Marc Munden on Directing Kids in the Brutally Artful “Lord of the Flies”

Two years ago, 36 first-time child actors and their families flew from England to Malaysia to reinvent Lord of the Flies as a four-part series (May 4 on Netflix), directed by BAFTA winner Marc Munden and adapted from a script by Adolescence writer-producer Jack Thorne. Over the course of a 17-week shoot, complicated by monsoon rains, cast and crew told the brutal story of choir boys fighting for survival after they’re stranded on a remote island following a plane crash.

William Golding’s unsettling novel came out in 1954, but its themes continue to resonate in 2026, according to Munden. “In our story, you’ve got this fragile boy who’s also a bully and a bit of a narcissist with this army behind him,” he says. “If you look at Lord of the Flies as a political fable for today, you can see who the bullying narcissists are as well as the sort of dutiful believers in democracy who are maybe less dynamic and less exciting. I think that’s the relevance.”

Speaking from his home in London, Munden explains why he drew on the visual cues of 19th-century Spanish painter Francisco Goya and discusses transforming three dozen British kids into frighteningly formidable actors.

The only thing more vivid than Lord of the Flies’ rainforest locations are the performances of these kids as they dramatize the descent from literal choir-boy behavior into homicidal madness. How did you find these children?

Nina Gold did the casting, and she might have seen over a thousand. We gradually reduced that number in workshops by trying out kids in different roles and got it down to the nine boys who actually have lines, along with the other non-speaking roles. They’re all first-time actors, ages five to 12.

No experience acting!? How did you get the boys into shape?

We rehearsed for five weeks in England, as you would normally with adult actors. Since none of the boys had any stagecraft, it was a question of inducting them into how that works. And then we went out and filmed it.

You make it sound so simple!

Well, the interesting thing is that even though none of these boys had been in front of a camera before, I think every boy that age understands bullying or playground behavior. They all understand wanting to have fun and perhaps being a bit selfish. They all understand not wanting to look after the little ones. All of that stuff came naturally, and also, these are very bright boys.

After rehearsing in England, you move the whole production to Malaysia to film on this archipelago of about 100 mostly uninhabited islands during the monsoon season. Logistically, that sounds pretty daunting.

The boys came with their parents and their siblings, and there were tutors, chaperones, and child psychologists. There was a whole army of people, and we all stayed at a hotel on the island of Langkawi, near the Thai border. Every day, we’d travel in a small boat for about 45 minutes to one of these remote islands. The whole idea was that these children had landed in an alien environment that might suit an adventure story, but it gradually reflects the boys’ discomfort and the breakdown of their society, becoming more of a horror film.

Mark Wolf’s cinematography and your directorial choices frame the story through inventive shots and great compositions.

Partly that has to do with the grammar of how we shot it.

How so?

We wanted to shoot it a little bit like a documentary thing, especially when you’d have 36 boys in one scene. Even though we’d rehearsed, there’d always be someone looking at the camera or someone goofing off in the side of the shot. So, it was a question of using the zoom lens to grab shots when we could. So that was part of the grammar.

Also, at the beginning and end of the series, you interrupt the action to insert portrait shots of individual boys. What’s that about?

I wanted to bring nonverbal material into the piece. When the boys were on the set, we’d put them in front of the camera, sort of communing with us in some sort of way. Francisco Goya, the Spanish court painter, had an exhibition a few years ago, and I was struck by how all those sitters seemed to be in direct communication with the audience. Here, I wanted to utilize that idea, as if these little boys were trying to communicate outside the space and into your living room. Those portraits hold up particularly at the end, when you see each of the boys looking so desperate.

The entire ensemble is pretty great, but David McKenna really stands out as “Piggy,” this chubby kid with glasses who gets picked on even though he’s basically the brains of the operation. How did you discover him?

Late in the process, David came in from Belfast to audition, and it was obvious that he’s an absolutely natural-born actor and a remarkable little boy. Everyone fell in love with him.

He’s very convincing.

Well, Piggy has all the ideas and knowledge, but he’s also really annoying, and David totally got that. When we were shooting, some of the terrain was very rough, and you’d often see David falling over, which I kept in because it’s just who he is. Sometimes, they’d carry him on a sedan chair, and he’d sort of be waving like the queen, and everyone would cheer. I did work with David on maybe bringing his performance down a little bit, but really, he came fully formed.

Piggy’s nemesis, Jack, is played by Lox Pratt, who kind of resembles Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, except he’s only 12 years old.

I really put him through his paces. I had this idea in my head that Jack should be like Malcolm McDowell in [1968 Lindsay Anderson boarding school drama] If, a sort of swaggering posh lout, a bit like Boris Johnson. But Lox played Jack very differently, more like an entitled rock star or a prince, preening and delicate but also capable of extreme violence and extreme cruelty. Lox was much cleverer than I had predicted and absolutely knew what he was doing.

As the kids in Jack’s camp become more savage-like in their war paint and masks, some of the scenes seem almost like an exorcism when boys are dancing jigs and marching along the beach, chanting “Cut its throat, spill its blood, kill the beast!”

It should be like an exorcism because as this goes from adventure film to horror, it’s as if, in some ways, they are possessed by “the beast.”

Was there a concern that those scenes might be too intense for the younger actors?

The “littluns” who were younger, five to eight, were not allowed to be on set when the older boys were chanting “Kill the Beast,” so yeah, they were protected from all that. But during that initial rehearsal period, the big ones learned to immerse themselves in their roles while also understanding the division between the characters and themselves. Sometimes things got a bit chaotic, but what I loved about this project is that everyone was so serious about the work.

 Lord of the Flies is now streaming on Netflix.

 Featured image: Lord of the Flies – Season 1 – Episode 103. David McKenna as Piggy, Winston Sawyers as Ralph. J Redza/Eleven/Sony Pictures Television