[MUSIC PLAYING]
Whatever this thing is it's not traveling far.
Will's body, it was a fake.
I don't think my parents ever loved each other.
[GUNSHOT]
It's not safe.
OK so hopefully, if you've done some blue skying,
you've come up with some various characters
just how like we did with 11 with our Sheriff Sam Rockwell
character.
So now that you've got all these,
another thing that we often do is
we start listing all the characters,
the ones that we think are going to make the show.
But again, even though we are going in a little more detail
now by making a list of our characters,
we want to start really broad.
We don't want to get lost in the woods of too many details.
So we're going to show you right now like the initial list we
made of characters that we thought
could be integral to this show.
So as you see in this document, we've
got kid who has taken, Tommy.
That it becomes well.
So some of these names did not stick.
And again, I think the reason that
is obviously the first character we wrote down.
Why we know for a fact that character
is going to make the show because the show is
about the drive of the show is about a missing kid, right?
Sometimes it's nice to throw some names out just
to give you something to hook onto.
We've got best friend Joel.
Joel obviously will become Mike later on,
nerd friend, Neil, who eventually becomes Lucas.
Yeah.
We've got overweight friend, Dustin, Joel's parents,
we don't go into any detail about them.
Joyce and Guy, I mean, his name is Guy.
That's how vague this is right now.
We've got Tommy's parents, Tommy being-
Is Will.
So Joyce, we obviously switched.
Again, all of these names are on Wendy, Arthur.
Sheriff, we went into a lot of detail there, Sheriff's
pregnant wife, she obviously didn't make the show.
Not all these characters are going to come up
with are going to make it.
As you continue to develop, you're
going to see who's going to make it
in who's essential to the plot and who's not.
We've got Sheriff's daughter.
That character obviously didn't make it.
We've got escapee, which was eventually
becomes 11, the escapee from the lab.
So again, baby steps, we're starting very small.
We're just going these are some of the characters who might
make it in terms of the names.
That can be a fun detour.
You're hitting a wall.
You're getting sort of tired of blue skying in it.
One thing we like to go is we'll just go
into like Social Security site.
And we'll punch in, we'll figure out
do the quick little math in terms of what
when these kids would be born.
So in the case of this, it was like sometime in the '70s.
And we would just type in.
And then you can choose.
You can go top 1,000 names from 1972.
And you're going to get a list starting with most
common to least common names.
And you can start to look through and make sure.
First of all, you make sure the names are period correct.
And also you can start to assign names to your characters.
Now, obviously the names we assigned here did not stick.
But it can start to give you a little hook
into these characters.
Yeah, it's funny.
Again how oh, you just seem like a Matt.
You just seem like a Trevor, a Lee.
A name does kind of give you some sense,
or you might have an impression of someone what someone
is like with a specific name.
It's a small thing, but actually does help
provide very early little bits of definition
as you're starting with the character.
In shorthand if you're working with a writing partner
to talk about it.
Hey, so Joel is going to go here.
And then Joel is going to go here.
Yeah, exactly.
That's it's just a shorthand for you to do.
You're just trying to come up with who
are some characters that might populate this story-line.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
In terms of deciding which characters are really
going to make it, which characters
are going to become essential to the show,
Ross touched on this a little bit before.
You've got to start with the most obvious ones.
In this case, we obviously the show
does not exist without the kid who goes missing.
Then you work from there.
We knew he was going to have friends who are
going to be looking for him.
So we know those friends are going to exist
and be a part of the show.
We know there's going to be a Sheriff a part
of the show who's looking for the missing kid.
We know the kid's friends, the missing kid
is going to have a family.
We know he's going to have a mother who's going
to be a central character.
So you just start working there.
And the story itself will dictate
which characters are essential.
Once we started to think these characters are
going to make it, we go into a little more detail.
We've got Joyce Byers, Will's mom.
OK, she's now switched we.
We got the name.
We got the name right this time.
And even the last name, actually,
once you're confident that a character is going to survive
and you're going to exist within your show, it's fun
to give them a last name.
It starts to again, just help give them
an identity in your head.
So you started really broad, and now we're
going into just a little more detail.
We're saying Will's mom, single, husband left a long time ago.
That's all, he's a deadbeat.
Drug addict we say maybe she has an older daughter, ellipses.
And then we go into the older daughter character,
Vicki Byers, very pretty, beginning
of trouble at a young age, 16, in with a bad group,
a group of older kids who pick on our hero kids.
