Charlie Brooker - Inside Black Mirror

Bryce Dallas Howard:When I read Nosedive , I had only recently joined social media. I was never on MySpace or Friendster or Facebook or anything, and then at the age of almost 35 I joined. It was the most agonising process to figure out what my profile picture should be, or what my little tagline was. I started doubting myself and worrying about it. And then I thought, “I can’t get too wrapped up in this because, Jeez Louise, I’m playing Lacie! I don’t wanna end up with a microphone, covered in swamp and losing my shit at a wedding.”

I let myself eat what I wanted, when I wanted, to get to the point where I didn’t really look like… an ‘actress’. But the real key choice I made was Lacie’s laugh. It wasn’t so different from my own laugh – I added 15 per cent fear, 30 per cent disingenuousness and 25 per cent depression! When you’re faking laughter, it feels awful, like a nightmare. Everything else really fell into place after Lacie’s laugh.

When I got to South Africa, where we shot, I pulled out one of my ‘nosedive’ videos to show Joe and I freaked out, because my real-life nosedive had happened exactly one year prior.

Joel Collins (series production designer):I’d found this town called Knysna on the Garden Route of South Africa. You had to fly to Cape Town, get on another plane for an hour-and-a-half, then drive for two hours. The new relationship with Netflix was exciting on that level, because I was able to find something amazing online, then get on a plane and say, “Shall we do this?” When I showed Charlie and Annabel this place they were enthusiastic. So I had to convince all the people living there to let us shoot.

Laurie Borg (producer):Whilst I was prepping San Junipero in Cape Town, Joel and I went to location-scout Knysna, which has a wonderful feel of an American coastal town with white clapboard houses and immaculate gardens. Think The Truman Show ! We knew we had found our key location and, with some clever set dressing, created a perfect American world. Filming all of Nosedive in South Africa was a great decision for both creative and financial reasons.

Joe Wright:All these houses looked the same, so it’s this really weird, homogenised little community. And that felt really appropriate for contemporary and near-future America. Especially California. I spent a bit of time travelling back and forth between Los Angeles and San Diego, and it all kinda looks the same.

Joel Collins:Joe and I recced around the island on bikes. It was hilarious. We shot there for no more than a day or two, but it set the tone for the feeling of the world that Lacie lived in.

James Foster (co-production designer):The enforced social conformity put me in mind of the 1950s, or a near future version of that at least. I saw the painted smiles on the people in old adverts for modern homes, telling you this was the way you needed to live, and to fit in. Keep up, don’t fall behind. Joe was also liking certain late-1980s modern styling, reminding me of the ‘upwardly mobile’ and showy side of successful individualism. I really liked the idea of a mix of the two.

Joel Collins:In true Joe Wright style, he took ownership of our key Truman Show ideology, went for the jugular and pushed and pushed. He made it more pink, more blue, more pastel.

Joe Wright:I don’t do things by halves, and I guess the colour range was based on the palette of this community that Joel had found. I wanted people to be camouflaged within their own world. No-one wants to stick their head out too much, and yet they all want to be noticed at the same time, which is a weird visual oxymoron.

James Foster:We aimed for an almost digital-looking reality. Perfect interiors with nothing out of place, but still uncomfortable. Clean and uncluttered modernist interiors with blank walls and repeated textures, confining things to the point that it could feel claustrophobic. Joe was keen to be really bold with the amount of sickly sweet pastel tones we were using, from the smallest props to entire interiors. With this veneer of colour, we gave the world a fake smile

Annabel Jones:We’d spoken about the aspirational element and sending that up by creating this saccharine world. And then Joe took it to a whole other level. We were like, “Oh, okay …”

Charlie Brooker:I was writing Men Against Fire while Nosedive was filming in South Africa. Because obviously, whenever we film somewhere nice, I’m not there. Not that this is a constant bugbear of mine! But I saw the rushes and immediately thought, “This is going to go one of two ways. This is a really strong flavour.”

The first scene I saw looked beautiful, but way more stylised than I’d envisaged. I probably pictured something a bit near-future, with shiny glass, more Minority Report . I would not have thought about pastel pink, blue and peppermint green. So I thought, “Christ, I’ve taken my eye off the ball slightly there. Does that alter things?” I was really nervous about it.

Joel Collins:At the time, those colour choices felt like risks. But when you watch the show, it doesn’t feel like a risk at all. It feels just right.

Joe Wright:I think people might have been a bit surprised. But Charlie and Annabel find people who they want to realise these stories, and then do give them a large degree of autonomy in doing so.

Charlie Brooker:The more I saw of what Joe was doing, the more I understood. And then when you get the final product, with Max Richter’s score, you see this saccharine world, but then there’s this very sad, contemplative piano score that’s quite mesmerising.

‘Pelican Cove… What is this, a eugenics program?… No-one’s this happy. A two-year-old with a fuckin’ balloon isn’t this happy’

Annabel Jones:That audio-visual marriage suddenly took the edge off everything. You realised that Max’s melancholic score had allowed Joe to go very big with the aesthetic. And there was the emotional punch.

Charlie Brooker:That’s very clever. Imagine how annoying Nosedive would be, if it looked like that and the music was jaunty! You’d go, “Fuck this.” But the whole thing also looks dreamlike, like a weird Disney nightmare.

Annabel Jones:You can’t talk about Nosedive without mentioning Seamus McGarvey, the director of photography who normally works with Joe. He just made it look painfully beautiful and cinematic. Seamus normally works on big, big Hollywood movies, so we like the fact that people who normally work on features for nine months can come and do what’s essentially a short film with us for three or four weeks. They can take an idea, have fun with it and enjoy blowing it up.

Joe Wright:At one point in the original script, Lacie drove from her suburb through the desert, and through different landscapes, to arrive at the wedding party. But we couldn’t afford to go to those locations. And then it struck me that she should drive for 12 hours or whatever, then arrive somewhere that looked exactly the same, as a comment on American homogenised culture.

For me, to a large degree, Nosedive is about sincerity. What is sincere? The characters in this story believe, in the moment, that what they’re saying is true. It’s just that, in the next moment, something else is true.