Charlie Brooker Talks About the Challenge of Creating the Interactive Black Mirror Episode ‘Bandersnatch’

In two different Netflix featurettes connected to Bandersnatch, the incredibly popular interactive episode of Black Mirror, series creator Charlie Brooker, Netflix VP of Product Todd Yellin and various members of the acting and production team all talk about how big a challenge it was for all involved to create and keep track of each portion of the story.

I remember midway through the first day literally ripping up the call sheet and the running order and going okay if we’re gonna get to do this a different way then you’ve got the actors having to keep track of where their character is bearing in mind that the previous morning they may have played themselves in a different timeline.

During the planning of the episode, a confident Brooker humorously said something about having to create a flow chart. Little did he know at the time that it was an absolute understatement.

We did a story about fascinating new technology that’s around fascinating new technology.’Black Mirror’ is the perfect show for interactive storytelling. As I started out, I thought well this will be fairly straightforward I’m sure I’ll have to draw a flow chart at one point. Cut to several months later, it kind of exponentially started to balloon.