Charlie Brooker - Inside Black Mirror

Also, things happen where you go, “What the fuck was that?” and then we distract you again. At the dinner table, Potter hears a noise and turns around and it’s actually the noise of his cell sliding shut. It’s the sound of somebody checking on him.

Carl Tibbetts:Originally, we were going to see the exterior of the cabin as a snowy base in the middle of nowhere. But I didn’t want to see the exterior, because I thought we should stay with Potter. So with that opening shot, we stayed on Potter for a while until he turns the radio off and then that’s the first time we see Trent. The idea was to know whose story this was and adopt a point of view. We didn’t want to see Trent before Potter sees him. So we were experiencing Trent through Potter’s eyes, because we’re in a version of Potter’s head.

Sharon Gilham (costume designer):The cabin location was a slightly timeless look at outback living. It could be contemporary or it could be 100 years ago. Trent’s costume was designed to look a bit too squeaky clean for the environment, like he just took it out of a packet, while Potter’s was more used and worn.

In the first of White Christmas ’ three stories, we learn that Trent was once a dating coach, until the night he helped geeky Harry (Rasmus Hardiker) bed the enigmatic Jennifer (Natalia Tena), only for her to fatally poison him.

Charlie Brooker:Really the first story stemmed from an observation that literally everyone in the world had, when Bluetooth headsets first became a ‘thing’. Walking down the street, you’d pass someone who seemed to be talking out loud to themselves, as if they had a mental illness, whereas they were actually conducting a hands-free call. It took a while to get used to. And I thought, “Could we do a story about someone with literal voices in their head encountering someone with delusional voices in their head”? The whole murder-suicide thing is quite a melodramatic twist for Black Mirror , but we wanted White Christmas to have a touch of Stephen King about it. You get away with that stuff in a portmanteau, in a way you wouldn’t in a standalone episode.

The story about the man on the horse came from me reading about the bullshit ice-breakers that pick-up artists come out with. Actually, within the episode, it works when Jon Hamm says it to someone, because he’s Jon Hamm, but when Harry does it at the office party he’s a bit less successful. I think if you went up to somebody and said that horse story, they’d go “Have you been reading these pick-up artist websites? Fuck off.”

Carl Tibbetts:The three stories had to stand alone, but there also had to be some kind of overarching identity for the whole piece. Jon Hamm and Rafe Spall’s characters gave us that, but also if you look at the colour palettes and the costumes, they’re all a nod to each other. When you’ve got these separate stories, you don’t want them to spin away from each other too much, so that they feel like a different show. There was definite style and design cohesion in there.

Sharon Gilham:In the same way Charlie’s writing presents a world we know is ours but with a slightly exaggerated truth, I wanted the costumes to feel familiar, yet strange. For the first story, I used monochrome tones and small details, like the shape of the men’s collars – rounded rather than pointed – to move them to their own world. Jennifer’s dress was specially made in navy leather and mesh, signposting her as a dominatrix reeling Harry in.

Jon Opstad (composer):I wanted to give each of these three stories a different character musically, but in a way that still gave the score a sense of wholeness and unity. The music of this first story has a lopsided weirdness to it, shifting into outright horror once the two characters are back at Jennifer’s flat and Harry’s being drugged.

Sharon Gilham:Trent’s costumes across these stories were designed to show him as a sleek, fast living, fast talking manipulator of other people’s lives, effortlessly slipping in and out of situations like an upmarket door-to-door salesman.

Carl Tibbetts:It was a challenge to get the point-of-view shots right. Trent’s live feed was technically challenging, and for Jon Hamm too. I’m one of his perverts on Trent’s side-screen, by the way: I’m Popcorn! People always commented how I did it so well. I was like, “What do you mean by that?”

The second story sees Greta (Oona Chaplin) sign up to have a digital copy of herself surgically extracted from her brain and tasked with running the minutiae of her home system. Greta’s new digital incarnation is appalled when Trent outlines her new existence.

Charlie Brooker:This whole story is basically just someone arguing that they exist!

Annabel Jones:It started as quite a comic idea: you just want your toast exactly the way you want it, so we’ll put your digital consciousness into a toaster. It’s a crazy idea, but when you see it, it’s harrowing. Oona is trapped in there, just so you can have toast the way you like it!

Charlie Brooker:An idea had been knocking around for a while: what if you put a consciousness into a toaster, and it falls in love with you? I couldn’t work out what the story was, until I realised it wasn’t a love story at all but a fucking nightmare. In one draft, Oona’s character Greta had kids. She saw her own kid playing with the real her, and she immediately realised that she would never hug her own children again. And she fucking wept, and so I cut it out completely, because it was just too weird and nasty.

Annabel Jones:But we kept it for Black Museum in Season Four, where it’s more poignant.

Carl Tibbetts:For me, this story was the most disturbing. It established the concept of what was really happening to Potter in the cabin, while being a standalone story. I always liked the idea that, when you heard this voice in Greta’s head, you thought it was her. But actually it was this chip, and then they remove that chip in the surgery room, and the chip sees itself in the reflection! It sees itself leaving the body. That felt like another crucial decision when it came to establishing point of view, because it was about establishing that concept of ‘removal of self’. Or a version of self.

Barney Reisz:Oona was another great example of late casting – I think we cast her literally two days before. She was in Los Angeles, so got on a flight to London. She was brilliant, but totally knackered.

Carl Tibbetts:Because Oona’s first scenes involved lying down a lot on an operating table, she fell asleep due to jet lag.

Sharon Gilham:Greta lives in a world of clean lines and expensive gadgets. She aspires to live a zen-like existence and so I put her in a kimono-like robe in her house. The virtual Greta’s costume was made of neoprene, a fabric that is used to make diving suits – a man-made, robust, practical substance that fits perfectly into the world that has been created for her.

Jon Opstad:For this second story, I wanted to give the music a crisp, clean, sterile nature to fit the narrative. I used digital synths, contrasting with the more analogue sounds used in the rest of the score.