We then say Billy Flanagan, high school bully,
Vickie's boyfriend, leader of a group of friends,
trouble makes fun of our kids, dangerous,
gets a knife, et cetera, the evil side of our town.
Now, the reason I'm sharing these two with you
is because elements of these characters made
into the show, these specific characters
did not make it into season one.
Vickie Byers a version of that became Nancy.
So we didn't give Joyce a daughter anymore.
And parts of Vickie ended up moving over
to Nancy in that she's the nice girl,
but she gets sort of drawn into a slightly darker
side with Steve.
The Billy Flanagan character, Billy ends up playing a role,
a Billy character very similar to this
ends up playing a role in season two.
And we keep that name, actually.
We do keep that name but some of this of Steve
is softened a bit.
But even in the original pilot, he
is a little scarier, a little more dangerous, more
of a bully.
So some of these elements from this Billy Flanagan character
became Steve.
So Vicki and Billy were like very early prototypes
for who would become, what would become Nancy and Steve.
And again, just like with blue sky, just like your big idea,
and none of this is it's all useful to have all of this.
And obviously, we felt pretty confident at this stage
that these characters would make it because we
started fleshing them out.
They obviously didn't.
That's OK.
You're in the story is going to keep evolving,
and stuff's going to get pushed to the side.
And that's just part of the process.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So again, you've started out really broad.
You have a really rough list of the characters, you think.
And once you're more confident, which
ones are going to make it into the show,
you should start fleshing them out.
You should start to zoom in on them.
Explore that character.
I think as you explore that character,
it'll illuminate more whether or not
they're worth having in the show,
whether or not they're interesting enough
to be a major character in your show.
So one of the characters, we are fairly confident early on.
I mean, you never know.
But we were pretty confident the Sheriff character ultimately
would become Chief Hopper, that Hopper
was going to be a part of the show
that we were going to have the Sheriff.
And so we started to really flesh him out.
So you can actually see, we started
to sketch him out a little bit beyond remember
he started out just Sam Rockwell not McConaughey
on a beach [INAUDIBLE].
So then we took that, and now we've suggested maybe--
Had a Sheriff which is not any more
detailed than Sam Rockwell.
And now, we're like OK, let's actually
give this guy a little more of a backstory,
a little bit of a dramatic hat.
So and some of this, yeah OK let's see.
It's interesting.
So we said maybe it was a family man in New York.
His son died, car accident.
Now he's fucked up, left the city to come here,
pictures of family and house, lives
in a shack near the beach, this was Montauk, still,
drinks too much, smokes too much,
over a course of series falls for Joyce who is also broken,
comes to terms with his past as he solves her son's murder.
So actually, that's all spot on, really.
In terms of Hopper, obviously, we switched his son
and made that a daughter, but the rest of it is true.
So what we were doing with Hopper,
and I remember actually as we were working on
like really early.
This was probably even pre the Sam Rockwell epiphany,
is that he was really going to be more modeled
after Chief Brody in Jaws, that he
was going to be kind of a family man Sheriff, and then.
That's why we the wife in the all of that.
But then looking at how this was going to be a TV show,
we wanted to do something a little bit more
with the Sheriff character.
We also didn't want to copy Jaws.
We want to do something different.
And so we wanted to give him more
of an interesting complex backstory.
And that's where we, and so suddenly,
he no longer has a pregnant wife.
He has a wife who he's divorced from or estranged from.
And he had, they had a daughter together who died.
And that, what we liked about that is it
gave us real emotional stakes in terms
of this, what's happening now in the present day in terms
of the investigation, in terms of the search for the missing
boy, in search of Will.
He's lost a child, so suddenly, it
takes on more meaning to him, the search
for the search for Will.
That, of course, leads naturally to a connection with Joyce,
right?
Because she's lost her son.
So they have both lost a child, and perhaps he
thinks in bringing her, saving her child,
he can kind of sort of redeem himself.
So suddenly, we're like OK that's a character.
That's a fully fleshed out are and we've
got an anchor so we sort of we're
starting to understand who Hopper is.
So we also do this with other characters, but not all of them
are that fleshed out.
That came to us, and obviously, this all mostly stuck.
Other characters let's look at like our description of Lucas,
nerd dungeon master, dresses in black,
glasses, LOTR, that's Lord of the Rings, fantasy books,
video games, unkempt.
That's nothing really like the Lucas that is in the show
at all.
Dustin, we describe as diminutive.
I mean, there's not much else we're talking about Dustin.
