‘Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’ Featurette: How The Ambitious Netflix Experiment Was Made
Imagine: a universe whereBlack MirrorcreatorCharlie Brookersaid no when Netflix approached him with the idea of doing an interactiveBlack Mirrorproject. It’s a whole parallel universe that butterflies out into millions of other possibilities and choices until your brain hurts — essentially whatBlack Mirror: Bandersnatchachieves as Netflix’s first choose-your-own-adventure feature film. But that almost happened, Brooker reveals in this newBlack Mirror: Bandersnatchfeaturette, which dives into the rabbit hole that was the making of the ambitious film experiment.
Black Mirror Bandersnatch Featurette: Making Of
Todd Yellin, vice president of product at Netflix, spoke about how he approachedBlack Mirrorcreator Charlie Brooker with the idea of making an interactiveBlack Mirrorproject, following the success of the same experimentation with some of Netflix’s children’s programming. “My initial thought was no, I don’t want to do that,” Brooker revealed. “And then annoyingly, I had an idea that would fit.”
That idea, which would become the basis for the ambitious,if thinly plotted,Black Mirror: Bandersnatchtook hold in Brooker’s head, and he accepted the daunting task. But Brooker had no idea going in just how monumental a taskBandersnatchwould be.
“When I started out, I thought, ‘Well this will be fairly straightforward, I’m sure I’ll have to draw a flowchart at one point,” Brooker said in the featurette. “Cut to several months later we’ve kind of exponentially started to balloon.”
“Charlie became enamored with the butterfly effect,” Yellin added, detailing the new tools that had to be invented to accommodate Brooker’s ambitious vision. The team involved includedBlack MirrorproducerAnnabelle Jones,directorDavid Slade, editorTony Kearns, and script supervisorMarilyn Kirby, who all described working on the project as something that they had never done before.
