Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker is nothing if not outspoken. He’s not afraid to deliver harsh words for viewers who made negative noises about the trillion permutations for the series’ choose-your-own-demise Bandersnatch film. He’s also told his audience to lighten up and not take the anthology series’ bite-sized efforts so seriously, despite engineering a story that has a secret ending that’s the stuff from which fan obsessions are made. And as it turns out, one of the other endings actually produced a sense of apprehension within Brooker, and (of course) he’s talking about it now.
Long before the cameras rolled, Brooker had been drafting an outline, and he envisioned an ending that makes Stefan aware that he’s being watched (and manipulated) on Netflix from the future. He told The Wrap, “And I remember … almost being embarrassed to show it to Netflix and go, ‘Is that all right to do that?'” Fortunately for Brooker, he says, “And they just thought it was quite funny.” He also explained why he wanted to include this ending within the film:
“And we thought, well, it would be funny — ’cause we wanted some branches to be funny, some to be horrifying, some to be dramatic — we thought it’d be funny if you just told him the truth. If you just said, ‘I’m watching you on the television and it’s Netflix and I’m from the 21st century.’ The more you try and explain it to him, the more crazy it sounds, and the more crazy he sounds trying to explain it to anyone else in 1984. So it literally just came as a consequence of that.”
Poor Stefan. The guy thought he was getting his big break, and then all hell broke loose while viewers delighted in ruining his life. And then to actually learn why this was happening to him, well, no wonder. Anyhoodle, we shall look forward to Brooker’s next round of interviews because even when he’s saying things that are not-so-nice, he’s always entertaining. At some point, Netflix might also release Bandersnatch viewing numbers, and oh boy, that’s gonna be strange to see whether Bird Box will lose its crown after only a few weeks.
(Via The Wrap)
