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While Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer were David Lynch fans growing up, in their own series they were sure to answer more questions than the director likely would have.
“It’s about giving enough that the audience feels satisfied,” Ross said.
“We wanted it to feel like a big movie,” Matt said. While the finale delivers closure as to what happened to Will, they left it open ended enough so that “there’s a bigger mythology, and there’s definitely some dangling threads at the end,” to set the stage for a season two.
The Duffer brothers were on hand to talk about the series along with stars Winona Ryder, Millie Bobby Brown, Gaten Matarazzo, and Caleb McLaughlin, during a panel at the Television Critics Association press tour Wednesday.
Stranger Things was Ryder’s first foray into television, and she used the structure of the format to influence her acting.
“I think what initially scared me about it was you couldn’t read the entire thing,” she said. “I sort of adjusted my perspective and used my own confusion, my own trying to figure out what’s going on, for my character.”
She also related well to her character, Joyce, a single mother searching for her missing son.
“I did really see her as someone who wasn’t perfect, and I appreciated that,” Ryder said. “She was complicated, she was struggling; I think she carried around a lot of guilt … she was like a lot of women I know who are really good people and just trying the best they can to get by … And i also think she reacts quite appropriately to these insane things that are happening.”
Which worked out well.
“When you’re kind of talking to lamps and doing things that you know … After a while you’re just kind of praying that it works,” Ryder said.
She called the breakout success of the show, “overwhelming in the best possible way.”
Ryder also worked with a cast of young actors around the same age as she was when she started her Hollywood career.
While she was a child of the ‘80s, Millie Bobby Brown, Caleb McLaughlin and Gaten Matarazzo had a great time experiencing for a moment what it was like to grow up in that era.
Some of the highlights?
“For me, the parachute pants,” Matarazzo said. “When we were filming it was hot outside, and they were still comfortable.”
For Brown, the record player.
“I had no idea what a record player actually was,” she said. “It’s so weird and I was like hold on, I need to know what that is. And I got one for Christmas.”
And also using giant walkie talkies, and riding their bikes.
“It was cool to be in the shoes of what my dad used to do when he was a kid,” McLaughlin said.
The Duffers, who described themselves as “the last generation to grow up pre-internet” pulled from their own childhood when creating the show by trying to capture that feeling of playing in the woods with a group of friends.
“We didn’t encounter any interdimensional monsters,” Ross said. “But in our dreams, we did.”
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