It’s been a whirlwind couple of years for filmmaker Dan Trachtenberg. After his breakout short film Portal: No Escape sent the internet buzzing in 2011, J.J. Abrams tapped him to helm 10 Cloverfield Lane, the delightfully different follow-up to the 2008 found-footage genre hit. Trachtenberg’s latest directorial effort is “Playtest,” an episode in Season 3 of creator Charlie Brooker’s twisted Twilight Zone-esque anthology series, Black Mirror.
“Playtest” focuses on a freewheeling American tourist named Cooper (Wyatt Russell), who is mourning his late father while taking a solo trip around the world. Eventually, he finds himself in London, rich in new experiences but short on cash. After a one-night stand with gaming journalist named Sonja (Hannah John-Kamen), he signs up to beta test a new augmented reality system for aShigeru Miyamoto-esque game developer for some much-needed money. What he finds when he’s taken to the gaming company’s remote facility is more horrific — and personal — than anything he could have imagined.
Inverse caught up with Trachtenberg and chatted about binge-watching, collaborating with Brooker, and how Big Trouble in Little China influenced “Playtest.”
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What was the collaboration with Charlie Brooker like? How hands-on is he with each episode?
He tends to spend less time on the set, but he spends a lot of time developing the scripts and is incredibly collaborative with that. He writes pretty much every episode by himself, but we went over every page together. He does get very hands-on in post-production, especially with all the tech-related stuff.
He has a very specific way of seeing things, and both he and I share the same bugaboo with how tech is portrayed so often in movies and TV where it’s just totally false. These are objects we interact with all the time, so it’s important for us to be a little bit more literal with graphics or design. He always wants to be diligent in making things feel like they could happen a certain way or should happen that way. Instead of having those kinds of things be big and obvious for the audience and having them say the plot for you it’s much better to be realistic about something even if it’s supposed to be futuristic. All of us who love Black Mirror really respond to that, so it’s a direct correlation to how much time Charlie spends in the post-production process getting all that stuff right.
What was the approach the design and function of the AR tech in “Playtest”?
Everything for us was always five minutes in the future. Right now we have Google Glass and Oculus, and our AR is the very next iteration of that. The phone interfaces in the episode are not the OS we have today but close to it.
Obviously for Charlie it’s about how that could be simultaneously a great thing and a terrible thing. We wanted to skew things towards being on the cusp of a dangerous execution of it, but also include an aspect of wish fulfillment.
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Source: Inverse