When Joe Barton was at junior school, he and his classmates were set a project. After being put into groups and given camcorders, they were instructed to make an advert for toothpaste. “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. “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. So there I was, from day one, being fucking cancelled.”
As a screenwriter, the 38-year-old Barton is now flying high, but cancellation remains “a theme”. 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. 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. 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.
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. Dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt revealing heavily tattooed arms, he is relaxed, funny and entertainingly sweary. 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 [the first series] ended. I basically wrote myself into a cul-de-sac. Then we found out we were coming back, and my first thought was: ‘Fuck. Where do we go from here?’”
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. 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. 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. “It’s the most structurally complex story I’ve ever tried to do,” he says, “and in the shortest amount of time. You’re just trying to get ahead enough so that people aren’t turning up on set with nothing to say.”
For 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. “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. And so he has ended up burying the human drama in stories about time travel or teenage witches.
As 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. 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. Next came writing credits on the police procedural Cuffs, Channel 4’s sci-fi drama Humans, and Troy: Fall of a City.
But 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. His first original series, the show was critically adored and criminally underwatched. As it was a British/Japanese bilingual thriller going out late on BBC Two, he knew it wouldn’t be a mainstream hit, which “allowed us to be more free with the choices we made. So we were able to include animation and even a dance sequence, which I think made the show what it was.”
That dance sequence is part of a spellbinding denouement in which the characters gather for a final standoff in the rain on a London rooftop. The viewer expects an eruption of violence, but instead the cast slip into a dreamy slow-motion dance, shot in black and white. Barton knew it was a creative risk, which was why he hired professional dancers, overseen by the choreographer Liam Steel, to try it out before attempting it on set. “I remember the first time me and the director Julian [Farino] went down to the dance studios. Liam showed us the dance and I thought: ‘Oh wow, it’s going to work’, and Julian just burst into tears.” After a run on BBC Two, the series moved to Netflix; a few weeks later, it was cancelled. For Barton, Giri/Haji remains the high point of his career. “As a purely creative endeavour, it’s my favourite out of all the series I’ve made,” he says. “But it was also a failure because no one fucking watched it.”
Barton says the streaming era has afforded him some great opportunities, although he believes the bubble is close to bursting. Citing The Spiderwick Chronicles and Nautilus, two series recently cancelled by Disney+ without being aired (the Roku Channel recently picked up the rights for The Spiderwick Chronicles in the US), he says: “It’s completely unforgivable, what they’re doing. The problem is that the industry is a creative endeavour that works within a huge capitalist system. And so you have all these artists and creatives, and then there are these other people who are there to make money. They are in the entertainment business maybe because they want to be adjacent to the glamour. I just think: ‘Go and be a hedge fund manager; go work in the City.’”
To get a TV show made, he notes, requires compromise. “One of the first things you have to do is let go of the image of the show in your head because that will never exist. Part of the pleasure is bringing it to life with hundreds of other people, as it’s a hugely collaborative medium. You shouldn’t think it’s all your vision, as that would leave you constantly disappointed.”
Barton’s biggest professional disappointment came while working on the TV spin-off to The Batman film, a job he “genuinely thought would be life-changing. My agent was saying: ‘This is the one. This is going to be huge.’” It was originally pitched by HBO as The Wire set in Gotham City’s police department; Barton loved the concept but was later told that the cop show idea had been thrown out in favour of focusing on Joker. So Barton binned the script he had been working on for six months, drafted a new one and sent it off. “And one of the execs called me and said: ‘We love it and we’re so excited about this show.’ And then I never heard from them again.”
It is experiences like this that have made Barton wary of working entirely on Hollywood projects: “In those environments, the treatment of writers is very weird. You feel like an antelope walking through a pack of lions – they are just desperate to take you down. I replaced a guy on the Batman project, and then I was replaced with someone else. That’s just how it works, and it’s brutal.”
In any case, Barton, who is in the process of launching his own production company, is not short of work. His new Netflix thriller Black Doves, starring Keira Knightley, has just begun shooting. Next year he will start work on a new version of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, for Sky, and there’s a series about a bounty hunter with director Michael Bay in the works (shooting was halted because of the actors’ and writers’ strikes). He has also written a sequel to the JJ Abrams-produced 2008 monster film, Cloverfield, which is yet to go into production and about which he regularly fields questions from Cloverfield fans on social media. He is often asked when it will be released, but says: “I only wrote it, so they don’t tell me anything.”
Reflecting on the ups and downs of his career, Barton concludes: “There’s a sense you have to ride your luck, and you are only as good as your last series. Luckily, with The Lazarus Project and Black Doves, I’ve got a couple in the bank. All you can do is make the shows as good as you can and pray that people watch them.”
• Series two of The Lazarus Project begins on Sky Max and Now TV in mid-November.