This is not-- these are not very evolved characters, not
in the same way that Hopper is.
And that's OK, because sometimes this stuff
is going to come very quickly like hopper clearly
in a quick little brainstorming session as is documented here.
We got his whole backstory, and we got his arc.
That is not going to be the case of every character,
and you don't want to beat yourself up
because that's not the case.
It's OK.
So some of this is not going to be right,
but you've got to throw it out.
And the stuff that stick is sticks is going to stick.
And stuff that doesn't is just going to go away.
Again, it's nobody's going to read this.
It doesn't matter.
Yeah.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
When you're working on these characters and developing it,
one good thing to do that, we do a lot
is we mind our own lives, whether it's
childhood or the life we're living now and looking
at our friends or personalities that we in trying
to be inspired by that.
And because you really want these characters to feel real.
And so I think that can really help flesh
a character out is just looking at your own life.
I think Joyce initially started out
a lot more like our mom.
I think that was the initial sort of prototype
is we were basing her a little bit more on our mom.
And some of the friends were based on Dustin
and stuff were based on our friends growing up,
little kernels of them, right?
So that helps.
Sometimes it helps to give them a physical characteristic,
I mean, anything that will help you see them,
start to think about what they're
interested in, what they like.
And specific things can help.
So if you look at this example for Mike, so we said he's shy.
We said birthmark along his neck, face,
kids make fun of him for it, so that's,
we're starting to get actually a little bit more specific.
Whether it's physical, or it could be a stutter,
it could be a million different things.
But sometimes that can be a shorthand
for the audience to start to understand
who this character is.
And then as we moved into the show,
we realized we didn't need that to define Mike.
And I would also say in terms of the shy,
we originally basing him a lot on sort of us we were
pretty shy kids growing up.
And so I think it was a shorthand for us
to write that character.
Then we see Finn Wolfhard's audition, it evolves.
Finn is not a shy kid.
That character evolves.
And I think it evolves into something
that was more interesting, more specific to the show.
But it's OK to start with your life.
And you can always let it evolve either in the script
or pass the script once you actually move into production.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So just as your story is going to have sort of go from A to B,
Will's missing we got to find Will.
So you've got a drive, and you're going to have obstacles
along the way, right?
You're going from one point to another point.
And again, there are going to be a lot
of little points between Will missing and finding Will.
Otherwise, you don't have a show.
So there's going to be a lot of stuff in between.
But it's important to know where you're going with it.
And it's the same with the characters.
Mike starts off as shy, not very confident.
He falls in love, comes of age.
It's a very broad character arc, but it is the character arc.
Hopper is broken due to the death of his daughter.
By finding Will, he's able to find some sort of redemption
for himself.
And he's able to find himself again.
That is a very simple arc.
And I think again, you're going to want to pick the characters.
You can't give everyone this incredible arc.
We have a ton of side characters in Stranger Things
that don't have a big arc.
The arcs aren't going to feel satisfying or earn
because you're trying to give everyone this amazing arc.
But at that point, what ends up happening is
or we find happening is you end up
shortchanging the characters who you want to have this.
You have the great arc plan for them.
You're just going to end up shortchanging those characters.
So it's important to focus on the ones who are really
essential in terms of arcing.
And the other characters are going to be great characters.
They just might not have this sort
of grand emotional arc in the same way
that Hopper does or Joyce or whatever.
And of the kids, we gave Mike the biggest arc
in terms of him coming of age.
But for Lucas and Dustin, their arc is even much simpler than
Mike's.
We don't have time for them to go through that full journey
that Mike does in season one.
They fall apart.
Their friendship breaks apart, and they're able to mend it.
I mean, Dustin kind of starts like nerdy and awesome
and he kind of is a nerdy and awesome at the end
even though he's still confident in who he is.
So you know, he doesn't have a big arc,
but he's a really great character.
But you're going to want to pick and choose
which of those characters you want to give full arcs to.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So you're going to have these arcs or some of them
right now where you're A to B, we
know where Hopper is going to end up.
We know where we want Joyce to go.
We know where we were on Lucas and Dustin to go.
We know where we want Mike and 11 to go, just roughly, A
to B. We don't know the journey, but we know roughly
where we want them to start and end up.
So what's interesting about writing a pilot script is
you're just doing the A. Their journey is just beginning,
you can't get them to be.
So for instance, Hopper, right, we set up
that he's popping Tuinal.
But we wait until the end of that pilot script
to even reveal that he had had a family
and that his daughter had died.
