Manners is the lead director behind the latest iteration of David Nicholls’ 2009 bestseller, the Netflix series One Day. Viewers get to know Emma, a working-class girl from Leeds, and Dexter, a privileged boy from London, through just one day a year, over a 20-year span. Manners’ role included setting the tone for the series as a whole, finding her ‘Emma’ and ‘Dexter’, choosing locations, and creating a visual language for the two of them, both when they’re together, and in the years where they’re separated.

The story kicks off on 15 July 1988 as the two of them meet at their university graduation in Edinburgh, and ends in 2007. Manners thought it important to cast at the younger end for the leads: “it was very much part of my pitch that I wanted to cast young for it, and I wanted us to buy into them early, and feel like they were bright young things with their whole lives ahead.” She cast Ambika Mod (This is Going To Hurt) and Leo Woodall (The White Lotus), then in their mid 20s, as Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew. Mod was notoriously hard to pin down, but Manners and casting director Rachel Sheridan “hunted her down” after she initially refused the role several times: “luckily she had a change of heart in the middle of the night… she just felt so, so bang on and so sort of… cerebral.” 

After Emma and Dexter graduate, they decide to walk up Arthur’s Seat, a very popular hike in Edinburgh which leads to panoramic views of the city. What looks empty and idyllic in the series had a lot of heavy lifting behind it – at some points quite literally. While the cast in all their makeup and costumes could take what Manners describes as a “cool little tractor” up the side of the hill, the crew were “lugging sandbags, cameras and lighting stands” along with them. “It was quite a herculean effort,” she says.

Being a popular tourist spot, it was impossible to shut off the entire hill for a day of filming, which meant shooting very early in the morning at the highest points, and then going “off the beaten track” once it started to get busier. Dexter revisits Arthur’s Seat in the final episode, and although Manners felt it was important for the aging to appear subtle throughout the series, by this point Woodall required prosthetics to lend him the extra 20 years. The high winds meant he was acting through prosthetics that “definitely became heavier than they were meant to be,” laughs Manners, but she maintains that the challenges “were the fun of it! It’s quite exhilarating.”

Manners directed episodes one, two, three and fourteen, with directors Kate Hewitt (Playing Nice), John Hardwick (Brassic) and Luke Snellin (The A Word) taking three episodes a piece. With each episode coming back to Emma and Dex after a time leap, it means “every year is self-contained: it exists within itself.” This gave directors the space to make their own choices, whilst still sticking to the tone Manners set. Alongside the expected indicators for each time period, such as Walkmans, vintage Penguin book covers, Adidas track jackets and payphones (Manners remembers teaching Mod how to use a payphone) another crucial aspect was the soundtrack. David Nicholls, who Manners describes as a “real muso”, sometimes came to the edit and picked music tracks with them. Nicholls also created playlists for both Emma and Dexter that were circulated to the team early on in the process - “I used to listen to those when I was working on the development of my vision, and the pre-production process,” says Manners.

Music supervisor Matt Biffa, editor Mike Jones, Manners and others got together and “had a lot of fun” sharing their favourite 80s classics - “it was a real collaborative effort. All the music… it holds such different meanings for different people.

“There were definitely some tracks we put on that David was like ‘God no, that’s awful’, but then other times he absolutely loved it.”

Each director had a hand in selecting the music for their episodes, with the completed soundtrack featuring everything from Cameo to Belle and Sebastian. Potentially the most important musical decision of the series came when Dexter was walking up to his box room in the gut-wrenching episode 14: How do you soundtrack grief? Eventually they selected Jeff Buckley’s rendition of Lilac Wine, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the editors’ suite: “Everyone was in tears just watching a man walk up some stairs,” Manners recalls.

It’s an odd image but it encapsulates the series. As the viewer is only privy to one day a year, we see the importance, beauty and sometimes tragedy in the moments that might seem insignificant when we are doing them ourselves. Manners says “it's not about the big, pivotal, life things… you don't actually see those.

“There was a point where I was like ‘oh my god, his mum’s got cancer… should we not show the conversation? But that happened the next day. So, we were strict and truthful to only showing that one day.”

At the series close, Dexter is back in Edinburgh visiting the spots where him and Emma first met. On the steps where he asked for her number, he remembers turning to kiss her – something omitted from the original scene. This sets off a final bittersweet montage which was inspired by a line from scriptwriter Nicole Taylor: “I think she had written about time collapsing in on itself, everything existing all at once”

Manners says her and the Director of Photography Nick Cooke "took this and ran with it." They initially had an idea to film all the moments where they almost kiss, to elevate that final kiss. They promptly forgot about it – "but then when it came to editing the final episode I remembered that seed of an idea and thought, 'Let's try it'. It's like flicking through the most intimate memories from across the years," finishing on the unseen kiss from the very first day in 1988. Manners says that when the editor, Jones, first put it together, they thought "that's it!"

“Life is lived in the smaller moments that you don't really notice along the way,” says Manners, “until you look back and just realise, ‘oh god, that was the thing. Those were the moments.’”

Molly Manners won in the Director – Scripted category at the RTS Craft & Design Awards 2024.