‘Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’: Behind the Scenes of Netflix’s First Adult Interactive Film (VIDEO)
Netflix’s latest Black Mirror installment, Bandersnatch, continues to boggle audiences long after they tune out of the choose-your-adventure film.
Thankfully, after days of wondering how it all came together, the streaming platform has released a featurette from behind the scenes with showrunner Charlie Brooker and star Fionn Whitehead (Dunkirk). The truly unique episode boasts an interactive element, allowing viewers to decide which path the characters take. All of those decisions end up leading them to varying endings and frustrating dead-ends.
“It’s actually quite complicated behind the scenes,” says Brooker, “but for the viewer it’s fairly straight-forward. You are given choices: Will you go out of the door or will you jump out of the window? But there’s myriad sort of timelines and story branches you can go down.”
As for how the project came to fruition, Brooker reveals that the streaming platform approached him about the idea of an interactive episode and he had been wanting to do another period episode, so they decided to mesh the two. The idea, Brooker says, stemmed from the notion, “What if you’re controlling somebody in the past?”
The featurette delves into the key players including protagonist Stefan Butler (Whitehead), Colin Ritman (Will Poulter), and Tucker (Asim Chaudhry) all of which are wrapped up in the world of gaming. Every one of them can be lead down varying paths depending on the quick decisions made throughout the episode, down to choices as seemingly insignificant as which cereal to eat.
It’s with those many options that the story becomes a wild maze, which Brooker likens to a Rubik’s Cube. “I had to literally get up from my desk and kind of walk around the house holding my head,” he says.
And it was just as difficult for the actors, as Whitehead notes, “It is really hard to get your head around which scenes you’re doing, because there are just so many.”
To find out more about the making of the wild Netflix project, check out the featurette below.
Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, Streaming now, Netflix
