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“Paul has always been a hero of mine,” says Charlie Brooker, acknowledging that with Paul Giamatti sitting right next to him, it might be an awkward thing to say.
“A hero? Inspirational hero?” Giamatti hops in, looking skeptical but delighted.
“I’ll go even further!” Brooker continues. “I’ll call you an icon, sir.”
“Wow, that’s a whole other level,” Giamatti nods. “Beautiful. Understood.”
That captures at least a little bit of the marvelous dynamic between Brooker, the creator of the long-running anthology series Black Mirror, and Giamatti, the Oscar nominee and Emmy winner who stars in one of the more hopeful installments of the latest season, “Eulogy.” Like many Black Mirror episodes, it’s set in a distant future that closely resembles ours, except that technology can allow people to actually step inside their own memories and turn them into a slideshow to be played for others. Giamatti’s character, a loner living on Cape Cod, speaks with an AI version of the daughter of a dead ex-girlfriend to look back on their relationship, discovering some surprising truths in the process.
It’s classic Black Mirror stuff, raising questions about our relationship with technology but also very universal human questions about love, regret, and memory. “I don’t get a lot of science-fiction or ghost stories sent to me,” says Giamatti, who is so interested in the stories of strange and unexplained things that he co-hosted a podcast about them, called Chinwag, for nearly two years. “So the idea that I could do this particular science-fiction stuff on Black Mirror was very exciting to me.”
On today’s special Sunday edition of the Prestige Junkie podcast, recorded live and in person at Netflix’s offices, I talk to Brooker and Giamatti about building their relationship while working together on Black Mirror, which also included Brooker walking away and allowing Giamatti to work with his episode’s directors, Christopher Barrett and Luke Taylor. (“Well, you were also really good,” Brooker allows. “So it’s not like I sort of had to go, ‘What the hell??’”) They discuss the technology used to create the striking scenes in which Giamatti and Patsy Ferran, as the AI guide, physically step into the memories. And also, inevitably, we wind up talking about the real-world implications of AI itself.
Hear it all on the podcast, and head to the Ankler’s YouTube page to watch the video version.
