Charlie Brooker - Inside Black Mirror

Charlie Brooker:I was looking for a piece of music that was very earnest and beautiful and poignant, and didn’t sound like it belonged in this dystopian hell.

Annabel Jones:It’s evocative of a time gone by. A hand-me-down in a world where everything is intangible.

Charlie Brooker:It’s got the tone of a song that sounds like you should know it. The original sounds like an old track, it’s got an old ‘60s feel and it’s immediately catchy. You feel like, “Why isn’t this a really famous song?”

At the film’s emotional climax, Bing enters the Hot Shot competition and performs a dance routine, then delivers a searing diatribe with a shard of glass held to his own throat.

Euros Lyn:You’d never know it from that intense performance, but Daniel sleeps a lot on set. You’d be asking if anyone had seen Daniel, and he’d be under a table, having found a little corner of the set where nobody was working. He’s so focused in life and what he chooses to do with his talent and career, and the same is true on set. He thinks very peacefully, and then when it’s time to do the work he switches it on.

I’d arranged for a choreographer to work with Daniel on what the dance was going to be. I briefed them both on how I wanted it to make me feel and how Bing might express himself through dance. So they went off and didn’t show me what they’d done. Daniel and I decided that we wouldn’t do any camera rehearsals and we would shoot first time. The only time I’d seen him do the speech was in his audition, and so it was one of those moments where you set the fuse alight and let the explosion come. We knew it was one of those things where you’d only get one chance at it.

Charlie Brooker:I typed that speech out in a real rush, to mirror Bing’s delivery. The speech doesn’t entirely make sense. Occasionally people have transcribed it or quoted it, and they often get things wrong. There’s also a few lines in it that are a bit more ‘written’ than they should be. He says something like, “You’re sitting there slowly knitting things worse.” which is a weird thing. But people just hear it as “making” anyway.

Euros Lyn:We did do two takes, but ran three cameras on Daniel, because we knew the speech demanded 100 per cent. I’ll always go for a second take, because something could happen to the exposed film stock, and digital material can get corrupted. The first take was fantastic, but maybe a line of dialogue had gone awry in the first, so we did the second take with it back in. There’s a little bit of switching between takes in what you see, but invariably a first take will have something you’ll never, ever get again.

I’d say the speech is 99 per cent how it was written. There’s this sort of existential rage at this meaningless world and the way it’s imprisoned its citizens. And then there’s an emotional rage at the way the woman he loves has been taken from him and corrupted. So Daniel had to keep hold of those two peaks of fury, and deliver this cleverly structured polemic. And on top of that, he had to do a really peculiar dance immediately before it!

‘The song’s good. It’s old. My mum used to sing it. And she learned it from her mum. A hand-me-down’

Annabel Jones:We didn’t want to deliver a massive message here to the audience. I think Charlie has an innate fear of people thinking that he’s trying to be clever. He doesn’t want to force opinions or thoughts or observations down people’s throat, because he doesn’t have that conviction in his opinion or thoughts. But what Charlie does so well, is getting that balance where it feels guttural and instinctive. Daniel is so believable and so engaging that you just feel for him. The combination of Daniel’s acting and Charlie’s writing just made that a really powerful scene.

Charlie Brooker:We’re really fortunate Daniel was cast. I don’t think the speech really changed from the first cut we saw, because he’s just phenomenal. Jordan Peele cast him in [the smash-hit 2017 horror film] Get Out , because he’d seen that. Jordan and Daniel confirmed it was specifically that speech.

Annabel Jones:Even in the dance, you can see that sort of anger channelling through every limb. Gosh, it’s a beautifully charged performance.

Euros Lyn:For the early WraithBabes ads, we had two real porn stars. It seemed best to cast real porn stars, who knew what to do and would have fewer hang-ups. So we tracked down two women, and one of them asked a guy to come in, but he’d never done it before – he was just one of their boyfriends! Suddenly, we were watching this scenario play out, with this guy snogging two women and getting it on. They were getting really carried away, and I was going, “Stop! Stop!” If I hadn’t shouted ‘cut’, they would’ve been literally doing it. So that was probably the most embarrassed I’ve ever been on set.

On a hard drive somewhere, there’s an even worse version of the WraithBabes video featuring Abi, because I shot something that was far too horrible to show. Oh God, I remember this awful phone call one Saturday morning. Charlie and Konnie had watched the scene and been utterly speechless! So we recut it.

Charlie Brooker:You don’t want to feel like you’re trying to titillate people in the wrong way. So we went with him putting his thumb in Abi’s mouth, which is a weird violation and says it, without having to show anything further than that.

Annabel Jones:Jessica’s dead eyes just spoke so much, anyway.

The bleak ending of Fifteen Million Merits reveals that Bing has sold out to the system, having been co-opted into streamcasting pre-packaged rants to an eager audience.

Euros Lyn:There’s an inevitability to that. Because we have to eat and survive within a system, there are certain things we tolerate and accept, in return for the nice apartment, food on our table or clothes on our kids’ backs. I don’t judge Bing harshly for what he ends up doing. Sometimes an individual cannot overturn an injustice. The world is full of injustice and that’s the truth, so it has validity.

Annabel Jones:It’s an uncompromising, unhappy ending, but one that feels like it probably would have been the ending. There’s an authenticity to it. You could also call it highly autobiographical for Charlie!

Charlie Brooker:Konnie and I did jokingly call it the Screenwipe Story, because I was doing this BBC Four show Screenwipe in which I sort of rant about stuff. And Bing ends up effectively doing a show where he rants and raves and there’s no point to it.

Annabel Jones:Bing has a better set than Charlie, too.

Charlie Brooker:In one quickly discarded draft, Bing and Abi were living together in the end, but they were both really unhappy. Abi had been given loads of plastic surgery and she was addicted to this compliance drink, so it was awful. There was originally another slightly different ending, too, with Bing still living alone in this big, plush place. After his rant, he’s anxiously looking at the ratings for his stream, worried about the numbers he’s getting for his show. So you realise he’s just swapped one treadmill for another. That ending just wasn’t quite as nice or ambiguous.