[MUSIC PLAYING]
So now you've got some ideas right now.
It's time to pick your favorite idea.
So hopefully this is the idea that if you wake up,
you're feeling really good about it, you're excited,
you can't wait to write, you can't
wait to get into final draft and start
making-- turning it into a script, but like hold up,
hold up, hold up.
So what-- we're actually going to do something
more fun than that, more fun than writing the script.
So the first thing we do and this is in a lot of ways
the most fun part of the process for us,
because you've got the idea down, right?
That's so hard.
You got an idea, which is really, really hard
and really taxing.
But once you have the idea, the fun part
is to explore that idea.
So this is something we call blue-skying,
we say we're going to blue-sky our idea.
And basically that just means no pressure brainstorming.
And remember, you could start blue-skying,
you can start brainstorming an idea,
and it's not getting you excited.
So you can always go back.
I mean, you're never forced to stick with an idea.
I mean, we do that all the time.
And one way you know it's a good idea
is that it starts to unlock a lot of doors.
So as you're thinking about the idea,
as you're brainstorming it, suddenly you
go, oh, what about this?
What about that?
It's exciting.
It's just like, oh, wow, this is a really fun sandbox to play in
and there's so much, almost too much, to do here.
That was certainly the case with "Stranger Things."
We had a psychic girl.
We had monsters.
We had a police chief.
We had another dimension.
We're like--
Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god,
we just had all this stuff, and we just wanted--
we started to spit all these ideas.
But I think the most important thing
is to trust yourself and trust what you're feeling,
and just you want to feel that passion,
you want to feel the excitement.
If you've got that, great.
We should start blue-skying.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So usually when Ross and I are blue-skying,
what we do is we get together, we hit on music,
we open up our computers, and then we just start to bat
around ideas.
So we throw out, it's almost stream of consciousness.
So it's just, we just throw out any and every idea
that we have.
We jot it all down.
It's super sketchy, very, very messy.
A lot of the ideas we throw out.
Will never see the light of day.
No one will ever read them.
This is like a very personal part of the process that's
just for yourself, but it's always
good to have too many ideas.
You can always pull from them later.
You'll be surprised.
I think as we stepped through our brainstorming for "Stranger
Things" how some ideas we had very early on
became something we used in season two or season three.
So it's always good to have a huge grab bag of ideas
and just start to throw any and everything out.
And the reason we like, even though it
is stream of consciousness, why we like writing it down
is because then you can go back, then you sleep on it,
you come back the next day.
You read through sort of your thought process and these ideas
and go, well, this here, this little line here,
that's really sticking out as a really-- something really cool.
Maybe we should build on that and go from there.
It's nice to just write it down and keep
a document of your process.
We typically spend, I don't know, anywhere from a week
to two weeks on this.
I think that was the case for "Stranger Things."
I mean, we spent about two weeks throwing out ideas.
I like giving yourself a lot of time on this,
because then again, it lowers the pressure.
And that if you have a day that's not particularly
productive and you don't come up with a big idea,
you don't start getting frustrated.
You're like, okay, well, there's always tomorrow.
You're going to have days, good days,
and you're going to have bad days, and that's okay.
Don't stress out.
It's important to be patient and generous with yourself.
So give yourself a little bit of time for this.
Just get it all out there.
Vomit it all out.
And I think it's all helpful, good and bad.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So we're going to show you our blue-sky document
for "Montauk," which eventually became "Stranger Things,"
right?
Ross and I write it down as we're thinking it.
So you're seeing really what was in our heads
as we were writing it down.
No one one's ever seen this before.
But you'll really get a sense of how we generated the idea
and how it evolved.
In terms of the kind of things you're growing to blue-sky,
you're going to be thinking about everything.
You're going to be thinking about character, setting,
world, mythology, drive, story, literally everything.
Which sounds overwhelming, but it's not
because it's fun because you can bounce
from thinking about characters to thinking about setting
to thinking about story.
I mean--
You get stuck on one thing, you move to the next.
And it's just-- you're going to see this document,
it's a little chaotic, but we're going
to go through and show you each of those things
that we were talking about and how
it led to this bigger piece.
