Jack Thorne on Screenwriting

Jack Thorne has a mighty range of screenwriting credits to his name, working on hit TV programmes including Shameless, Skins and This Is England ’86. Here, he reflects on writing his BAFTA-winning drama The Fades and discusses his influences, his experience writing for multiple storytelling formats and why effective collaboration was the key to the series’ success…

While The Fades is a supernatural drama, Thorne believed it was important to root it in real issues that audiences would relate to. This instinct was driven by the films and programmes he loved growing up. He shares his inspirations were “E.T and The Goonies, shows that were about real issues. E.T is in my opinion the greatest film that’s ever been made and certainly the greatest film about loneliness, and as a lonely kid it was really important to me that E.T existed. The Goonies is about a bunch of kids who are losing their home and then they go on a pirate adventure.”

Thorne explains that these influences shaped the real world problems in his own series: “Those were the shows I loved so with The Fades we were trying to do something similar.”

A major lesson that Thorne has learnt during his career as a writer is how to collaborate effectively. He admits that “now I’m a bit better at collaborating… I didn’t give enough people enough space and they eventually forced me to give them that space because I wasn’t getting scripts in.”

He also shares that creating The Fades wouldn’t have been possible without input from everyone in the team. Because: “everyone brought something to the party and the longer I went on the process, the more I discovered that. Everyone to our location manager Jethro Ensor who discovered our first big location, the shopping centre. Me and Farren the director walked around that shopping centre and just came out brimming with ideas because the shopping centre was such an evocative place… everyone was bringing something and so the script was what they ended up doing, but everyone had a role within the script.”

Thorne has developed a breadth of experience from radio plays to feature films, and he shares that he feels “very lucky to have had careers in film, TV, radio and theatre.”

Does he have a favourite medium? Well, Thorne says: “In terms of which I love the most, I couldn’t answer that question because I don’t know. I love them all and feel very lucky to be working within them all.”

But, working across different formats requires versatility as a writer. Thorne reflects: “they’re all very different. Although the skills are similar in terms of you’ve got to work out how people are going to say the lines they’ve got to say in order to tell the story you want to tell… each are very different and you have to work it all out again, each TV script is different because if you repeat yourself again you’re screwed.”

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