot of plays, joining lunchtime readings and things like that. Eventually, the Bush Theatre was kind enough to put on one of my plays, called When You Cure Me. Bryan Elsley – the creator of Skins – and Jamie Brittain came to see it and thought that I may have something to offer to Skins. I started working on Skins about three months later.
I was very lucky that the Skins opportunity came along when it did. At that time, I had been applying for roles like assistant script editor on Eastenders and not getting anything. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen, or whether it would happen.
At the same time, I was beginning to write films. I wrote a short film via a connection I made via a film networking website. That short film did well, and Ivana MacKinnon, who’s a brilliant film producer, saw it and brought me onto a Celador scheme which paid £5,000 for me to write what turned out to be The Scouting Book for Boys. Ivana, by hook or by crook, managed to pull together enough finance for us to make that, and Tom Harper directed it.
So I have had three careers working in parallel: theatre, TV, and film. That wasn’t a deliberate strategy but it seemed like a good way to keep myself safe in case one of those strands didn’t work out. Working across all three seems like it should be tangled chaos but, as a writer, you actually live very distinct lives in each of them. Film and TV, in particular, feel miles apart. For me, I need to keep those plates spinning all the time. It’s by doing this which has enabled me to stay in work for about twenty years so far.
Navigating different mediums: TV, film, and theatre
You’ve successfully written across TV, film, and theatre. Do you have a preference?
I find writing for TV easier, which isn’t to say I have a preference for it, but there is a certain logic to a TV hour, which feels easier for me to sit within and to subvert. With Film, it feels like struggling uphill, but I am more confident with TV.
Theatre feels quite exposing; it’s the most terrifying of the three. Every review is going to be about you. I got four hours’ sleep last night because reviews for Toxic Town were coming out so I was up, searching the internet for reviews. Thankfully, the reviews are good, so that anxiety was misplaced. When it comes to stage reviews, it’s worse! The review literally starts with your name and can become a slow evisceration… or celebration. You’re either getting one or the other with theatre reviews.
Does that anxiety influence your writing process?
The reviewers are always somewhat in your head. I try not to let it dictate my work because you can’t write your best work that way. My anxiety is constant anyway so I never quite manage to shut out that noise. It’s about finding ways to see past it.
I remember, when I was working on Shameless, I asked Matt Jones – who was writing alongside me – I asked him, ‘When do you feel safe in this industry? When do you feel like it’s all going to be okay?’ He said, ‘That moment never happens.’
I feel safer than I did in the past. Certainly, with TV I feel safer. With Toxic Town, this is Netflix stepping into social realism for the first time, so there’s a lot of pressure of being the one who either screws it up for whoever comes next, or paves a path for Netflix going forward. The pressure of that became a bit overwhelming!
You’re incredibly prolific as a writer. How many projects do you work on at any one time?
I tend to only work on two things at the same time. The reason I like writing two things at once is because, if I’m just working on one, I stop sleeping. I become too obsessed with it. If I’m able to swap to a second project, it gives me the freedom to take a breath and a break from my own brain. It allows me to the go back to that project with a bit of distance and maybe tackle it in a new way.
Collaboration and adaptation
You’ve worked with some major names – Shane Meadows, Philip Pullman, J.K. Rowling. How do you gain the trust to write for someone else’s world?
Shane [Meadows] took a punt on me, to be honest. It wasn’t like he sat me down and said, ‘Tell me everything you know about Lol and Woody – go!’ as though I had to pass the quiz to get in! Though, I have had that in the past, when I interviewed for a shadowing scheme for writers on Eastenders. The person who saw me in said to me, ‘Apparently, you know everything about Eastenders. What’s the name of Sharon Watts’ dog?’ I just don’t retain information like that.
With Shane, it was actually Channel 4 that suggested me for it. I’d done quite a lot of work for Channel 4 by that point, so they knew my personality as well as my writing. Shane met me and he was happy for us to give it a go, and if it didn’t work then he’d find someone else.
With Philip Pullman and J.K. Rowling, it was a bit different. Adapting someone’s work is a really personal thing. For Pullman, his work means a huge amount to him, so it’s important to be very mindful of that. Jo (J.K. Rowling) is a lot more used to working with writers, so she’s quite open.
The Cursed Child project started as a treatment of what was going to be in the play. When I spoke to Jo, I made it clear that I’d be writing this dialogue for Harry [Potter] but it might not be dialogue she was okay with, so I was just going to get it all out on the page as soon as possible so we can start the discussion on it together. Essentially, I needed to show her who I am as a writer very quickly so we’re aligned when we get further along.
Advocacy and representation in the industry
You’re a strong advocate for disabled representation in TV and film. Can you tell us more about that?
When I was in my twenties, I suffered a nervous breakdown that became a physical breakdown. I then developed this condition called cholinergic urticaria, which is basically an allergy to heat. I also became allergic to physical movement because every time I moved it provoked an allergic reaction where I broke out in hives. So, I spent six months flat on my back and it took me a long time to be able to move properly again.
We need to start thinking about how we can challenge the way TV operates. It’s inherently inaccessible. So it’s not about quotas or encouraging more disabled talent on screen. It’s things like toilets. If you’re on location as a disabled person, you have a choice: either starve yourself and restrict your water intake, or crawl across a dirty bathroom floor to use the facilities.