Something that's not going to be in this document,
but it is something you can think about,
you saw sort of doing it on the fly,
and I don't think we nailed it, which is title,
and that's something else you can blue-sky.
I mean, for "Stranger Things," Montauk came to us
instantly just because we--
it's a cool word.
There's something a little spooky about it.
Now when it came to changing the title due to,
we weren't able to shoot in Montauk due to cost,
so we had to move it to Atlanta.
So it had to change.
And we didn't want to just do call it, Hawkins.
We didn't want to just do it as a make-believe town
as the title.
It's not-- wasn't very exciting to us.
So we just came up with a bunch of ideas.
You know we had The Keep.
We had Indigo, which was going to be the name
of the government program.
And of course, amidst that we had "Stranger Things."
And I think ultimately it sort of boiled
down to Indigo and Stranger Things.
Indigo sounds really weird now, but that
was sort of the runner-up.
And one fun thing we did, and this is if you do
want to take a beat away from your blue-skying,
we sort of mocked up each title in Photoshop
in a font that we thought was sort
of what we wanted to actually do for the show, that got
across the vibe of the show.
Well, I was always Team Stranger Things,
and it looked good.
It looked like a Stephen King book.
Maybe because it just made me think of needful things.
It may have not been any more difficult
or complicated than that, but for whatever reason,
that's why we liked it.
And that's why the show is now called "Stranger Things."
Let's look at that.
Actually look at the doc again.
You can do title in that.
That's one of many elements.
So let's go through and sort of step through this little--
it's going to be a little chaotic looking at the doc,
but this was exactly what we did back in the day.
And you're going to see our thought process.
MATT DUFFER: So we'll start off with characters.
The first thing we wrote is, "Sam Rockwell, opposite
of McConaughy, lives on a beach."
So this is Hopper that we're writing about.
Again, I don't have to specify that we're
talking about Hopper.
This is just for us, as long as we understand what we're
writing, it doesn't matter.
Also Sam Rockwell means a lot of things to me and Ross.
We know what type of character we're describing
when we say Sam Rockwell.
This is not for anybody else.
It's just for us.
So Sam Rockwell is shorthand for like, a book of things.
Well, and I think the most important thing,
and I think this is opposite of McConaughy,
in this "True Detective" was coming out of the time,
but I think that by Sam Rockwell,
we meant that he's not your typical Hollywood hero.
This isn't-- we didn't say, if we wrote Tom Cruise lives
on a beach, that gives us--
Very different.
Very different, very different vibes, you know.
Dwayne Johnson lives on a beach.
Very different vibe.
And then we start talking a little bit about plot,
you'll see.
"They've opened a portal, you don't understand, snatchers."
So, again, snatchers is not a good name.
That eventually becomes demogorgons, right?
But that's the origin of the demogorgons right there.
"People are going missing, you understand,
that's the third person that's gone missing, they've drowned,
they're saying they drowned in the lake or the ocean."
Remember this used to be set right next to the ocean.
"You don't believe that, do you?"
So this is the idea that its government lies, right?
We even ask ourselves questions in this.
We write down our questions.
"How do we keep these kids involved?"
And then we say, "maybe the sheriff
isn't the major character."
So it's interesting that we actually started it out,
and that's probably why we started out
writing about Sam Rockwell, is we
had Hopper was going to be the main character.
Well, if you remember it started with prisoners.
So, again, that's the-- you know,
you've got this police character as the lead.
But I think we made a mental note to, wait,
can we steer this more towards the kids.
How do we keep these kids involved?
We didn't know the answer, and that's okay.
You can ask yourself, like Matt's saying,
ask yourself questions.
We don't know how this is going to work,
but we know we want to keep the kids involved
in the investigation of their missing friend.
But then we say, "kids are dying,
getting yanked into another dimension,
his bike is just sitting there, where the hell did he go?"
So we're starting to introduce some imagery that actually
did end up in the final show, and actually
on the poster for the show.
"What happened to him.
Everybody's looking for this kid."
And then we reintroduce the sheriff.
