“It was more reacting to the different scenarios and versions of scenes.” But Poulter, who plays the mysterious game designer Colin, said that’s easier said than done: “I find it hard enough managing one character arc and emotional continuity when you shoot out of sequence. “One of the key things is that the character doesn’t change, but the situations that the character is in do,” Whitehead explained. With that managed, the actors focused on the constants. “The art department, and props, and everyone involved was really on the ball in making sure that the version of the scene matched up with the choices made,” said Whitehead. The task fell to the production staff, led by director David Slade, to make sure the external timeline remained consistent. “In the end, the actors very kindly said, Let’s just do this scene and we’ll get on,” Jones recalled. But it ended up overcomplicating things instead. On the first day of shooting, the Bandersnatch producers tried to make things simpler by putting a gigantic flowchart on set, so the actors could better understand what was happening in each scene. The actors then received paper copies of the script - according to Whitehead, who played Stefan, they were “the size of a breeze block” - as well as electronic copies they could navigate in Twine. In the beginning, Brooker and Jones started out mapping the many Bandersnatch plots on Post-it notes, then moved on to a whiteboard, and eventually realized they needed to use a programming tool called Twine, which is often used to design video games with multiple story branches. “If we’d have known how difficult it was going to be,” Jones told Vulture, “we might not have done it.” And, of course, they had to make sure the episode didn’t feel too complicated to actually watch. They had to shoot wildly different outcomes while maintaining character continuity and preserving an engaging plot. They had to find a way to write a script that contains myriad variations big and small, and then communicate each of those variations to the cast and crew. But as hard as that all might be to choose, according to the people who created it, it was even harder to make.īandersnatch forced the Black Mirror team - including executive producer Annabel Jones, creator and writer Charlie Brooker, director David Slade, and actors Will Poulter and Fionn Whitehead - to rethink many of the givens of filming a TV episode. The more Stefan suffers, the longer you keep playing: You can force him to stop taking pills prescribed by his therapist, you can make him “throw tea” over his computer and destroy weeks of work, and in an especially chilling story line, you can even compel him to kill and dismember his father. The interactive episode of Netflix’s sci-fi anthology series forces you to make all sorts of terrible decisions in what amounts to psychological torture for its main character, an aspiring computer programmer named Stefan. It’s not easy to watch Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. Fionn Whitehead in Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.
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