Next came writing credits on the police procedural Cuffs, Channel 4’s sci-fi drama Humans, and Troy: Fall of a City.īut it was Giri/Haji, his 2019 thriller about a Tokyo detective who goes to London to search for his missing brother, that made Barton’s name. But I knew I wanted to make stuff, and the one thing I could do straight away was write.” His first project was a web drama called Freak, starring Georgina Campbell, after which came a feature-length video for the boyband McFly, which “was awful, just terrible”, but enough to get Barton an agent. And so he has ended up burying the human drama in stories about time travel or teenage witches.Īs a child, Barton always dreamed of being a movie director but, on completing a degree in film and TV production in 2007, he realised he had “no concept of how to go about it. “I think everything I’ve done has been an attempt to ‘Trojan horse’ character drama into a bigger genre, even though it’s the genre that gets stuff made.” Barton despairs that when when he has pitched ideas for character-based dramas where “it’s just people talking to each other”, he has always been turned down. You’re just trying to get ahead enough so that people aren’t turning up on set with nothing to say.” The problem is that the industry is a creative endeavour that works within a huge capitalist systemįor Barton, the pleasure of writing The Lazarus Project lies less in the big action set-pieces than putting characters through the emotional wringer and seeing how they cope. “It’s the most structurally complex story I’ve ever tried to do,” he says, “and in the shortest amount of time. Barton compares the experience of writing the show to the scene in Wallace and Gromit’s The Wrong Trousers where Gromit, atop a runaway toy train, is frantically laying down track as it careers around the house. At the start of the second series, we find George trying to assuage the damage caused by his decision to turn back time to save his girlfriend, Sarah (Charly Clive), who had been killed in a traffic accident. The series follows the fortunes of George ( Paapa Essiedu), who is recruited to a top-secret organisation whose members regularly time travel to head off potential extinction events, from pandemics and terrorist attacks to nuclear war. Then we found out we were coming back, and my first thought was: ‘Fuck. I basically wrote myself into a cul-de-sac. Since his previous shows hadn’t made it past one series, Barton assumed The Lazarus Project was “another one-and-done, so I didn’t worry too much about how ended. Dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt revealing heavily tattooed arms, he is relaxed, funny and entertainingly sweary. We are sitting with cups of tea in Barton’s gleaming open-plan kitchen in Brighton where he lives with his partner, Alice, and their two children. All of which makes the success of his time-travel drama The Lazarus Project, which returns for a second series this month, that much sweeter. Then there was his firing from HBO’s TV spin-off of The Batman, mention of which causes his head to drop into his hands. Despite glowing reviews, his 2019 crime thriller Giri/Haji and last year’s teen witch series The Bastard Son & the Devil Himself were both terminated after one series. So there I was, from day one, being fucking cancelled.”Īs a screenwriter, the 38-year-old Barton is now flying high, but cancellation remains “a theme”. “All I could think to do was zoom in and out, and I thought: ‘This is great, I’m really doing it, I’m making a film.’ Then I was ill and off school for a week, and when I got back they’d refilmed it. “Everyone wanted to be in the advert, whereas I wanted to film it,” says Barton, who at the time was gorging on behind-the-scenes footage of the Indiana Jones films. After being put into groups and given camcorders, they were instructed to make an advert for toothpaste. When Joe Barton was at junior school, he and his classmates were set a project.
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