So that's huge right there, that early
brainstorming right there.
We started to develop some of the core--
Core elements.
Core elements of the plot.
What that drive is.
Another thing that we get into in this document
is worldbuilding, right?
So we go into, "are the two worlds bleeding into our world.
The wormhole is expanding.
You see, you need to be able to get into the other world.
There are openings.
Mouths to this world."
"Perhaps one of the kids accidentally goes into it.
It draws you in.
With what?
Something trance-like, enticing.
Dancing particles, almost like moths, fluttering around.
The wormhole is expanding.
This universe is bleeding into our own."
What I think is interesting about this
is some of these ideas don't make it into season one,
but some of them make it into later seasons.
We do have a mouth to another world, which
does make it into season one.
MATT DUFFER: We end up calling it the rip.
What didn't make it as the trance-like thing
or the dancing particles.
Dancing particles was really the prototype
for what would become the Mind Flayer in season two.
We started to get overloaded with ideas,
so you'll see as we move into outline,
that's just an idea that just didn't make it into that pilot
script.
But again, no ideas are bad ideas.
This all came around.
The fact that this world is bleeding into our own,
that also became a core element of season two.
It didn't really play a role in season one.
But again, we're just throwing out these ideas.
And this is day one of brainstorming.
And you can see how much we're already coming up with.
I'm going to skip a little bit,
but I'm going to go into what is probably
the most important five minutes of brainstorming in our lives.
And you'll see it all as we were writing out in real time,
back in, what was this?
Looked like April 14.
We said, "there's a world underneath this world.
Two worlds."
So that's the upside down, obviously.
"This world is encroaching into ours."
We're repeating something we've already said, but that's okay.
"Increased military presence.
They've unleashed this thing.
It's not going to stop.
Maybe it's a kid with powers.
Is that weird.
Or maybe a girl of sorts.
Certainly can take inspiration from that.
Then we have this kid who can't connect with anyone, who begins
to connect with this girl.
She kisses him.
Very ET-like."
Who--
And that's talking about Mike now.
Mike.
"Very ET-like.
Who are you?
I was experimented on.
Explodes his head."
So that didn't-- that didn't make it in, but that could be
cool.
"This place, it's going to open up.
Don't you get it?
Something more innocent.
The government wants her.
They're tracking her down," et cetera.
So, and then--
How do we get to this other place?
I can show you.
Like the "Matrix."
So this right here is the creation of Eleven.
So this is when we came up with Eleven.
So I don't know if this is an hour worth of brainstorming
or less, but we started with a show
about a sheriff investigating a missing kid to introducing
the idea of the Upside Down and a girl with psionic abilities,
and the whole ET aspect of the show, which is, I think,
really essential to why it was successful,
was generated right here.
And we're even questioning, is this a good idea?
Is that weird?
And obviously, we got excited about it
because we kept writing.
When I think that's the thing we talked about
too in the big idea phase, it's like,
does this open a lot of doors?
And so suddenly we're going, as you can see,
one door opens-- the girl suddenly opened the door to,
wait a minute, now she can have a relationship
with our protagonist boy character.
Well, that's interesting.
So that opens up a door as, wait,
now, she can show him where Will is.
So earlier a couple paragraphs before we said,
how do we get the kids involved in this investigation?
We just got our answer right here.
And then you can tell we got excited about this character
because we keep writing about her.
"She's not from another dimension."
So there we're clarifying she's not from this Upside Down.
"She's one of them.
They captured her.
I was born here," meaning in the laboratory.
"We can do her backstory.
Telepathy, powers, experimentation.
No one understands it.
And we have to overlay that with the everyday evil, suburbia,
depression."
Okay, so there we're starting to move from just very rapidly
from character and story into themes.
So we're going-- we're talking about what can we do
thematically with this story.
Again, this is why it's a little bit chaotic and all
over the place.
That's good and fine.
So we're saying, "but it's an evil.
We have to overlay that with the everyday evil, suburbia,
depression, evil.
How perfect everything is, but everything is not perfect.
We put on a face for the public.
The inner darkness.
That's what it's about."
So suddenly we're going, okay, what is the theme of this show?