And we use that as oh wait, there's more to this character
than I thought.
But we don't even explore it.
We just tell you, the audience that
at the very end of the episode.
And then we know, and anyone reading the script
is going to know.
Oh, this is an important part of this character,
and I know they're going to continue to explore it.
But don't race it.
Really, we're just setting up who these people, are
and we're starting them on their journey.
But that arc for Mike for instance,
he meets 11 at the ending of the pilot.
He's not coming of age yet.
He's just meeting the person that's
going to change his life.
But we don't know how she's going to change his life.
We don't know that she's going to change his life.
We don't know that.
So we're just starting them off on their journey.
So I think sometimes, and this has happened with us.
We want to race along too far.
Lucas and Dustin are best friends still in the pilot.
We haven't even hinted at any discord between them.
We're going to wait.
I think it is a big mistake that some people make
in terms of, and we make it all the time.
We have to keep reminding ourselves simplify, simplify,
simplify.
Slow down.
And slow down.
You get very excited, and you try
to cram way too much into a single script, just,
and everyone's always they're worried
about they want to get across.
They want to get across that this is a great character.
They want to get across yeah, you want to tell everything,
all your ideas about Hopper.
Slow down.
You have time.
It gets going to get overwhelming,
and the script is not going to work,
so just a little bit at a time.
Simplicity is your friend.
Yeah, this is just step one of many steps.
Yeah.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
In terms of when we're developing characters, I mean,
there's a lot of tricks we can do.
Like we said, we pull a lot from our lives
and from people we know.
And then there's also something that's, I don't know,
it's been effective for us in terms of we
take a character who is a stereotype,
the jock, the cheerleader.
The nerd.
The nerd or whatever like Steve whatever
is the perfect example or Nancy is a good example of something
who starts out of this stereotype, someone
who the audience thinks that they know.
The good thing about that is immediately you go,
OK, I think I know who this person is.
So they're comfortable.
They're like, OK, this is the douche bag jock, right?
And then you flip that on its head.
So you go wait, there's more to this character than you think.
This is something that John Hughes who's
a writer director we obviously look up to a lot
did all the time.
I mean, it's the classic Breakfast Club thing.
You meet all these characters.
You have each of the characters assumes
they know the other character based
on these stereotypes, these assumptions that they've made.
And then over the course of the film,
you kind of peel back those layers,
and you realize there's a lot more to them.
What it does is it gives the audience something
to hook onto and go, OK, that's the nerd.
That's the cheerleader.
That's the douchebag boyfriend.
That's the thing.
But what we like to do is real life isn't that simple.
No one can be that easily defined.
But again, just be careful you don't have
to peel back much in the pilot.
You can just hint at it or even not at all.
But for Hopper for instance, two lines at the end of the pilot.
Oh, someone says he lost his kid.
Thanks for coming out teach.
We really appreciate it.
She died a few years back.
Sorry.
His kid.
That's it.
We know there's more to him.
And we're going to go into that further,
but we're just hinting that there's more beneath this
and just like right just a cop.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The other important thing, right, and I've
touched on this a little bit is that these characters are
going to surprise you.
So they are kind of living, breathing things.
I think if you've created a good character,
and what's going to happen is and you
have to stay true to their character, right?
So as we said there's going to be a drive,
and you're going to throw obstacles in their path.
And you're going to kind of a little bit watch
how these characters are going to overcome that obstacle.
And I think if you're doing something,
and it's not organic to who they are as a character,
it's going to be pretty obvious it's
going to feel really wrong.
And so oftentimes, this is what's
cool about writing is they become very real in a sense.
Because you don't want to manufacture.
You don't want to force them.
They're going to kind of a little bit do their own thing.
And what's fun about that is they can often surprise you.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So hopefully in your blue sky and you've
come up with some possible characters
that you want that you think you need to tell the story that you
want to inhabit this world.
So you're going to make a list now of possible characters.
This is a good something that we did and you saw us do,
and it can be really helpful.
You're going to make a list.
You can come up with names if you want.
Just pick three to five that you think
are necessary to tell this story.
And then start to flesh them out.
Don't do that for all the characters just some of them.
You have an idea that pops in your head.
Oh here's a good idea for an arc for this character.
Jot it down.
Or just say this is Lucas.
He's a nerd.
He wears black.
He has glasses.
He gets bullied.
It can be that basic.
But just come up with that initial list.
And I think it's going to be really helpful as you
move forward to the next stage of writing.