What do you do after Black Mirror?
Chris Barrett on gut instinct and balancing ambition with family
Beyond the spellbinding visual magic that Us create, I’ve always admired the clarity with which Chris Barrett and his directing partner Luke Taylor approach their work. Most recently, that’s come through in their Black Mirror episode “Eulogy,” starring Paul Giamatti. It plays like a short feature film, and is technically jaw-dropping and emotionally tender in a truly beautiful way.
It’s so good, it got me thinking: how do you make choices as a director and as a parent, when big opportunities come your way? So I sat down for coffee with Chris to ask him how they decide what’s next…
This conversation gets into all of that. It’s about the weight of making something good, how you use your time, and the importance of tone. Hope you enjoy it.
Tomas: You came from short form and commercials, but you were always actively one of those directors saying, "I want to do something long form and with emotional heft." Now that you’ve done it, do you feel differently as a director?
Chris: Yes, in the sense of feeling more certain that this is what we want to be doing. It’s a big leap to go from short film - our short was probably four minutes with hardly any dialogue - to a feature that’s an hour and a half. We weren’t sure how we were going to bridge that gap. Black Mirror came along and allowed us to do that. It was a perfect stepping stone… 45 minutes, two people, a great script, great actors. We quite quickly felt at home doing it. As soon as we finished, we were like that was so rewarding and so refreshing and we wanted do more of it. It just felt like the right thing to be doing.
Tomas: So you’ve now done something longer - you’ve made a ‘real’ thing in the eyes of a world, and it’s good, and successful, how do you start defining what’s next? Do you have a set of criteria?
Chris: Yeah. We have to. There’s two of us, and we each have partners and kids. These things are brutal on families. The bigger the success or opportunity, the bigger the impact it can have. We are very close to our families and want to be good parents and that weight is hard to balance. Even though my family came out for a few weeks during Black Mirror, it was still a disruption. So the idea of what comes next has to be chosen with a lot of care and thought. And because you’re spending so much time doing it, you've got to do it for the right reasons.
Tomas: Do you actually have a list?
Chris: Yeah. Even for commercials, we had a list. It’s not just about the creative. It could be about building relationships, something purely financial, or a project that frees us up to do something we won’t get paid for later. It's all about balance. We haven't rewritten it for long-form yet, but we will. You can’t go into long-form thinking about finance, it's got to be is it the right story or is it the right thing? One of the best pieces of advice we got told early on in our career when we were still graphic designers was do good work and you'll do good. It sounds so simple, but it's what we've always focused on because if you do something good, no one cares if you got paid well or whatever it is.
Tomas: How do you balance that with the glitzier opportunities? Things you might not be obvious choices for but are tempting?
Chris: Gut instinct. If it feels right, we’ll do it, even if it’s not something we’ve done before. Sometimes we get sent a script and think, “Why have they sent us this?” But we love it and can see how we could make it work. That’s exciting. We like not repeating ourselves. Sometimes I feel like when we were doing commercials and music videos, it kind of negatively affected us. We jumped around so much that we didn't have a copy-paste visual aesthetic or something that could clearly define what we did. But over time it became more about the tone. That’s what I love - when someone says, “I can see you in that.” It took time to realise how tone can unify different-looking work. It’s like having an accent.
Tomas: I think tone and taste are very similar. Your taste leads to your tone. And people often recognise your tone quicker than you do. If something has an authentic emotional moment, can be wrapped in any form. That can run contrary to success in commercials though - really financially successful directors often just do the same thing.
Chris: Because it’s dependable. Clients know what they’re getting. If I were the client, I’d probably choose that kind of director too. That’s why I sometimes think, “Why have they chosen us?” But as a director, you can’t overthink those decisions. If someone chooses you for a random reason, just do the best job you can.
Tomas: You mentioned gut instinct and not overthinking things. I think that something that you guys do that very well, and that's actually really hard to do is to listen to that voice and ask, is this right for me? Do I actually think it's good? And maybe there's something in the fact that there's two of you.
Chris: Definitely. We’ve always had this double gut check. People ask us how it works. We both studied graphic design, so our brains were taught the same way. We’re different personalities, but we have a shared foundation. If we both like something, we move forward. If one of us doesn’t, we talk about why. And if we can’t agree, we don’t do it. That applies to ideas we generate or things that come in.
Tomas: I think that's really valuable. And I think a lot of the time if you're a director on your own, you're searching for that person. When something like Black Mirror comes out, do you see it as cashing in a chip? Or just a progression?
Chris: If we’d written a list of dream jobs, Black Mirror would've been at the top. We’d even written something once that started, “This is an episode of Black Mirror.” So when it came to us, we said yes instantly - no matter what the script was. It just so happened that the script was spooky perfect for us. It wasn’t super dark, and we’re not dark people. It felt like a love story with memory and heart, which we like. We felt pressure, but we kind of thrive on that. It was exciting - just knowing there’d be an audience. That’s the dream: to make stuff people actually watch. Not something that disappears on an obscure platform. So we threw everything at it and loved the challenge. We’ve always been quite shortsighted: just do this well, and maybe something better will follow. We knew we wanted to do long form, and this felt like the perfect calling card. It was so right it made us doubt how it even came together, but we just thought: let’s go for it.
Tomas: So now that it’s out, do you use it as a calling card for something you’ve written, or something that comes to you?
Chris: Both. We’re not precious about where a good idea comes from. We’ve written our first feature. We went to art school because we were terrible at English, so it’s funny that we’re writing now. But screenplays aren’t novels - it’s just getting what’s in your head on a page. And it was exciting to get a fully formed script like Black Mirror. All that hard work’s done - you just get to make it. That’s exciting.
Tomas: Earlier you mentioned the clash between ambition and family. That tension never fully goes away. We have similar small, tight knit family set ups - we don’t have lots of support around us, we’re very present as fathers. Sometimes it feels to me that ambition, or opportunity runs contrary to that. I was on this latest shoot and wrote in my notebook ‘will this project make me a worse Dad?’.
Chris: It’s the hardest part. Even when the Black Mirror script came in, my first thought was, “This is going to be hard.” My wife was really supportive, but she knew how difficult it would be. It’s about asking: is the weight worthy of the opportunity? And you’re gambling. Even if you think it’s a great opportunity, it might not be. You’re gambling with your family, your time. It might not even come out. So it’s about calculating the risk and rewards. There is a risk, it could end up really damaging a family life and that's the hardest thing.
Tomas: And as your ambition grows, so does the time commitment.
Chris: Yeah. You don’t get much time on this earth. I want to use mine well. There’s got to be a reason to do something. Maybe it’s the crew, the experience, something. But especially with a feature - that's why it's taken us so long to write a feature film, because it's like we don't just want to make a film to say we've made a film. It has to be for the right reasons. And then with family, we’re still trying to figure out the right support system. It’s going to be hard, but what’s the best way of doing it?
Tomas: It’s also about how present you can be. I find it easier if I can zoom out and imagine explaining this to my daughter when she's a bit older. “My dad went to do that film - it was quite good,” versus “My dad went to do a biscuit commercial in Asia.” Also, I want to be an interesting person to my daughter who shows her that what I see as work, which is really very close to what other people would see as a hobby, is something that's valuable and enriching and makes me feel good.
Chris: Yeah. I had that chat with my son. He knew it was a TV show. He liked that. It makes sense to his brain. That thing exists now and he can watch it when he’s older. That’s pretty cool. It’s not a biscuit commercial. It felt good.