Black Mirror director on the challenge of creating TV's least festive Christmas special

Millions sat down and scooted much nearer to their TV sets for the first and only festive Black Mirror.

As White Christmas turns 10, we sat down with director Carl Tibbetts to unpack the least festive Christmas special around.

Black Mirror, White Christmas

When he was first approached for a Black Mirror Christmas special, director Tibbetts – who had previously helmed the critically-acclaimed episode White Bear – understandably thought it "a bit of an odd choice" but he was quickly won over.

White Christmas, broadcast on 16th December 2014, was the final episode of Charlie Brooker's dark sci-fi series to broadcast on Channel 4 before moving to Netflix.

It explored three stories told by two men (played by Jon Hamm and Rafe Spall), involving a woman who is digitally cloned, a pickup artist whose night ends in horror, and a man obsessed with his ex-fiancee after their relationship abruptly ends.

"I'd done another episode of Black Mirror called White Bear, which was a pretty dark episode - very similar themes to White Christmas, actually, crime and punishment," Tibbetts recalls, speaking exclusively to RadioTimes.com.

"They came to me with another episode, a Christmas episode, which I was really surprised that they were going to do. I was thinking, 'How is Black Mirror going to smash into Christmas?!' But actually, obviously, it does quite well."

"It was a great script - [although] it wasn't really a script at the time," he adds. "What it was at the time was four stories that were going to spin off one central idea...I guess [series creator, Charlie Brooker] had lots of other ideas for episodes, lots of other ideas for what could have been full episodes but, I don't know how and why, they ended up being slammed into one episode."

Tibbetts adds: "I just thought it was absurd, funny and a great thing to take on because it was a bit of a crazy idea. It was always a no brainer in terms of doing it."

A Hamm for Christmas

As it approaches season 7, Black Mirror is no stranger to Hollywood stars eyeing up roles. But back in 2014, Jon Hamm was pretty much the first, paving the way for the show to go global.

Hamm's character, Matt, is introduced as the leader of an online group of male sexual predators who watch each other seduce women. He also tells Spall's character, Joe, about his former job, training (or torturing) "cookies" – digital clones of people. The final scenes of the episode see a sinister revelation about Matt - although he doesn't exactly go unpunished for his crimes.

"Everybody just wanted Jon for that character," Tibbetts recalls. "With people like Jon, you make a straight offer. He was a big fan. We knew he was in the UK and I remember, in the same year, he ended up doing Toast of London as well.

"Mad Men was still going, it was coming to the end, and he was still huge. He was a really big coup and he turned out to be brilliant. I was a little bit apprehensive - I didn't know what to expect from someone like that. But he was a lovely, warm, generous, kind, talented, professional actor."

He adds: "His character really didn't have the hardest part, I guess. He didn't have to plumb the depths. He plays a slightly shallow grifter, which he is very good at - it's nothing like Jon but he's brilliant at that! He has a lightness of touch throughout, and a bit of sinister-ness."

Spall's Joe, meanwhile, is slow to open up in the episode but, soon enough, we discover the horrors of his story - that, after an abrupt breakup and being "blocked" from seeing his ex-fiancee and the child he thinks is his daughter, he bludgeoned his ex-fiancee's father to death.

"Rafe had to carry the burden of what [his character] had done and slowly reveal himself, and do that in a subtle way, but obviously be a bit more contained throughout the whole thing," Tibbetts reflects.

"So it's Rafe that had... I wouldn't say had the harder job, but he certainly had to carry the broodiness a little bit more than Jon, who could kind of skip around a little bit. He was perfect for for that character at the time."

The technical tidbits

While the set-up of White Christmas seems quite simple, it was a challenge to pull together, with a limited budget and slightly "rushed" timescale on set.

"We were right up to the wire," Tibbetts admits. "I think we were in the sound suite the night before it was due to go because it was a longer episode.

"There was so much involved in it, and the post[-production] process was a lot of work around gelling those stories and creating a clear through-story that worked for both their characters, for Jon's character as well because he had to come out of it with his own story as well.

"There's a lot of work done in the edit to make these stories coalesce, to bring these disparate things together. There'd been a lot of work in terms of trying to make sure that they felt like a whole piece, as well as individual stories...

