When I sat down with Matt and Ross Duffer (collectively known as the Duffer Brothers) last month they were pretty calm, cool and collected for two guys whose first series, “Stranger Things,” had become a cultural phenomenon and earned a tantalizing 18 Emmy nominations after the debut of its first season. To clarify, they certainly were not cocky or overconfident, but considering the looming deadline to submit nine episodes of the second season to Netflix they certainly were not as stressed as you or I would probably be. The context of the interview (for this LA Times Envelope piece) was to discuss their award success so far (“Stranger Things” won both the PGA Award and the SAG Ensemble Award in January) and what lies ahead. With a healthy 45 minutes chatting around their editing suite’s kitchen, that left a ton of our conversation on the cutting room floor.
Until now.
From my experience, The Duffers simply don’t come across as writers and directors who have let their mammoth success get to their heads. They’re incredibly humble about the lack of success of their first Hollywood endeavor, 2011’s “Hidden,” and how lucky they are to have creative freedom with Netflix now. And when you read their reaction about the second season’s knockout trailer set to Michael Jackson‘s classic “Thriller” and realize how much they care about not dragging out their story just for the sake of a set number of episodes, or listen to them reflect on their meeting with President Obama, you’ll understand how hard it is not to root for them.
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Gregory Ellwood: The second season trailer is pretty incredible. Where did the idea of including the “Thriller” music come from? Is it in the show?
Ross Duffer: No, not us. We have an amazing marketing department in Trailer Park. We work with this guy Adam Finkelstein. He and [Netflix’s] Jennie Wilkes were in charge of marketing. They delivered it. The first cut was very close to what you saw. Then the challenge just became getting [the rights] to “Thriller.”
Matt Duffer: Which was really hard.
Ross Duffer: Yeah, easier said than done. Everyone was so in love with it and Netflix was so in love with that song that a lot of people worked really hard to…
Matt Duffer: And there was an alt cut without it, which was good but it wasn’t the same. It didn’t have that magic.
Gregory Ellwood: Do you sort of feel like for season two you have to figure out a way to put “Thriller” in the show now?
Ross Duffer: I actually just thought about that yesterday. I was like, “Oh my god, do we need to figure a way to put it because right now it’s not in the show.”
Matt Duffer: But honestly until we saw the trailer we never even thought [it could happen]. Michael Jackson is like that holy grail. It’s like The Beatles or something. You just don’t put that in your show. So even though we were ahead it didn’t even cross our minds to do it until now.
Ross Duffer: Prince would be the other one.
Matt Duffer: Yeah, Prince is difficult to [clear too].
Ross Duffer: I hadn’t even tried to get a Prince song.
Gregory Ellwood: Let’s talk about the gestation of the show. itself. Where did the idea even come from?
Ross Duffer: It’s so hard to pinpoint. I mean it’s weird but we saw that movie, “Prisoners”, you know with Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal? It’s about a missing child but kind of as far away as you can get from “Stranger Things.” Anyway, we came out of it and we really loved the movie and then we thought, “You know I could have watched that for seven more. It could have been an HBO movie. It could have been a limited series on HBO,” and went on and on because I was so in love with those characters and that world.
Matt Duffer: There’s something about the pacing that we just felt that I remember around the time that I remember seeing advertisements for like, “True Detective” and I don’t remember, was it around then? [Editor’s note: “True Detective” premiered four months after “Prisoners” was released in theaters.] But anyway, cinematic television felt like the pacing of this and something about it where I would have loved that to be eight hours. Why did it have to only be two?
Ross Duffer: Something that feels exactly like a movie, that’s shot like a movie, that’s scored like a movie, but that exists on this different platform. We’re not television people. We love movies. And then we started talking about what could a long form movie look like? And we separately had this like, supernatural missing kid movie idea that we were kicking around and we couldn’t crack it until we started thinking about it as an eight-hour thing. Like an eight-hour giant Stephen King adaptation, and then we started to get really excited about it. Like, you have this bigger canvas and then suddenly you get to go, “Oh, I can do some things that, if this were a movie, we wouldn’t have been able to do.” Like, focusing on three different generations. You just don’t have time.
Matt Duffer: If it was a movie we would have had to either follow Winona [Ryder], we would have to follow the teens or we followed the kids. It would have to have been one of them. So, we got excited because we were like, “Oh, we can follow all of them.”
Ross Duffer: “Oh wait, we can have a little ‘Goonies’ and then we can have ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ and we can have, you know, ‘Close Encounters.’” We can have all these different tones from all these different movies.
Matt Duffer: But I do think there was some concern when we first started, like how are these tones going to mesh all together? Like, how is that going to work? When we went to pitch the show we cut this mock trailer using clips from “Nightmare on Elm Street” and “Halloween” but then also “E.T.” And I think this also shows how important music is to the shows. We then put this sort of John Carpenter synth over the whole thing. I don’t know, somehow it was like the glue that held all these different tones together. And I think we honestly weren’t 100% sure until we saw that come together and we were like,”Hey, maybe this is gonna work. It’s not going to feel disjointed, it’s going to feel like one tone.”
Ross Duffer: Well, it’s like “E.T.” and “Halloween” actually went together really nicely because they’re both set in these sort of very American suburban areas and something supernatural scary happens.
Matt Duffer: And even something like “Halloween,” it’s so much more suspense based and character based. If you look back at it, it’s such a simple storytelling. It’s not like we’re trying to mesh “E.T.” and “Saw.” When you actually go back and watch these movies, I feel like they have this perception [of being something they are not]. Even ‘Texas Chainsaw’ has this perception of being this grotesque thing, and it’s like watch it again, it’s really not. It’s much more about suspense and tone and feeling then it is anything else.