“Metalhead” is the only episode of Black Mirror to date that cannot be read as an allegory. It’s not a satire, or a morality play, or even a cautionary tale. Instead, the penultimate installment of the Netflix anthology series’ latest season is 42 lean, tense minutes of pure action, following one woman (Maxine Peake) in her desperate, futile flight from a deadly robot attack dog she triggers by breaking into an abandoned warehouse. The vast majority of the episode, shot in stark black and white, features no dialogue or actors other than Peake. There’s almost no world-building: We don’t know who built the robot, or why, or what happened to the world to make it as eerily postapocalyptic as the landscape Peake traverses. There’s only the chase.
Like the rest of the season, “Metalhead” was written by Black Mirror series creator Charlie Brooker. Unlike the rest of the season, however, “Metalhead” isn’t a script-centric experience. It’s the contributions of episode director David Slade that stand out, moving confidently through action-movie tropes from car chases to shootouts and channeling the chaos of Peake’s mad dash into a visual language that’s frenetic yet chillingly crisp. Slade is a prestige television veteran, having worked with Bryan Fuller on both Hannibal and American Gods after helming an episode of Breaking Bad. Here, he channels that experience into an impressively seamless feat of effects work: The robot is mostly computer generated, but in the moment it feels tangibly, terrifyingly real.
Last month, The Ringer spoke with Slade about the planning, vision, and execution behind “Metalhead,” Black Mirror’s most formally audacious outing to date.
I enjoyed the episode, and I’m excited to ask you some questions about it.
Oh, great! I’m really glad people are beginning to see it, because they’ve been so damn secretive about it. I have a lot pent up. I haven’t been able to talk about it; I’ve been under many, many secrecy threats. Nobody threatened me, but you know.
In terms of how long you’ve been under lock and key, when did you start talking to Charlie Brooker about the episode? What were those conversations like?
They sent me a script when I was finishing American Gods. I was literally sound mixing, so it was around June of last year. They sent me a script — it was a very short script — and said, “Are you interested in talking?” Of course, I had to sign all the nondisclosures first. As I read the script, I immediately had this vision of a horrifyingly oppressive world, with a great sense of unease about the writing. I was like, “I want to do this.” [Laughs.]
Those calls are always kind of boring to listen in on, because they’re really just about making sure you understand everything. But we immediately found we were on the same page; we were all terrified of these Boston Dynamics robots, we all understood where this was going and knew what this particular one was about. There was this great tone and atmosphere to the scenario. It was also unusual to me because, when someone says they’re sending you Black Mirror, you expect pages and pages of dialogue about technology. And there was hardly any dialogue! There was only two or three pages.
I found Charlie to be incredibly open — very, very trusting from the get-go. I quickly signed up, and within a month, I was there with them. I kind of waited until I was in England before I was like, “Look, let’s shoot some black and white.” They responded very favorably to that. They did some tests, and eventually we were like, “OK, we’re gonna commit to black and white.” Again, the location photographs I was taking as I was going around, the one thing I kept coming back to was the oppressive nature of the story. So we shot it on a native black-and-white camera. Once we made that decision, everything switched to black and white. My memory of the entire thing is in black and white!
You mention there’s not a lot of dialogue; it seemed to me like there’s a little more directorial autonomy and responsibility to adapting a script like that. How did you approach it?
I immediately realized that this was going to be a vast undertaking, because one of the great things about dialogue is that it takes up pages. [Laughs.] When there’s no dialogue, when you don’t have a five-page dialogue scene anywhere in the script after a certain point, then every time you look at a scene, it’s a series of four-second shots. You know what I mean? Alec Guinness talks about making a film as eating an elephant with a teaspoon: You start at the trunk, and it’s these little tiny bites each day that get you through. But of course, what I’m doing is I’m reconstructing an elephant with a teaspoon, when you shoot something this complex. And it’s not an actual movie; it’s a TV series. There was a certain amount of autonomy that I got, which was kind of by necessity, because to shoot that much stuff, I had to have complete freedom to make this work. One day, we shot 40 setups, which is a huge, huge, huge amount of stuff to do. Everything has to be designed around being able to work.
This is also not an action movie in the sense that Maxine Peake, our lead actor, is astonishingly human and the heartbeat of the entire thing. It’s not a thing about chasing robots as much as it is about a person. She is astonishing in that she has this humanity, and at the same time she’s completely fearless. But within that, there’s the thing the director has to do to make her feel safe so she is able to be as emotional as she can be. If it were a tech shoot where everything was green screen and she had to have tracker marks on her and all of that stuff, then that would make it difficult. And we had a lot of that stuff to do. It was just a really complicated shoot, but I guess I’ve had so much experience in these things that I’m very, very aware that the actor is the most vulnerable person on the set, and you shape your production process to give that actor as much safety and freedom as you can.
Were you involved in her casting?
