Char­lie Brook­er: ​‘Once you’ve f**ked a pig on the tel­ly, you’ve shift­ed the bar for what’s acceptable’

Cross­ing the Atlantic to inter­view British writer and broad­cast­er Char­lie Brook­er may seem a bit per­verse, but it’s odd­ly fit­ting, mir­ror­ing the move of his genre-blend­ing sci-fi series Black Mir­ror from Chan­nel 4 to stream­ing behe­moth Net­flix. In Toron­to to pre­view the new series – screen­ing the episodes ​‘San Junipero’ and ​‘Nose­dive’ – Brook­er dis­cuss­es the oppor­tu­ni­ties of work­ing on Netflix’s inter­na­tion­al can­vas, the ben­e­fits of writ­ing stand­ing up (and with a PlaySta­tion in the house), and how he loves sto­ries with hor­ri­ble, bleak endings.

LWLies: Mov­ing from broad­cast tele­vi­sion to Net­flix opens Black Mir­ror up to 80 mil­lion inter­na­tion­al sub­scribers, over half of which are in the US. Has that new audi­ence influ­enced your approach to this new season?

Brook­er: It hasn’t. The first script I wrote for this sea­son was ​‘San Junipero’, and I was delib­er­ate­ly, slight­ly imp­ish­ly think­ing, because I’d read some­where that some­body was wor­ried that it would get all Amer­i­can­ised, I thought, ​‘Right, fuck it, I’m going to set one in Cal­i­for­nia – fuck you! – because I can!’ Real­ly, most of our sto­ries, with excep­tion of ​‘The Nation­al Anthem’, could have been set any­where, and they were set nowhere. But oth­er than that, the major dif­fer­ences are run­ning time, because you can be flex­i­ble, so we’ve got a 90 minute one, and some are short­er, and it’s a slight­ly big­ger canvas.

When you sat down to plan out these new episodes, what does that big­ger can­vas give you, creatively?

The main thing is, there’s a slight more vari­ety of tone. So it’s not always a bleak-fest, because that would get very pre­dictable. We’ve already done sev­en episodes with a real­ly hor­ri­ble end­ing. And we kind of approached it like we were doing dif­fer­ent genre movies. So ​‘San Junipero’ is like a com­ing of age dra­ma, a romance, a John Hugh­es movie, and then you’ve got ​‘Nose­dive’, which is more of a social satire, and then you’ve got ​‘Playtest’, which is like Evil Dead 2. It’s a real­ly idio­syn­crat­ic and odd show, because they’re all so dif­fer­ent from each oth­er, but they’re all under the same ban­ner. In our wanky way, we thought ​‘It’s like we’re curat­ing a film festival’.

For each episode, was the genre the start­ing point, or was it the tech­no­log­i­cal idea you’re riff­ing on?

It’s weird, in that it’s a bit chick­en-and-egg. Usu­al­ly what hap­pens is, either I have an idea, or I’ve got an image for some­thing. And then some­times it will sud­den­ly coa­lesce into a ​‘what if’ idea. Some­times it’s real­ly quick. And then you’ll think ​‘Oh, that feels like a detec­tive sto­ry, we haven’t done that before’. It’s inter­est­ing though, because the ​‘Playtest’ episode came about because I was think­ing ​‘What’s the Black Mir­ror ver­sion of a haunt­ed house?’ Could you do a sto­ry with­out dia­logue, about one per­son, in a haunt­ed house for the night? And that was the start­ing point. So, in a way, some­times it’s just a use­ful men­tal trick, to think ​‘What’s the Scan­di-Noir Black Mir­ror?’ – which is ​‘Hat­ed in The Nation’, the 90 minute one, our Scan­di-Noir one.

Has that changed your actu­al process of writ­ing episodes? You’re already mov­ing from a TV hour to a flex­i­ble Net­flix hour – but 90 min­utes, that’s essen­tial­ly a movie.

It is a movie, basi­cal­ly. It’s fea­ture-length. And that one is par­tic­u­lar­ly com­pli­cat­ed, because it’s a detec­tive sto­ry. I had to plot the whole thing out, and it took fuck­ing ages. Because it’s a mys­tery thriller, you’ve got to work out quite an intri­cate plot. And that feels like it’s a dif­fer­ent mus­cle. And there’s ones like ​‘San Junipero’, which I wrote with­out think­ing about it. To sound tossy for a moment, there was a moment where – when­ev­er I hear peo­ple say this I think ​‘You fuck­ing liar!’ – where I was writ­ing a scene and then one of the char­ac­ters said some­thing and I was like ​‘Oh fuck, that’s a great idea!’ and just went with it. Which was a sur­prise. ​‘Be Right Back’ is anoth­er one that I wrote in a sort of trance. You start play­ing a film in your head, and start describ­ing it on the key­board. And then you even­tu­al­ly get to the end. That’s the worst descrip­tion of writing…

There was some­body from Cre­ative Screen­writ­ing Mag­a­zine who was here ear­li­er, and she said ​‘Have you got any advice for writ­ers?’ and I said, ​‘Yeah, write stand­ing up’. Because this time around, I bought a cheap lit­tle stand off Ama­zon, and I wrote stand­ing up, because it’s slight­ly uncom­fort­able – it’s not so uncom­fort­able that you can’t do it, it’s slight­ly uncom­fort­able. And it means you don’t end up going on the inter­net, basi­cal­ly, because you’re there to do a fuck­ing job. So I’ll write for 25 min­utes… then I’ll go and play on the PlaySta­tion for a bit. And I do this all night. I go noc­tur­nal. And then I go back and I’ll write a bit more, and then I go back to the PlaySta­tion, and then I go back… And hope­ful­ly by then, I’ll lose track of time and then I’ll be writ­ing for fuck­ing ages, and then there’s a point where you get excit­ed about it. So my advice for writ­ers is always: write stand­ing up, and get Scriven­er, and write in 25 minute bursts, and get a PlayStation.

