Charlie Brooker - Inside Black Mirror

And then I bumped into someone at Channel 4, who said something like, “We miss Black Mirror .” So I emailed them and asked how we could make this happen.

Annabel Jones:They had the budget left for one hour. And we were like, “Well, is that a Christmas special, if it’s the same length as a normal episode? Could we possibly get 90 minutes?” We told them we were feeling slightly unloved here. Could we get another half hour, just so it felt as if we were giving something different – an extra bit of running time that allowed us to adopt the portmanteau format?

Charlie Brooker:We wanted to do three stories in one. Weirdly, three stories feels like a full meal. You can’t really do a portmanteau with two stories. So you go, “I’ve got these ideas. They’re not a full episode, but they seem like they could be linked.” Also, I like portmanteau things like [the 1983 film] Twilight Zone: The Movie . Portmanteau horror films always have three or four stories in them, and it just felt like you hadn’t seen one of those in a long time. It felt fitting, and so did doing it at Christmas.

Annabel Jones:It took some back and forth, but we got commissioned. And then the festive fun began.

In Conversation

Carl Tibbets – director

Annabel Jones – executive producer

Charlie Brooker – writer and executive producer

Joel Collins – series production designer

Robyn Paiba – co-production designer

Shaheen Baig – casting director

Barney Reisz – producer

Jon Hamm – actor

Sharon Gilham – costume designer

Jon Opstad – composer

Joe Potter and Matt Trent have spent five years working together in a small Arctic outpost, and yet remain virtual strangers. On Christmas Day, Trent seizes the opportunity to get to know Potter. Over dinner, they exchange stories of date-coaching gone tragically wrong, the existential horror that lurks behind ‘smart houses’ and, finally, the terrible series of past events that Potter has tried so hard to forget.

Carl Tibbetts (director):I was very surprised Black Mirror were doing a Christmas special! I thought it was hilarious. Whenever you’re getting involved with Black Mirror , it’s always absurd, but good fun. The White Christmas concept is brilliant and you can’t help but laugh at the very idea of it.

Annabel Jones:It was great that Carl, who’d done such a good job on White Bear , came back to do White Christmas . He can do brutal. He’s not afraid of embracing the horror, but he’s a very sensitive guy.

Carl Tibbetts:I came on board with a treatment that became more and more fleshed out, and eventually turned into the episode. They had four or five concepts that weren’t fully formed episodes. We talked about portmanteaus and the early classic British horror movies like 1945’s Dead of Night , which became an influence on White Christmas . We wanted to do our own portmanteau: several stories that spun off a central conceit.

Charlie Brooker:The Christmas aspect makes it a little more emotive and nightmarish. Christmas isn’t really central, but we set one of the stories at a Christmas work party, and we keep referring to Christmas, and there’s the snow.

White Christmas is structured like a series, with three separate stories at the same time. Some of the ideas had been developed for this potential third series that hadn’t quite materialised. And then the process of weaving those ideas together suggested the overall structure of it. Originally it was set on a spaceship, but not for very long.

What we do is set up two different technologies, then use them both at the end. So we set up the stuff to do with the Z-Eyes device, which lets the user stream live video and block people. Then it brings up the cookie concept, of your consciousness copied into an egg.

This film was the first time we chose to start reusing gadgets we’d used before. At one point, we tried to reinvent the interface device and went through different variants, but no matter what we did it wasn’t as good as the gizmo we had in The Entire History of You , so we decided to just use that. And doing that slightly opened the door to us dropping in Easter eggs, these references to other episodes. I probably thought that White Christmas might have been the last one we ever did, so I thought, “Fuck it, might as well.”

Annabel Jones:We were very keen for the individual films to feel they were building towards something, unlike a few portmanteaus with discrete stories that don’t really pay off. I always feel slightly cheated by a portmanteau where there’s no real link. So we worked hard at making sure that there was a build, that they tied in, that they came together and that it made sense of the whole world. I think there was really good craftsmanship in that film.

Joel Collins (series production designer):A Black Mirror Christmas special felt so ironic that there was talk of calling it Black Christmas ! It was like giving someone a dark festive treat. We tried to design an environment where it was a London, but a new-ish London, a bit ahead in the future, because the technology was a bit beyond. It was a very complex thing to do, and again, sometimes showing less is more important than showing more. At one point, we thought everyone could be living in boats so we’d never see any cars. But without much financial scope, the best thing to do was reduce it to a much simpler form and just work with the story.

Charlie Brooker:At no point did Annabel or I think that they would be living on boats.

Robyn Paiba (co-production designer):The challenges were not only the timescale and creativity, but geographical. In one week we were prepping and shooting in the four furthest corners of London. The set was built in Twickenham, which was also the starting point as a base for the third and fourth series.

The two lead actors for White Christmas’ were The Big Short ’s Rafe Spall as Potter and Mad Men ’s Jon Hamm as Trent.

Shaheen Baig (casting director):During our first series especially, actors’ agents hadn’t understood what the show was yet, so sometimes I had to battle to explain what we were trying to do. But because the quality of the scripts was so great, people wanted to do it.

Barney Reisz (producer):But by now, people were ringing Shaheen up, practically offering to do it for nothing! Big names like Jon Hamm made it public that they wanted to be in Black Mirror .

‘Try to blow on my face. You can’t, because you don’t have a body. Where are your fingers? Your arms, your face? Nowhere’

Charlie Brooker:In the first draft, before Jon came along, Trent was a cheeky cockney. He was more of a Jack the Lad, a chirpy bloke to contrast with Potter. And then fortuitously, around mid-2014, Jon Hamm had seen Black Mirror , and was in London, and we got word that he would like to meet up. So we said, “No of course not. Not that physically repugnant idiot!”