Charlie Brooker - Inside Black Mirror

By the fifth rehearsal, everyone was ready and it was time to go for the first of our three takes. All the energy in the room was a 10, and it was time to rock ‘n’ roll. One of the coolest experiences of my life was getting to be a part of, and be the focal point of, a team working together to get something right. I had to be totally vulnerable, no holding back.

Dan Trachtenberg:Wyatt kind of shocked us all when he went to such a devastating place. And he had to go there multiple times as we perfected the camera move.

Charlie Brooker:That was one of those moments, when we first saw a scene in the dub and it’s almost too much. That moment where Cooper’s babbling and going, “I don’t know who I am.” It’s so horrific. You feel so bad for him.

The fact that Cooper ultimately dies because his mum calls his phone, that was partly a knowing nod to people who say, “Oh, it’s the show where some British guy warns you about what would happen if you dropped your smartphone on your toe, and then the pixels went into the toenail and filled up your bum, and your bum went digital, and then your bum was emailing your ear and you didn’t know about it and they were talking about you behind your back.” So we deliberately did an episode where a phone does kill someone! Something as trivial as phone interference becomes the big twist. Here’s a bit of audio trivia: you know that noise that phones make when there’s a bit of interference, which you hear before the phone rings? That starts to surface near the end, but it keeps happening throughout the soundtrack in a slowed down, embedded way.

At one point, we wanted to break the fourth wall. We had a thing where Cooper gets told he’s a character in Black Mirror , but that would have been a bit weird. We also wanted to do Nightmare Mode, so that if you went back and watched the film again it would be different.

Annabel Jones:This is a good example of where stripping things out makes something stronger. There’s the danger that it becomes so layered it all becomes slightly meaningless. So if we ever felt we were putting too much in, we wanted to draw it back.

Dan Trachtenberg:Initially Cooper’s relationship with his mom was quite different. She was overtly neurotic and his death was more her fault for constantly trying to dote on her grown son. But we realised we had it the wrong way. It was more poignant to shift it so that Cooper was taking his relationship with his mom for granted. The wall he’s put up between them, his defiance against reaching back out to her, is ultimately his undoing. Basically, I have guilt about not calling my mom enough, as many of us do.

Annabel Jones:Throughout Playtest , there are lovely little details that I think probably still get missed. The idea was that every experience Cooper has had, to the point where he plays the game – the pubs he’s visited, the places abroad – all get sucked up into his memory and then are used against him. Or he uses them as textural details within the world. So the Raven pub in which he meets Sonja – that becomes the book he’s reading in the Harlech House.

Dan Trachtenberg:We devoted a lot of time to this. Sometimes it’s overt, like Cooper’s watching a giant spider movie on the plane and then later we see a spider. But sometimes it was subtler. On the morning he and Sonja wake up together, the placement of his scar and her head are matched later in the film in a very different scene between them. There’s even a Red Sonja poster hanging in her apartment!

Charlie Brooker:Everything’s referenced. The stuff that Cooper sees on monitors on his way into SaitoGemu, is actually the stuff that all feeds into the nanosecond fantasy that kills him.

Annabel Jones:The magazine cover that Hannah shows him in the flat, with the image of Shou Saito, informs Cooper what Shou looks like.

Charlie Brooker:Sometimes people ask why Shou speaks Japanese at the end, whereas he speaks English to Cooper. That’s because Cooper never actually met Shou! Shou dresses differently when we meet him properly at the end: he’s actually a different kind of guy.

Annabel Jones: Playtest had a twist on a twist, and at script level it did confuse people. A lot of conversations went, “So how come Cooper is so good at Whac-A-Mole? How come he’s so susceptible?” or “So how did Sonya actually steal his credit cards?” No. None of that happened. There are often a lot of pained expressions on a Black Mirror set.

Dan Trachtenberg:I’m so damn happy with Playtest . I’m always delighted when people come up to me and tell me how scared they were watching it. Because the making of a film like this is never scary, so you really have to rely on the craft to do its thing. It’s just such a relief to hear it did!

Wyatt Russell:Genre filmmaking in its heyday was John Carpenter and those early 80s films. Because there were elements that my dad [Kurt Russell] was involved in pioneering with Carpenter, it was really fun to do Playtest and for my dad to see it. He really loved it and he likes Black Mirror . It’s our generation’s Twilight Zone . It was especially cool because Playtest has a lot of homage to Carpenter movies, particularly with the spider that resembles The Thing .

You wondered whether the second ending was gonna be annoying. How was it gonna work? But more than anything, what comes across to me in that ending, is the idea that if you skirt responsibility in life and try to run from your real world problems, it’s going to bite you in the ass somehow. Cooper was trying to avoid all these inevitable things that were coming. Early-onset Alzheimer’s, or death in its many forms. By going away, he was avoiding his father’s death and his mother’s grief over his father’s death.

Charlie Brooker:That’s a fair interpretation from Wyatt. It puts me in mind of the Twilight Zone stories where an unbelievable giant concrete block of punishment is dropped on your head, just because hard-nosed reality comes in and clobbers you.

Wyatt Russell:In my mind, Cooper’s dead in real life, zipped up in the body bag. But does his consciousness live on in some other digital realm? Does he have this hellish existence for eternity, where he has to live out the rest of time inside his constant anxieties and fears? This chip inside his head might allow his consciousness to live on in some way, in an everlasting hell. Which is an absolutely terrifying thought.

Charlie Brooker:I like to think that too. Cooper could be at the point where you see reality warp and stretch – he’s stuck within that plummeting sort of freefall. I like to think that could happen.

Annabel Jones:If only he’d rung his mum.