[MUSIC PLAYING]
MATT DUFFER: We're from Durham, North Carolina.
Growing up we were just nerdy kids
playing Dungeons and Dragons with our friends.
ROSS DUFFER: We always loved films
and we wanted to do that for a living,
but we had no idea how to make that possible.
How do you get from the suburbs of North Carolina
to where we are now in Hollywood, making
a show for Netflix?
MATT DUFFER: So around third grade,
our parents for Christmas gave us a Hi8 video camera.
We were really excited about this.
Starting in the summer of the fourth grade,
that's kind of when everything changed.
We made our first full length movie.
We will fight honorably.
And one more thing, onward to battle!
ROSS DUFFER: Then when we moved in to high school,
we said, is there a way to make these movies even better?
So what we would do is every summer
we would actually start to write some scripts down
and this was our first instance of us writing scripts.
I made it.
MATT DUFFER: And that continued all the way into college.
We went to Film School at Chapman University.
We were still mostly focused on directing.
We realized at a certain point that no one
was going to let us direct anything if we
didn't have a script that we could attach ourselves to.
Forget about it.
MATT DUFFER: So we took some screenwriting classes,
we learned the basics of screenwriting.
Structure, inciting incident.
We started to learn some big ideas about how
to write a screenplay.
But father, you're a man of science.
And a man of reason.
MATT DUFFER: So there was a big turning point for us
and that was after we had struggled
for a while in a couple of scripts,
we weren't getting anywhere with them.
And a lot of this was because we were focused on what
we thought the industry wanted.
What was selling in the moment, what people were excited about.
We just cut out all the noise and we just
wrote something that was really personal to us.
The story was called "Hidden," and it
was about a family that was hiding in a bomb shelter
from some mysterious threat above the surface.
And we did something which we hadn't really
been doing, which because of the time crunch,
because of the financial pressures, we just sat down
and we're like, we better figure out this story before we
go into writing it.
And we outlined it.
And when we outlined it, the outline worked and then
we wrote the script incredibly fast.
It just fell into place and "Hidden," was born.
It sold in a bidding war to Warner Brothers
and we were suddenly back on our feet
and feeling confident again.
ROSS DUFFER: There are many ups and downs over that,
but that was a huge hurdle.
We didn't even know how to write a screenplay to suddenly we
had sold a screenplay and we had made money
with just words that we have written on paper.
That night we went to get a meal and I
remember it was such a big moment for us
that we were able to order soda with our meals,
because prior to that we could only afford really
water with any of our meals.
To me it was Thai iced tea at the local Thai restaurant,
that we were able to do that.
Like, Thai iced tea, please.
Also I felt a little bit like sheepish about it,
but it was like, oh man, this is a really good Thai iced tea.
It was a huge moment, we're like OK, this is it.
We've made it.
But the big take away from us was write something
that you're passionate about.
Write something that you truly love, not something
that you think other people are going to love.
And outline, outline, outline, outline, plan, plan, plan.
But there was a shift in the industry around the time
and there were a lot of producers
that kept going, hey, well, that's an OK movie idea,
but do you have a TV idea?
And so there was really a move towards television
becoming more cinematic and that started to get us excited.
And so we started to go, well, you know what?
Maybe this is a type of storytelling
that we could get into and that's
what led us to eventually develop "Montauk," which
is the pilot script that would eventually
become "Stranger Things."
MATT DUFFER: It ended up selling to Netflix,
and that moment, receiving that call that Netflix was not
only buying our script, but was greenlighting it to series,
and that they were comfortable with Ross and I directing it,
was probably the best moment of my life.
This class is really for anyone who dreams of telling stories
for a living.
It's for the person who has 20 scripts in their drawer, none
of which have sold.
It's for the person who has only written 20 pages of a script
and hasn't been able to get past the 20 pages.
Or is just staring at a blank screen
and they can't write a single word.
You've got the idea, but you don't know what to do with it.
It's also for people who, like us, don't
know a single soul in Hollywood and want
to see how this works and see if this is something
that maybe you could actually do and you can make a reality.
MATT DUFFER: This class is also for people
who just love "Stranger Things," and want
to see how we created the show, how we built it from an idea
all the way through the script.
To show you how it works, we're
going to go into documents and things we wrote.
Netflix has never seen it.
Our actors have never seen it.
So we're going to be showing you those top secret "Stranger
Things" documents for the first time.
ROSS DUFFER: We'll use examples from "Stranger Things,"
from the pilot all the way through stuff from season 4.
Bitching, right?
Yeah, yeah, bitching.
MATT DUFFER: So something else we're
going to do to show you how this process works is
we're going to create our own fake Dustin and Steve "Stranger
Things" spin-off series.
This is imaginary, it's just for this class,
but we're going to generate the idea in real time
for you and we're going to write the opening hook
and under extreme time constraints,
and hopefully it's going to be some fun.
This is not a real thing, Netflix.
ROSS DUFFER: We love writing, it is a fun process.
Yes, it is frustrating at times, it gets scary at times,
you get stuck.
It doesn't feel like you're ever going to get unstuck sometimes,
but what we try to do with this class is show you
our process because this is what we found
has made writing as smooth as possible and as fun as
possible.
I'm going to be a little dramatic here.
Right here we cut to black.
Hey, I'm Ross.
I'm Matt.
Together, we're the Duffer brothers.
And this is "MasterClass."