Charlie Brooker - Inside Black Mirror

In Conversation

Bryce Dallas Howard – actor

Charlie Brooker – original story writer and executive producer

Annabel Jones – executive producer

Rashida Jones – co-writer

Mike Schur – co-writer

Joe Wright – director

Joel Collins – series production designer

Laurie Borg – producer

James Foster – co-production designer

In a world where everybody’s socioeconomic standing is dictated by their star-ratings given by other people, Lacie Pound is desperate to move into a luxury apartment. Having been invited to the wedding of her top-rated childhood friend Naomi, Lacie spies an opportunity to boost her own score, but her increasingly frantic cross-country trip to the wedding does not go according to plan.

Bryce Dallas Howard (actor):I went to New Zealand to shoot a film and was away from my family and friends. I told my husband I was lonely and he recommended that I watch Fifteen Million Merits .

Now, I really have to police what I watch. I don’t know whether it’s because I get so immersed while watching something, or my imagination goes wild afterwards, but I’m sensitive and can get very affected by it.

To say I had a nervous breakdown would be way too dramatic. However, I had quite a night, let me tell you! Owing to the time difference by the time the show ended, I couldn’t get hold of my husband. So I sent him a series of videos of me crying, saying, “How could you do this to me? Why would you make me watch this? This is the stuff of my nightmares!” I just felt total betrayal.

In one of the videos I sent, I actually said, “I’ve just taken a real nosedive.” So I didn’t watch any more of the show. And then Black Mirror reached out to me to star as Lacie in their film called Nosedive …

Charlie Brooker:This one started as a movie idea, yonks ago. It was substantially different but we went out to the States and had meetings with various movie companies, some time after the first season of Black Mirror .

This is a common experience for writers. You go out to the States, have all these really positive meetings with lots of studios, and you think, “Wow, this is the big time. I’m going to be the king of this town in a week!” And then nothing happens.

Annabel Jones:Because these Hollywood execs are worried that everyone else is having the same meeting, they have to have the meeting. And so everyone spends a lot of time telling each other that they’re great. That’s how it works. And by accident, some things get commissioned.

Charlie Brooker:Back then, Nosedive was more of an outright comedy, set in a world in which the economy was run on your personal score. It centred on a celebrity who’s got a really high rating, but he’s blackmailed into reducing it to zero in twenty four hours. It was like Brewster’s Millions for reputation. He had to shred his own reputation, but there were certain rules, like he wasn’t allowed to break the law. So he could walk around saying offensive things to people. And yet, the more he tried and went around being offensive, the more he become a folk hero in this Charlie Sheen meltdown sort of way, so he could never get it down to nil. If someone makes that film, they owe us some fucking money because it was our idea.

Annabel Jones:This was back before Uber, before people’s rating had become a kind of currency. Before you’d get in a car with a total stranger because they’ve got a high four.

Charlie Brooker:Thanks to TripAdvisor and Amazon reviews, you were used to the idea of things being rated out of five, but not so much people. So then, when Season Three came along, we felt it should be more about a waitress or somebody. What if we followed somebody who’s teetering on the brink of being downgraded? So that was the new starting point.

Annabel Jones:For added variety, we thought we should take an approach more like [the 1987 comedy film] Planes, Trains and Automobiles , where she’s got to get somewhere. We’d plot her journey and have the system throw more obstacles at her.

Charlie Brooker:Originally, our main character Lacie had been invited to give a work presentation, somewhere where lots of influential people would be. At that point, we started talking to Rashida Jones and Mike Schur, because we knew it would be set in America and we wanted that authentic American voice. Nosedive also felt more comedic than some of the episodes. Rashida actually contacted us.

Rashida Jones (co-writer):Oh yeah, I approached them… if by “approached” you mean “begged to be a part of it in any way”.

The multi-talented Schur and Jones had plenty of experience in US TV. Mike had created Parks and Recreation , Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Netflix’s The Good Place . Rashida Jones co-wrote the 2012 film Celeste and Jesse Forever and had starred in the likes of Parks and Recreation , The Office and Boston Public .

Rashida Jones:I had been a fan of Black Mirror and Charlie’s show Newswipe , because some UK friends had introduced me to his work. No one quite has a brain like his: twisted, hilarious, prescient, and singular. So he and I became friendly and talked about what we could work on together. Then he and Annabel called about their first Netflix series and how they wanted to take a stab at the show’s first comedic episode.

Mike Schur (co-writer):I’ve been friends with Rashida forever: we met in college 25 years ago. One day, when we were talking about shows the other one would like, I told her she had to watch Black Mirror . She then informed me that not only was she already a fan, but she had started a correspondence with Charlie and he had mentioned the possibility of her writing an episode. This is usually how it goes when you’re friends with Rashida – she’s eleven steps ahead of you at all times. I had just finished the final season of Parks and Recreation , so the timing was perfect, and we ended up just volunteering for duty.

Annabel Jones:When Rashida said Mike would like to work on Nosedive with her, we were like, “Okay, a comedy god? Great!”

Mike Schur:Our only goal was to try to serve the show Charlie and Annabel wanted to make. Charlie’s treatment wasn’t fully fleshed out, moment by moment, but the entire idea and narrative were there. It was such a clean idea: a world where the five-star rating system had gotten out of hand, and was now determining social standing and access to resources. Such a haunting and perfect Black Mirror idea. So perfect, that all of China is apparently now actually using it.

Rashida Jones:We all had several phone calls about character and plot. Mike and I pitched some new ideas and then went off to write a draft. One big shift was to make Lacie less of a mercenary game player and more of a people-pleaser. That’s a very American archetype that I can relate to – I vacillate daily between people-pleasing and misanthropy – and we thought it would help you follow her demise with empathy.