No, Charlie Brooker did not purposely make scenes in “Bandersnatch” that are inaccessible.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter last month, David Slade, the film’s director, said that they made at least one scene that “we can’t access.”
Brooker admitted to TheWrap there are technically scenes that no viewer will be able to come across in the choose-your-own-adventure style “Black Mirror” film starring Fionn Whitehead, which Netflix released last month. “No we didn’t do that [on purpose], it was an accident,” he said.
But if you need something to blame for this, well, in very “Black Mirror” fashion, Brooker says it’s technology’s fault, really.
Basically, because of the complicated way they went about crafting the entire narrative — which included using video game code — when they later found out some scenes they had already shot weren’t needed, it was too late to actually remove them without causing the whole thing to fall apart.
“We only can’t access them because we made changes to quite a few things and as a result — and technically, because of the way it’s been put together — is like one big timeline with all the footage on it and it sort of jumps to points along that timeline,” Brooker explained. “So there was a point after which, I think, we delivered [and] finalized that timeline, where we then altered something to do with the interactive path, which meant that now one or two sections were redundant.”
What Brooker is describing there is actually a common occurrence in video games and it’s rare that you’ll find a game that doesn’t ship with cut content buried in its files, with the game not programmed to access them. So, really, this whole thing is somewhat less dramatic than it might sound initially.
Guess we’ll forgive Brooker for these “deleted scenes.” But we did already cut him a break for not remembering how to get to the secret post-credits scene.
You can also check out our interview with “Bandersnatch” stars Whitehead and Will Poulter here.