"It was the cohesiveness, story-wise, and the thread through it of working hard on making sure that Rafe, his slow reveal of himself, worked. Even his body position at the start, he's turned away from Jon, and then he slowly turns around and unfurls and opens up. There were lots of sort of things to taken into consideration at the time – technical things."

One chilling element of the episode sees the cabin that Matt and Joe are staying in (which actually turns out to be a cookie), gradually changing to resemble the cabin where Joe murdered his ex-fiancee's father.

"As Rafe's character opened up, the whole story opened up and the place they were in, that was actually a cookie, changed over takes," Tibbetts recalls. "We would swap out bits of the scenery, and replace it with other bits in certain tapes. And there was a slow chipping away in the progression of it."

One of the final scenes of the special shows Spall's Joe forced to experience time at 1,000 years per minute in the cabin, with Wizzard's I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday playing on a loop on the radio (the song that was playing when the murder took place).

As he smashes the radio on the ground over and over again, a new one appears in its place, playing the song louder. That scene was filmed with no cuts, with Tibbetts explaining: "I thought we could do it all in one go because it was a sort of Michel Gondry-esque way of doing it. We certainly came up with it late in the day.

"We tried to keep it in as much Rafe's point of view to begin with as humanly possible, so that there were more questions in the beginning. I came up with a shot where it comes through the window and goes over the snow globe, goes over Rafe, Rafe gets up. He stands at the mirror, he goes over to the door, and we sort of slowly reveal the world and the place as if it's through his eyes and through what he's experiencing...

"I remember working quite hard on that to sort of give it a point of view throughout, even though it's jumping between the points of view, it's just making sure it's sort of stuck with them."

Ghosts of White Christmas past

Like any director, Tibbetts doesn't make a habit of watching his own work back, going years without watching White Christmas. But an accidental recent viewing proved to him that the episode still stands up in various different ways.

"I think I saw it about a year ago, for some reason. Maybe my wife was watching it and I sort of thought, 'Oh, it's not as bad as I remember!' - not bad, it wasn't ever bad. But because it was quite a tight shoot, quite a rushed shoot in some respects, there were technical aspects of it that I wasn't particularly happy with.

"Part of the challenge was there was a lot of Jon Hamm and Rafe Spall sat down talking which, visually, is quite a challenge. Time-wise, there's not a lot else we could have done with them... [but] that concerned me at the time. I was worried that it was going to not be engaging.

"But actually it's the thread of that through it, the sort of telling a tale and a yarn that keeps you really, really engaged, that narrative all the way through.

"So it's not particularly, visually, whiz, bang, dynamic, full of action. It's quite a slow-ish, traumatising still piece and I was aware of just making sure that it didn't get too visually repetitive, that things were different enough and that the camera was doing enough of the storytelling as well as the talking.

"At the time, I thought maybe it didn't hang together quite as well. But it did. I watched it, and it was good. And it's that thread, it's that dialogue, it's Charlie's voice all the way through that trips you along through these sort of dystopian tales, bleak tales.

"We talked a lot about White Bear and the reference of Tales of the Unexpected, Hammer House of Horror, folky dystopian feelings to it that made it feel local in a weird way. There were aspirations, I think, to make [Black Mirror] more international on a bigger scale, as it went on. But I know, particularly for those two stories, they felt quite British in a weird way."

One and done?

Despite the meteoric success of Black Mirror, White Christmas is still its only Christmas special. But is there scope for another?

"They've done one, haven't they?" Tibbetts reflects. "So you'd have to have a reason to do another one. You'd have to have a good story. You'd have to have a good reason to make something Christmas.

"I don't know why they did it, I've never asked them. It's fun and silly, but I guess if they've got a good reason, if Charlie has a really good idea to make something Christmas, he'll go for it again. Charlie and Annabel [Jones, Black Mirror producer], they've got some bloody good ideas and they've taken [Black Mirror] in as many directions as it can go... it can kind of do whatever it wants.

"I wouldn't be surprised if they did but they'd have to have a really, really good reason to go for Christmas again."

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