Charlie Brooker - Inside Black Mirror

Joel Collins:We couldn’t harm animals, so we used frozen rats that would have been fed to pythons. We stuffed them and put devices on their heads.

Colm McCarthy:A lot of people talk about how they couldn’t handle the moment when Dawson “whittles” away at himself while looking in the mirror. What makes that scene work more than anything, is a brilliant make-up team and a fantastic performance from Daniel.

In pre-production, the thing Charlie wanted to talk about most was all the ways that somebody could damage themselves. As often happens with Charlie, these conversations became quite competitive! He won, by talking about somebody falling and hooking their eyelid over a coat-hook, while trying to maintain their balance on an icy floor. It was the most hilarious but disgusting thing I’d ever heard.

I was conscious that the sex in ‘Pain Addict’ was pretty extreme, but also key to the storytelling. It’s always a bit awkward on set, but I think it helped that the two actors were Australian and American! Actors tend to be very uptight about doing that type of stuff, but they were more chilled-out. You just have to be upfront about what you need from the scene. It was important to the story and it’s definitely not titillating. It’s actually quite brief in its time onscreen, although it took a long time to shoot on set.

Annabel Jones:There was so much mileage to be had from the second segment, ‘Dead Wife in the Head’ – a lot of fun in taking petty domestic grievances and amplifying them. Aldis Hodge and Alexandra Roach are great as Jack and Carrie.

Charlie Brooker:That story is a bit like a divorce. Be Right Back played out like an internet romance, where they go from exchanging emails, to phone calls, to meeting up in the flesh, whereas ‘Dead Wife in the Head’ is about familiarity breeding contempt. Carrie’s stuck in Jack’s head with no free will, so inevitably she becomes a back-seat driver who complains about everything. It became a sort of claustrophobic relationship break-up analogy, with people fighting for custody of the kids at the weekend.

There were all sorts of other ideas I’d had around that concept, such as people who would walk around renting space to about 20 different dead people at once. So you’d be like the landlord to a whole houseful of lodgers in your own head.

Carrie ends up trapped inside a toy monkey which can only say either “Monkey loves you” or “Monkey needs a hug”.

Charlie Brooker:I used the toilet in an airport in Singapore. And as I was walking out, there was this sign saying, “How was the toilet today?” with happy-face or sad-face buttons. Immediately, I thought, “Urgh, I’m not touching that, because it’s in a toilet!” And then I thought, “Look at that fucking dystopian imagery they’ve put in my eye-line there – that’ll come in handy some day.” And sure enough, it did.

The stuff with the monkey in this second story is deliberately played for laughs. And then the third one gets darker, with this ghost story about people paying to electrocute Clayton Lee [played by Babs Olusanmokun] over and over again. The notion that you could still be brain-damaged, as a digital ghost, isn’t very nice! But at least they haven’t edited you into a new body where all your limbs are dicks, and you’re constantly falling on your own balls. Or you’ve got 50 arseholes over your mouth that keep shitting onto your own lips.

Annabel Jones:Emmy-award-winning writing, right there.

Colm McCarthy:At what level do you sell Nish’s lie, before you reveal she’s actually here to take revenge on Rolo for torturing her father? That’s always tricky in a story. At first, the situation seems to be: here’s a creepy guy in a museum, and here’s Little Red Riding Hood. So that’s the bushel you’re hiding everything behind in plain sight, as it were. I always talk about making things surprising but inevitable. The reveal is a shock, but you’re also going, “Of course it was that, I should’ve known all along.”

Letitia Wright:I decided to start off by believing my own lie. I deluded myself into believing that Nish really was on a tourist adventure, and really did want to find out about this museum.

Colm McCarthy:With scenes like Nish first seeing the museum, giving Rolo the water and seeing her father for the first time, we cut those moments to death, sixteen million different ways! When Nish sees her dad, she’s being restrained, but it’s all going on inside her.

Letitia Wright:Rolo was so carried away by his own achievement and his own ego. He was giving Nish an education, not knowing that she already had an education on how to transfer a soul and make it digital. So she just lets Rolo talk, because she’s missing certain aspects of the story. She didn’t know, for instance, about the racist people coming in to execute her dad.

Colm McCarthy:Charlie’s really, really good in the edit. He uses reasonableness incredibly aggressively, in order to get what he wants! He’s incredibly entertaining and charming, too, and understands how that process works. So there were a lot of creative conversations and debates which made the show better. It wouldn’t have been made better by Charlie and Annabel just agreeing to everything.

Interestingly, during the edit Charlie and Annabel wanted to investigate the more dramatic performances. Rolo is quite comedic and larger than life, but they were keen to play away from that and find the humanity, which made it much better. Doug is an incredibly flexible actor and so he gave a range of performances.

Some of the darker elements ended up on the cutting room floor. Charlie and Annabel were weirdly interested in a tonal thing about what would be too much for an audience, and they were dead right, because loads of people have said, “Oh God, it was so dark” and loads of people have said it was so funny, but not to the point where those things broke the episode. So Charlie and Annabel were really good guardians of the audience.

Annabel Jones:I think it’s more selfish than that. It’s not guardians of the audience, it’s…

Charlie Brooker: …Guardians of the Galaxy? Sorry, I’m such an arsehole.

Annabel Jones:You can only ever go with what you think feels right for the script and the character.

Doing a portmanteau with an enthusiastic and sometimes unreliable narrator allows the individual stories to go very big and melodramatic. And it allows us to have fun with concepts that wouldn’t necessarily extend to a full Black Mirror episode. But tonally you need to keep the framing story as grounded as possible, otherwise you risk losing your audience.