Black Mirror creators Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones recently revealed that the songs sung by Miley Cyrus in her episode were actually Nine Inch Nails tracks that were readapted into pop standards.
The popular sci-fi series premiered its fifth season on Netflix on Wednesday (June 5) and Cyrus stars in the third episode, titled Rachel, Jack, And Ashley Too, as a teen pop star with obsessive fans. Brooker shared that the idea of transforming NIN songs for the episode was in the script very early on, but they needed to get Trent Reznor’s permission to re-write some of his tracks.
Luckily, Reznor was into the idea from the very start, as Brooker said at a press screening in London on May 24, via NME. “It was via email and he was really happy. He wanted to see the script and I got to rewrite his lyrics in a chirpy way,” he said. “I’m not the best lyricist in the world, and there’s one point where she’s singing ‘I’m stoked on ambition and verve’ instead of, ‘You’re gonna get what you deserve.’”
“He thought it was all very funny. He found all of the dark comedy very entertaining. There are lots of dark concepts in the film and we just enjoyed a childish subversion of them,” Jones added. “You know, an artist being more successful when they’re dead than when they’re alive is just such a ghoulish idea — but then we’re living in a time when you holograms of Prince, Amy Winehouse or Whitney Houston appear.”
“A couple of days ago, Whitney Houston’s estate sort of thought, ‘Oh, we’ve left it a few years now, that’s a tasteful period of time, now let’s dig her up and get her back on stage,'” she continued. “She’ll be so much more valuable as a hologram than in the real world because, you know poor Whitney, no scandal and nothing to derail the tour.”
“We’ll all be asking ourselves questions in a few years of ‘Will we be going to a tour in a few years where there’s a hologram performing music that we love? Is there going to be a point where we ‘Yeah, we accept that’?”
Speaking of Cyrus, the creators said, “At the end, she does a fucking good job of doing ‘Head Like A Hole’.”
Watch the trailer for the episode below.