Absolutely. I met with Maxine, who was one of my favorite choices to go to. We had one big meeting, and she seemed to be on, and then we just started talking and figuring it out. When there’s something like this, I said to her, “I can’t really afford too many shots of this damn robot! It’s all gonna be up to you.” It’s literally not possible to do too many shots of that thing, because it’s a damn expensive thing. Finding ways to humanize it all — she made it all possible.
The location seems so important to the overall effect. Where did you shoot, and what went into that decision?
The location scouting was pretty exhaustive. I knew that I needed desolation. I knew it existed in England. I knew that the light in England, having spent a lot of my life there, would most likely be incredibly soft and overcast. That was important to me, to utilize that as well as I could. It’s an anomaly to England, and in California, it’s hard light. Understanding not just the locations themselves, but the light that was gonna be in the locations, where the sun was gonna go up and go down, was a big part of our planning. Really going out of our way to find those quite desolate places — the warehouse exteriors and all of that stuff. We did a lot of traveling, and I ended up doing something directors never do, which is giving back shoot days to production so that we could pay to travel. Again, it was a lot of exhaustive scouting: me being there with a camera and taking photographs, then going through the process of grading those photographs to look like the film that we’re about to make. It was all very, very planned.
We were lucky to be in England, but there was a lot of travel. It wasn’t all shot in one area. A lot of places in Devon and outside of London, and some places inside of London as well.
What is the robot, exactly?
I came on very early in this process, so I was very much involved in the design of the robot from the get-go. Joel Collins is the overall series production designer, who I’ve known for years. He contacted me and said, “We’ve got some sense, but nothing’s really going, so it’s kind of a blank slate.”
We were all terrified of Boston Dynamics, of course. Funnily enough, in the history of Black Mirror, usually what happens is, whenever something in the season comes out, six months later it actually happens in reality. Of course, about a month ago, I got an email from Charlie Brooker saying, “Hey, look at this robot Boston Dynamics has got! It’s got a camera on the front, just like ours! It looks just like ours, how far fetched.” The theory behind it, and the look of the thing — to me, it would be military hardware, and there’d probably be a lot of them, even though really what it was doing was protecting retail. You’re in a world where something’s happened; we all had our own theories about what it was, but definitely something bad has happened. Not many people are left, and they’ve all kind of banded together. So these robots are essentially protecting retail: They’re protecting products, but they happened to be military. We’re in a world now where — I’m not talking about the fictional world, but in the real world — empathy has a lower product base than other things these days. It’s not hugely far fetched to say, “Well, why not just send the robot out and kill ’em, so they can’t come back?” That’s where we were politically as well, that this was a very bleak future.
What was the balance between practical effects and CG?
We looked at a lot of that stuff and designed it. We had a [mechanical stand-in] that we worked with, which was a physical thing that we used. This is not something that would necessarily be on camera, but something for the actors, and Maxine particularly, to have and know where it is and see what it was — the scale of it, the size of it. All of those, all of the sequences were digitally replaced. In the end, we didn’t use any of the practical stuff. That came down to television, really, because we had a longer postproduction than we had a preproduction, so the idea of making something that was physical, that could practically do all the things it could do — we just didn’t have the time to finesse it.
We did know we had a longer postproduction period, so we designed it as if we were going to do it practical and then did it digitally, if that makes sense. I sat down with Joel Collins and figured out how all the technology would work, and whenever possible, we would use real technology. We used a LIDAR scanner, which is a real-world thing; it’s what you see when you see footage of self-driving cars and stuff. (LIDAR stands for Light Detection and Ranging.) They’re kind of like radar for light: They send out a thing and they bounce it back and they create a topography of the world around them. The important thing for me when it came to how the robot looked at the world, I felt like it was really important to represent that as correctly as we possibly could. So we did: We LIDAR-scanned all our locations and our sets.
With Charlie at the beginning, we were like, “I don’t know how it is. The way it sees, it’s like predator vision or something. Let’s figure out what it is.” We had a lot of conversations. One of the joys of working with Charlie Brooker is, those conversations go on for hours: how the technology could be utilized, what it should be. Then what happens with those conversations with him is, they get completely watertight. There’s no way any of it can be hashed together. It all has to work. That was great, and that was really fun. Then Mike Bell and his team at Double Negative, who did basically all of the visual effects, were wonderful. Because we were shooting with black-and-white cameras to begin with, we actually had GoPro cameras on our cameras, cameras on cameras, so they could be taking color data as well as black and white data, just for tracking. Then after a while, they figured out how to do it without that, so that was cool.
We planned it meticulously. I’m used to storyboarding meticulously, which I did, and we shot it exactly the way we wanted to shoot it. They did all of the capture that they needed. I was pretty astonished, actually, with how beautifully realistic — I knew we would have realism, but I was really happy with the work they did. We designed every shot, but I was expecting to have more of it out of focus. [Laughs.] What you do when you do these things is, you’re just trying to get the bit you believe, but we managed to make this thing you completely believe.