Charlie Brooker - Inside Black Mirror

I especially enjoyed working with Hayley, because she wanted to create a grounded character. I wanted Martha to feel like the girl next door. No huge dreams or ambitions. Just someone who wanted to build a simple life with her partner, only to have that snatched away. It was something we can all relate to, and her portrayal was heartfelt and honest.

Hayley Atwell:I wanted to bring naturalism to every moment. To make Martha’s grief feel real. That helps the slightly futuristic and sci-fi elements seem plausible. I’ve never lost someone like that, thankfully, but I wanted to play it as truthfully and sensitively as I could. I was tired by the end of each day, but I loved the story and the team, and that just kept me going.

Before the shoot, I had a giggle with Domhnall Gleeson, who played Ash. We went to Dans le Noir restaurant in Farringdon, a restaurant where you’re served a meal in the dark. That certainly broke the ice. Domhnall and I wanted the audience to get a sense that this couple had a loving, playful relationship, so all the little montage clips of our time before his character’s accident are full of humour and warmth. I suppose it serves to make the loss greater.

Joel Collins (series production designer):The story is so upsetting and complex emotionally. Technology-wise, all it needed was that nudge to the next day, rather than the future. We needed to establish that this stuff could be real. So we made laptops and phones that are almost real now, because we made them so long ago. At the time, they seemed fantastical. For me, the future is detail. Unless there’s a catastrophe and the world gets rebuilt, the rest of the future is in the details around us, such as the roads being emptier because we’re all inside on computers all the time. Those details are more relevant than a wide shot.

Owen Harris:I wanted the technology to be something that you might see if you walked into the Apple store tomorrow. You wouldn’t be totally blown away to find them trialling digital paper like Martha’s drawing board. It needed to feel practical and tactile, so that it sat comfortably within the story, rather than sticking out, screaming for attention. The return of Ash as a cyborg starts to stretch the ‘near present’ sense of future, but by then I hoped you’d be accompanying Martha on her journey and indulging her steps towards the horrifying arrival of her manufactured ‘ex’ in a box.

Joel Collins:That was the beginning of us setting the tone for subtlety in vehicles. The petrol station at the beginning has these micro cars. If the future is electric, it might mean small cars. It’s a subtle beat in Be Right Back , but it’s the beginnings of those ideologies and that thinking. Maybe the future’s simple, small, eco-friendly and all that stuff.

Robyn Paiba (co-production designer):We found an amazing farmhouse which was quite rundown and needed work, but fitted cinematically. The farm had an elderly owner and an even older dog who managed to defecate in one room during the tech recce whilst we were all standing there. Tonally we went for a warm, but pared-back colour palette.

Joel Collins:The shoot involved incessant journeying. One day on the M25, someone drove past me in a van and could see Domhnall Gleeson’s fake body in the boot, wrapped in plastic.

Owen Harris:I really wanted to film Ash’s accident. I wanted the shock of the accident to affect the viewer as well as Martha. So we set about choreographing the stunt, finding the locations, scheduling the days… and then I got a tap on the shoulder and a reality check.

Charlie Brooker:The accident wasn’t in the script. I think Owen had an idea for quite a startling image, of a van spinning through the frame in slow motion. But we just felt we didn’t need that. It’s more powerful that Ash just goes off and you don’t know what’s become of him. And so, when it’s confirmed to Martha that something has happened, it’s confirmed to us as well.

Barney Reisz (producer):I’d made a mistake, because our budgets were a little bit higher for Season Two. So when I was trying to persuade Owen to do Be Right Back , I’d told him he could do whatever he liked. That’s the sort of things producers say to directors!

Owen Harris:So after a brief wave of disappointment, you regroup and look at what tools you have to portray that sudden sense of shock and loss. And in the end, the answer came from the house Martha lived in. The isolation that Martha and Ash had longed for as a couple suddenly became empty. And over a few brief beats, we created this sense of waiting that would make the solitude feel suddenly quite overwhelming. So instead of the drama of the accident, we had the quiet emptiness of being terribly alone.

‘You’re just a few ripples of you. There’s no history to you. You’re just a performance of stuff that he performed without thinking and it’s not enough’

Charlie Brooker:Martha shutting the door in the police’s faces was probably inspired by the scene in Saving Private Ryan when a woman’s washing up and a jeep arrives. The minute she sees it’s an army guy and a chaplain, her knees buckle. It’s really upsetting and tells you everything you need to know without any dialogue.

Ash is called Ash quite pointedly, because he fucking dies, almost straight away.

There was a lot of debate about his robot body that arrives in the box. Sometimes I get very insistent about things, which I refer to as getting ‘Taliban’ about them. The idea was: the body arrives blank. You put it in the bath, it somehow connects to the cloud and downloads his characteristics, then morphs its shape and textures. So I was adamant that this thing should have no features, no hair, nothing… and then we ended up shooting this thing with ginger hair. We finally altered the shot using CGI to put more foam chips in the box and cover the hair up.

Annabel Jones:Charlie’s always good at getting away with things that are slightly implausible, or that require a bit of a leap. He often undercuts it himself or gets the characters to undercut it, so here the robot Ash says, “It’s a bit creepy,” and you just embrace it. Whereas if you try and present something as being ultra-sophisticated and straight, it’s a harder sell.

Charlie Brooker:The episode is odd, because it’s quite comic in places. It’s also heartbreaking, but Martha and Ash have a nice little rapport, and there are some slightly absurd moments. And then it’s weirdly like a supernatural story. You can see a Hammer Horror version of that story where you have to go to Ash’s grave and spread a particular fluid on it. ‘ I Piss On Your Grave ’: the romantic horror of the century.

Domhnall had a really hard job to do. He effectively had to be the C3PO version of himself, a slightly naive, blanker version of himself, and he pulls it off really skillfully. One thing I was very keen not to have happen was for Ash to start feeling emotions and suddenly fall in love. There was no need for him to do that, because he’s all surface.