American Cinematographer - May 2019 - 39

All images courtesy of Netflix.

tioning the level to which he has
control over his own actions.
The direction of the narrative
largely depends on decisions made
by the viewer, which include seemingly inconsequential judgments -
like choosing a breakfast cereal - as
well as more disturbing and sinister
determinations, like whether or not to
kill people and, subsequently, to chop
up or bury a body.
"When I was going through it
all and preparing it, I had to try to see
everything holistically," says director
David Slade, whose work includes
TV episodics Hannibal and Breaking
Bad, and the feature 30 Days of Night.
"The idea that there is one way
through [a narrative] is the thing that
defines a director - [but for this
project], I had to say, 'Okay, I
acknowledge that that is not on the
table anymore.'"
Aaron Morton, NZCS - who
had previously collaborated with
Slade on the Black Mirror episode
Metalhead - was originally assigned
to the project as the sole director of
photography, but during prep, as the
complexities of Bandersnatch came
into focus, it was decided that the
shooting schedule needed to be
pushed to allow for more thorough
preparation. As Morton was committed to another project that intersected
with the end of the new 35-day shooting schedule, Jake Polonsky, BSC -
who had photographed Black Mirror's
pilot - was hired to complete the
shoot. "As we got deeper into prep,
we realized what a monster this was
going to be compared to any 'normal'
shoot," Morton offers.
Though
the
description
provided to Netflix viewers indicates
a 90-minute run time, the whole of
Bandersnatch in fact contains "approximately 4.5 hours of viewable footage
in total," Morton reports, and is
divided into 250 segments - all
based upon Black Mirror creator and
writer Charlie Brooker's screenplay.
As Polonsky attests, the script was
"incredibly hard to read, as it

t Black Mirror: Bandersnatch viewers are compelled to make pivotal decisions on behalf of computer
programmer Stefan Butler (Fionn Whitehead) as he designs a game that's eerily similar to the Netflix interactive
movie he's actually in. pp & p Director David Slade works alongside cinematographers Jake Polonsky, BSC and
Aaron Morton, NZCS, respectively.

contained every possible configuration of the story." Slade notes, "You
realized you couldn't fudge anything.
You couldn't put anything on the
shelf and wait until later. You had to
go through all of it, [and] think all of
it through. Otherwise there could be
serious problems, because if it didn't
work on paper, it wasn't going to
work."
Polonsky was brought in at the
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end of prep, which allowed for early
familiarity with the visual trajectory.
Even though this was the first time
that either cinematographer had
shared a project - and that Slade had
collaborated with two directors of
photography - all three filmmakers
enthusiastically note how seamlessly
the shoot was executed. "It was really
fortunate that [Jake] was able to come
in before we even started shooting,"
May 2019

39
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American Cinematographer - May 2019

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