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Something spooky has arrived on Netflix. (No, it’s not another Adam Sandler film.)
Stranger Things, an eight-episode, Amblin-inspired series from Wayward Pines alumni the
Duffer Brothers stars Winona Ryder as a mother whose young son goes missing. It takes
inspiration from Stephen King and Steven Spielberg, with a dash of Guillermo del Toro.
Our Phil de Semlyen sat down with the show’s creators (twins, but not in the Stephen
King sense) to talk scares, filming techniques, and, err, Harry Potter.
1/7
Ross: When you boil it down, it's a young boy who vanishes under mysterious
circumstances and it becomes increasingly apparent that something supernatural is
behind his disappearance. It's really about the different generations searching for him
and trying to find him. If you were doing a movie, you would have to pick one of those
stories, you could tell the mum story or you could tell the friend story or you could tell
the sheriff story. And what we were excited about is that, no, we can tell all of these
stories with a slightly different tone and feel to them.
2/7
Ross: Obviously Spielberg's getting thrown around a lot and that's great, but also it's
exciting that this is Netflix and not a movie, and that's why we put the chapter title cards
on every episode. We wanted it to feel like you're sitting down and reading this big fat
Stephen King book and that was exciting to us. Because this is something sprawling, we
can tell this story over a much longer period of time than two hours. So inherently it's
going to have a different texture and taste to it than, say, a Spielberg movie or what not,
so that works for the Stephen King references that are coming in.
Ross: There obviously are moments where we wanted it to be scary. I mean, when we
were young, our favourite thing was being scared and being pushed a little bit, watching
things that maybe we were a little too young [to be watching], and those are some of our
favourite experiences.
3/7
Often it’s scarier when stuff is weird and when you don’t fully understand the motive.
4/7
That frame is pretty identical to the frame when Brody types in 'shark attack' in Jaws.
There's little stuff like that but we try not to be too acute about it. We do it every once in
a while because we couldn't help ourselves.
There be monster(s)
Matt: One of the things we were really excited about is that we wanted to build the
monster and we did. There was a company called Spectral Motion that did a lot of stuff
for Guillermo del Toro. The monsters and creatures were always scarier when they felt
very real and tangible, and there’s something about CG that lessens the impact of it.
Often it’s scarier when stuff is weird and when you don’t fully understand the motive.
Pennywise in IT is very weird. This is nothing like Pennywise, but we wanted to sort of
create that strangeness. The ambiguity around it is very much purposeful.
Ross: In college, even, we shot on film. It's always hard to know nowadays if it's just
nostalgia. I don't think it is, I think film still looks a lot better with the depth of it and a
texture to it. It's a dying art. We are very happy with how it looks. We did our best to
replicate our preferred aesthetic which is a film look; that’s what we were going for.
Ross: There's nothing worse or more grating than a bad child actor performance. That
will kill anything, so we knew they would make or break the show. And so for us, the
minute Netflix greenlit the show, we started casting. We saw hundreds and hundreds
and hundreds of kids and there's so few that can give you a good performance without
having to do ten takes. And the bottom line is we found four kids that we thought could
do that. There was honestly no one else that we found.
Ross: Winona plays Joyce who is the mother of the missing boy, so she's dealing with the
grief and the guilt that you would in a typical missing child drama. But at the same time
she is encountering what seems to be paranormal activity that's interconnected with her
son – it seems almost like her son is reaching out to her. We talked a lot about Richard
Dreyfuss in Close Encounters, because for much of the show Winona is entirely on her
own and to the outside world she seems absolutely bonkers. So what she's going
through is very real and she continues to believe in it and takes that trip down that rabbit
hole.
5/7
Dr Martin Brenner (Matthew Modine) was the hardest role
to write
Matt: When we cut to him as little as we do and give him so little dialogue, how do you
make him an interesting character? That’s a character who we didn’t really figure out
until we started working with Matthew. And he brought a lot himself. He informed it, and
I’m really happy with where we wound up with him at the end, with something that was
discovered during the course of shooting, really.
Ross: When we started casting these people we didn’t have a script written, and honestly
that was extremely helpful. There’s mystery [with Dr Brenner]. We wanted that presence
of someone mysterious and dark and sort of manipulating things behind-the-scenes. So I
think it was a balancing act for us of, ‘how much of that line do we show?’.