Charlie Brooker - Inside Black Mirror

I keep pitching a version of Nosedive 2.0, where we’re these two outlaws who go around swearing and shaking people up. But that will probably only ever exist in my mind.

For many Netflix viewers, Nosedive would have been their introduction to the world of Black Mirror .

Charlie Brooker:In a way, the episode order doesn’t matter because it’s an anthology, but equally it fucking does matter. I always assumed San Junipero was going to be the first one, because that was the first one written. We had a lot of back and forth with Netflix, who thought Nosedive should go first. Nosedive is a very accessible gateway drug, whereas something like San Junipero is more high concept.

Bryce Dallas Howard:Now, when I walk around, people see me as the girl from Black Mirror . To be identified at all with a show and a story that’s just remarkable on every level, is exciting and inspiring. It just makes life feel really awesome. With Black Mirror , there’s nothing to apologise for.

Charlie Brooker:A slightly adolescent bit of me thought that people who liked White Bear would watch Nosedive and go, “Oh, it’s all gone pastel.” So I remember being really, really anxious about Nosedive being a lighter episode. Then I showed it to a friend of mine, without saying anything. About five minutes in, she said, “This is a fucking nightmare.” I suppose I forget: what I think is frothy and light is someone else’s fucking nightmare.

Bryce Dallas Howard:My dad [the Hollywood director Ron Howard] and I watched Nosedive together, just the two of us. Afterwards, he shot up and started backing out the door, blurting, “Wow, that was excellent-excellent-excellent! I’ve gotta run, I’ll see you later!” And he then told me later that he was having a panic attack! He found it so unnerving and uncomfortable. He doesn’t have neuroses on the level of Lacie, but y’know, he’s on social media…

Annabel Jones:After seeing that episode, a lot of people said, “I just stopped using social media. I realised this was taking over my life.” The running order definitely matters, because people get what the show is very quickly from Nosedive . And then the fact that we follow up with a very different episode teaches you that this is an anthology. It’s like, “Don’t be fooled into thinking all the episodes are going to be like Nosedive , because look what we’ve got next… Playtest !”

In Conversation

Dan Trachtenberg – director

Laurie Borg – producer

Wyatt Russell – actor

Charlie Brooker – writer and executive producer

Annabel Jones – executive producer

Joel Collins – series production designer

Cooper has travelled around the world, in a bid to avoid the aftermath of his father’s death from Alzheimer’s, but finds himself unable to afford a return ticket to America. When he applies for a short-term London job as a game-tester at the company SaitoGemu, he gets sucked deeper and deeper into the augmented reality world of the creepy Harlech House, which uses his own fears against him.

Dan Trachtenberg (director):I first heard about Black Mirror while directing [the 2016 film] 10 Cloverfield Lane . Mary Elizabeth Winstead had binge-watched the first two seasons and was raving about it. I liked that very-much-discussed first episode, but loved The Entire History of You and Be Right Back . These were exciting futuristic concepts, taken to logical yet unexpected places and paired with powerful performances and filmmaking.

Annabel and Charlie sent me a little Playtest synopsis, which eventually became a more evolved treatment. I was gonna do the project no matter what, because it’s Black Mirror , but certainly the subject matter made it all a no-brainer.

Laurie Borg (producer):Dan brought a different approach to the Black Mirror process. He understands VFX extremely well and wanted a cinematographer with a distinctive voice – the New Zealander Aaron Morton. I love working with people who push the boundaries.

Wyatt Russell (actor):In 2015, I was in Atlanta doing another movie, and lived in the same house as my actor friend Alex Karpovsky, who told me about Black Mirror . I watched Be Right Back and we were all like, “Oh my God, this is the best show ever.” In America, it was just this show on Netflix: very culty and not mainstream at all. Because it was an English show with English actors, I never thought about acting in it. Then my agent said Black Mirror were interested in talking to me. Dan Trachtenberg was directing and the script existed, but wasn’t entirely finished. I didn’t care because I knew it was gonna be great.

Charlie Brooker: Playtest came about when two ideas glommed together. I wanted to do a haunted house one, a digital ghost story. And then there’d been an idea involving Whac-A-Mole, which would end up being a sequence in it.

I still think this idea was funny, but we can’t do it now. Somebody answers an advert, then goes to test an augmented reality Whac-A-Mole system. He whacks the moles and gets better and better at it. The moles get faster and faster – and then they can’t switch it off. So everywhere he looks in his life, these little cartoon moles pop up and he has to keep whacking them. If he stops, they fill his whole field of vision. If he sleeps, he wakes up and there’s thousands of moles. He goes mad, and they have to tie his hands down. Then they just go, “Put him with the others,” and they move him into this big room full of people who are all tied to gurneys, screaming and seeing moles.

Something really appealed to me about the silliness of this cartoonish idea, but it wasn’t a full episode – it was a horrible 15-minute short. Still, that idea kept floating around and so did the haunted house idea. Then I suddenly thought, “Oh wait a minute: what if you had a ghost story where it’s working out what frightens you on the fly, so what you’re seeing is being changed on the fly?” In the same way, in video games, there used to be dynamic soundtracks that would work out if the action was exciting and so the music would get more exciting. And so those two ideas somehow coalesced.

The twist that happens at the end with the phone call, that came in late in the day. Dan Trachtenberg was already on board and we were having lots of discussions. Dan’s a very big games person as well…

Annabel Jones:Dan’s a huge games person. Bigger than you, Charlie. And much better than you, I’d say. Much more knowledgeable.

Charlie Brooker:Well, you wouldn’t know because you don’t know anything about games. So actually, even if Dan knew nothing about games, you as a fucking rube would be dazzled by his knowledge. He could tell you that Pac-Man was written by a dog and you’d go, “Oh was it? Gosh I never knew that.”