Your writ­ing voice has always been so well-defined, both in your TV writ­ing and your prose. Does writ­ing come eas­i­ly to you?

No, it’s always been like fuck­ing pulling teeth. I hate writ­ing. I love hav­ing writ­ten, but I hate writ­ing. When I was writ­ing week­ly columns for the paper, I found that increas­ing­ly more and more dif­fi­cult. So I stopped doing it. And then, not that long ago, the New York­er asked me to write a piece, and I was like ​‘Oh, it’s the New York­er – well, I’ve got to do that!’ And it was a night­mare, because I hadn’t writ­ten an arti­cle, or a col­umn, in like a year. I’d for­got­ten how to do it, it was so difficult.

So do you not miss exer­cis­ing that par­tic­u­lar writ­ing muscle?

I don’t miss that, no. Because I was real­ly not enjoy­ing it, by the end. I think it was part­ly because I just felt like I’d exhaust­ed my desire to write like that. And I’m sure it’ll come back, and I’ll want to write things like that, or write long­form prose pieces. But at the moment I don’t. It’s like, when I start­ed out I was a car­toon­ist for ages, but then I got sick of doing the speech bub­bles. I’ve blown up that whole side of my career, it’s slight­ly terrifying.

What do you think is the uni­fy­ing tone of Black Mir­ror? It’s not quite cau­tion­ary. Maybe speculative?

Yeah, it’s spec­u­la­tive. I don’t think of the show as cau­tion­ary tales. I think for a cau­tion­ary tale, it has to sup­ply a solu­tion for the prob­lems. And I nev­er know what the solu­tion to any­thing is. I’m just a wor­ri­er. So when we have bleak sto­ries, it’s just me wor­ry­ing out loud in a sto­ry. Some­times I do enjoy just tor­ment­ing the char­ac­ters, because those are the sort of sto­ries I enjoyed watch­ing when I was a kid, like The Twi­light Zone, or Threads. Or a short Span­ish film from the ​’70s called La Cab­i­na. It’s on YouTube – I won’t tell you what hap­pens in it. I don’t know, I’ve always been attract­ed to doing real­ly hor­ri­ble, bleak stuff, so it’s a good exer­cise to see if I could write sto­ries that weren’t that, but still make them Black Mir­ror stories.

Being an anthol­o­gy series with these dis­crete parts, Black Mir­ror feels like some­thing of an anom­aly on Net­flix, the home of binge-watch­ing. Was that a cre­ative concern?

I think that it’s the per­fect plat­form for anthol­o­gy shows, by which I mean a dif­fer­ent sto­ry each time – because, tra­di­tion­al­ly, when you’re doing a show when the sto­ries are going to be dif­fer­ent each episode, you don’t have cliffhang­ers or return­ing char­ac­ters. And, in order to drum up inter­est, or just remind peo­ple that your show exists, you’d have to trail it, which leads you to spoil the sto­ry in some way. This is a very hard show to pro­mote, we’ve found. It’s quite dif­fi­cult to do trails for it, because you’re try­ing not to say any­thing. So now these plat­forms exist, like Net­flix or Ama­zon, or the [BBC] iPlay­er, where you get the whole thing.

Some­body used a good anal­o­gy the oth­er day, where they were say­ing it’s like it’s in a cup­board in your house, and you don’t know it’s there. It’s like when Stranger Things took off, and became a thing, and sud­den­ly every­body had to watch Stranger Things. And peo­ple would go, ​‘Have you seen Stranger Things yet? No? Oh, it’s in that cup­board in your house, go and have a look.’ And you don’t have that pres­sure of your first night, basi­cal­ly. When you do broad­cast TV, it’s slight­ly ter­ri­fy­ing to think that there could be a foot­ball match on. Andy Mur­ray might sud­den­ly win Wim­ble­don and it’s on at the same time as your show, and it can suf­fer as a result. Even though every­one claims they don’t care about rat­ings, they do real­ly. And so it’s great that rat­ings are becom­ing less and less sig­nif­i­cant, and you get a longer shelf life.

Was there any­thing you do in this new Net­flix series that you couldn’t do on Chan­nel 4?

Just the run­ning time, real­ly. Noth­ing real­ly in terms of con­tent. I’ve been very lucky, I think, through­out my broad­cast career. Freak­ish­ly lucky. Once you’ve fucked a pig on the tel­ly, the bar for what’s accept­able has been shifted.

Black Mir­ror Sea­son 3 (part one) launch­es on Net­flix 21 Octo­ber. Read our review of the first episode ​‘Nose­dive’.