A group of us got together and created this report called ‘Everyone Forgot About The Toilets’ and we surveyed the industry about its practises and wrote about what the industry needed to change. This gave birth to TAP, the TV Access Project, which now has 300 people in different focus groups and the buy-in of all ten main broadcasters.
Our work has led to the implementation of accessibility coordinators on most high-end dramas, and we’ve got specific funding that’s available to improve accessibility to spaces for disabled talent. Those major broadcasters made a commitment last summer to no longer work with sets and sites unless they’d undertaken an accessibility audit. I am still part of the team at TAP and I’m still very involved, but it’s now run by the amazing Heloise Beaton.
TAP is more for people who already have careers and we help with promoting them, so it’s less about bringing people into the industry and more about levelling the playing field. If you’re a disabled artist wanting to break into TV and Film, DANC (The Disabled Artists Networking Community) offers opportunities to find your way through training and networking.
Advice for aspiring writers
What advice do you have for young filmmakers looking to enter the industry?
The industry is stagnant. It needs you.
There are people who think that you have no control over what you do, that the industry is such a closed shop and there’s only one way of doing things and that’s to write a six-part crime drama for ITV. But, actually, the desire for change starts with you. The desire to change what we see on our screens, the desire to change the narrative about how things are presented starts with you; if you’re the writer, you’re at the base of it.
Rio Ferdinand, when he was coming through West Ham, was the most talented player in virtually every position. When someone asked him why he wants to play central defender, he said ‘Because I can see the pitch from here’. And I think that’s what a writer is. We can see the pitch and therefore we have some control over that pitch, responsibility for it. Being part of TAP was one of the best things I’ve ever done in that sense, asking what we want the pitch to look like and understanding that it’s up to us.
It’s not just that there are blockers at the top of the industry that say you have to do this or that. That’s not true. There are bad shows being made because of that assumption. But you can break the mould. We need people to keep breaking the mould constantly; it’s the only way TV will stay fresh. We need the next Dennis Potter and we need the next Michaela Coel, because when those sort of people make their mark, that mark is tremendous.
How do you handle rewrites and feedback?
Writing is about rewriting. You’ll get loads of notes and it will feel horrible at times because your instinct is to assume that they haven’t read it properly. But your job is to love the next draft of the script. If you don’t love the next draft, they can tell and the project will fall apart.
With His Dark Materials, we went through forty-six drafts. By the end of that, you want to kill everyone you’re working with, but you’ve got to keep redrafting, doing the dirty work. Writers who succeed in this business are the ones that smile, shrug, and do the job. The ones that mess up are those who stop caring, get bored of the project, or just get pissed off with everyone. They just don’t want to do the work anymore, and that’s the thing that makes the difference. Those who smile when they’re still getting notes on draft five will get further.
You’ve also got to work out where others are right with their notes and which are worth pushing back on. Being able to make that judgement call is a crucial part of who we are and what we do, especially in TV. It can happen the other way, too, of course. Sometimes you’ll think that their notes are wrong but after a few drafts, you’ll realise they were right all along.
Current and future projects
You’re currently working on Toxic Town and Adolescence. Can you tell us more?
Toxic Town is out now on Netflix – please watch it all the way through, because completion rates matter! If you don’t finish the series in a certain amount of time, it’s like a big black mark against our viewing figures!
As for Adolescence, it’s a four-part knife crime drama set in South Kirby, just outside of Doncaster. Each episode is filmed in one take. I worked on it with Stephen Graham; it’s the first time that Stephen’s written, so that’s really exciting.
We knew we wanted to write something that presented four different views on why this situation happens. The single-take idea was something that Phil [Philip Barantini] and Stephen talked about and decided that we’d do the arrest in episode one then, in the second, the police trying to deal with evidence inside the school. In the third, the suspect and the psychiatrist, and then the fourth episode will take us back to the family and the aftermath. It was a process of working out how each of those episodes became their own film. When writing episodes, it’s helpful to think about whether, if you took the episode out of the show, would it still work as a standalone. That’s always a useful gauge as to whether each episode has a life of its own.
Once we’d written the scripts, the first week was rehearsal and script work. The second was technical work, trying to work out the camerawork, and the third week was shooting. During the rehearsal phase, Phil and Matt Lewis – the DoP – and I walked around the school incessantly, trying to work out the best routes and timings around different areas of the set. This led to constant adaptation of the script, refining it so that the camera flow was right, and timings between scenes and settings were true to life.
Honestly, it was one of the most enjoyable filming processes of my career. The single-take thing, that technical limitation, was liberating creatively. Knowing that I couldn’t just cut away, but had to keep the story flowing.
Jack Thorne’s masterclass provided a fascinating insight into the life, mind, and creative process of one of the UK’s most accomplished screenwriters. Jack’s journey proves that persistence, adaptability, and a willingness to keep evolving are crucial to long-term success as a writer in Film, TV, and Theatre.
We would like to thank Jack for taking the time to share his experiences and knowledge with our students, who were unanimously inspired and energised by his story.
