Charlie Brooker - Inside Black Mirror

Charlie Brooker:Daly is our first proper bad guy, in a way. A cartoon bad guy, so to speak. Someone who literally gives speeches about how bad he is.

Annabel Jones:What I really liked about USS Callister was the switch in protagonist, which you don’t often see. When we meet Daly in the office he’s emasculated and humiliated in front of Nanette by his colleagues and business partner Walton. We feel his pain of being ignored and laughed at by his juniors. Then when you begin to realise what he has had to do to get ‘respect’, to be the hero he can never be in real life, you see the monster and our sympathies massively shift. But it’s a real credit to Jesse’s talent that some people still feel sorry for him during the final sequences!

In the game Daly is masterful, commanding and respected. Rather than ignoring him, his colleagues are forced to play along with him, to be obsequious and sycophantic. Daly has blended reality and game into a cruel fantasy that he is living out. Unfortunately I see lots of parallels with the real world. So it was very important that we then follow Nanette. It becomes her story and she becomes the hero. She also crushes the damsel-in-distress stereotype of Space Fleet !

Charlie Brooker:You do feel pretty sorry for Daly early on. We actually shot a moment where he’s just met Nanette for the first time and then she’s chatting to her new office colleagues, and you see him clench his fist. Netflix wondered if it revealed him to be sinister too soon. I initially thought they were wrong, but to see if their note worked, we cut the shot of his fist out and it was far, far better. It left you empathising with him for longer, so it’s more of a body blow when you realise he’s the villain. Sometimes you get really wedded to a particular beat and then someone else comes along and suggests you kill it, and annoyingly they’re right.

Toby Haynes:I kept saying I felt sorry for Daly, and Charlie would say, “Yeah, but he throws Walton’s kid Tommy out of an airlock!” My view was that these weren’t actually people to Daly, they were noughts and ones. He’s a programmer who designed them for a reason, to behave in a certain way. So in some ways I had sympathies for him. But when we shot that airlock scene, Jesse smiled. He enjoyed the action. That’s what he gave to Daly. He was a sadist, an evil character.

Charlie Brooker:You could argue the airlock scene is the point at which Daly’s beyond redemption. He’s mistreating people horrifically. Even though he feels this is some sort of virtual realm, when he’s throwing a child out of an airlock, that’s like Darth Vader levels of evil. It’s interesting because I lose sympathy for him really early on, when he’s shouting at his crew and you see how terrified they are.

There is a very clear parallel between Callister and The Twilight Zone ’s episode It’s a Good Life . That’s about a young boy with superpowers who can make things happen just by thinking about them, and it’s still incredibly uncomfortable and horrifying to this day. In our story, Daly’s an overgrown boy rather than a literal one. They’re both stories about superpowered tyrants.

I’ve got an element of sympathy with somebody wanting to lose themselves in a fantasy world, because real life is depressing. Fine. The problem is that Daly’s dragged lots of other people in and he’s a fucking sadist. And he knows he’s a sadist. It’s not like he’s playing Grand Theft Auto where he’s running people over, then accidentally finds out they’ve got histories and lives and relatives. He knows exactly what he’s doing, because he helped create it. He should either quit, or stand up to [his real life boss] Walton, or go and set up a rival company, or tell them all to fuck off. What he shouldn’t be doing is building a fantasy world and tormenting everyone.

Black Mirror flexed its growing CGI muscles with the creation of the Arachnajax monsters, which are seen both on the surface of an alien planet and on board the USS Callister .

Louise Sutton:They had to be scary but also have some comedy to them. We all loved that moment when Daly’s pizza comes and he pauses the game and the Arachnajax drums its tentacles on the ground.

Joel Collins:We designed the Arachnajax, then passed them over to the VFX company Framestore. Toby wanted tentacles down the front, a bit like Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean , which added a layer of humour.

Toby Haynes:The Arachnajax needed to be able to shrug or whatever, and I thought that would be really funny. Also, tentacles are disgusting and no-one wants to be turned into a big tentacled thing! It gave the creature a very human quality, in a really alien way.

Joel Collins:The Arachnajax were also a bit like the creatures in Starship Troopers, to be honest. There were a lot of tropes going on in USS Callister , so that the audience gets the tone. The art of Black Mirror is to stay within a box that isn’t too far away from people’s perspectives. So then they fall into the box with you, and you can shake the box around, bang their heads and upset them a lot.

Russell Dodgson (creative director, Framestore):We had to represent a wide range of character emotion in a short space of time, with the Arachnajax’s deeply non-humanoid form. The design of the creature gave us a lot to play with: we had long arms to drop as part of a sigh, and multiple tentacles to exhale through.

By the time the crew member Shania [played by Michaela Coel] has screamed and convulsed her way through the Arachnajax transformation, we’re left with a pale, staggering, shaking creature. To get this look, we referenced newborn deer, who find it hard to stand after their birth and shake and shudder as they try to ‘find their legs’.

Louise Sutton:There was originally talk of doing the alien planet surface in a studio, as Star Trek would have, but I always felt we needed to go outside to get some air and scale, because we were inside everywhere else. So we ended up in Lanzarote, which felt ideal.

Toby Haynes:We found a quarry made of red rock, but it wasn’t quite right, so we transferred a whole skip-load of red sand from it to another quarry! Lanzarote was the only place within our radius that we could get to, that had a pool warm enough to put actors in. And let me tell you, it was still bloody freezing.