For some people, their process is,
that's the starting kernel of their idea.
That's not how Matt and I work.
What we do is we're coming up with that story with characters
that resonate with us and with the drive.
And through that, as we're developing it, we go, okay,
that's--
there's something more about this story
that I think can be impactful for people.
So, in this case, it's sort of Matt and I grew up in suburbia.
So it's going, okay, maybe there's--
everything seems perfect, but beneath it, there's more.
And I think that got us excited about, okay,
this story can be more.
It's not just about finding a kidnapped kid.
It's not just about kids fighting monsters.
There's something a little more resonant about it.
So, again, that can be something that you come up
with when you're discovering your big idea,
or like us, it can come through the process of blue-skying it.
But hopefully your story starts to take on more resonance
as you're developing it.
Now the one thing that you're not going to see,
if you sort of zoom in and read through this document or pause
the screen, the one thing you're not going to see
is a lot of us talking about location or setting.
And that's really because part of the big idea
was this is set in Montauk.
We didn't really feel the need that we
needed to go into a lot of detail blue-skying that.
We knew what it was.
I actually think it is a good idea
to write out some ideas about the location
because that can lead to story ideas.
Like, even then, we didn't do this here,
but I think it would have been a good idea
to start talking about what are some cool locations we could
explore within the world of, say, Montauk, or eventually
Hawkins, right?
You can talk about the arcade.
You can talk about the movie theater, the mall.
You could talk about the kids' basement.
The Fish 'N Fry.
And start thinking about what are cool, like,
mini settings within the larger setting,
and that might actually lead to more ideas and cool ideas.
So it's something that we didn't do as much back then,
but we do it now when we're working on an idea.
We definitely try to think about setting.
Yes.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
As you're starting to throw out all of these ideas, what's
going to have started as, like, a really, really rough sketch
is going to start to get filled in a little bit more.
So, hopefully, what was really blurry at first
is going to start to slowly come more and more into focus,
and you're going to get a sense of what this show is.
Like, we're starting to see "Stranger Things," not
completely, but a little bit.
It's like our vision is getting a little bit better.
But you see how much of "Stranger Things"
came out in the blue-sky process.
That the big idea--
and I think a lot of people put too much pressure
on every stage, and it is a process.
You've got to take it a little bit at a time.
So this-- Eleven wasn't in the big idea, which
is hard to think about now.
It's hard to think about "Stranger Things"
without Eleven.
She wasn't in that paragraph.
She wasn't in the paragraph.
But now we've got demogorgons, they're called snatchers.
We've got Eleven, she doesn't have a name yet,
but we know there's a girl with psychic powers.
We know that she's going to bond and have
sort of an innocent relationship with our young boy lead.
We've got a broken sheriff, who we're calling Sam Rockwell.
We've got the kid's mom.
We talk about her in here.
It's a lot of what the show's going to become.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
As you're working on this, you're
going to start to explore the tone of your piece.
You're going to start to figure out
what is the mood of the piece.
And that really is what-- what is tone,
when people ask what is tone.
I mean, really it is a feeling.
Like, what feeling does it evoke in you?
What mood does it evoke?
And "Stranger Things," of course,
has many different tones.
We knew it was going to have these horror elements,
but see, as we're discovering this character of Eleven,
the tone is shifting a little bit.
So it's becoming a little less of a cop supernatural
procedural, which honestly sounds a little boring,
and it's becoming-- it's getting a little bit more
of that Spielberg vibe into it.
We're moving a little bit away from some of the darker Stephen
King themes, which were in the original paragraph,
and infusing them with a little bit more
of that Spielberg vibe.
The kids are becoming a bigger part of it.
So the tone is evolving.
And I remember, it's not written down in this document,
but it's something that we talked about
and why we were excited about the idea,
is that it would allow us to explore
a lot of different tones.
It's why we had basically three generations.
We had adults, we had teens, and we had kids.
And each of them was going to be able to allow
us to explore a different tone.
It was something that excited us about TV.
It's like, oh, we can have three different types of movies,
four different types of movies, and kind of
weave them together.
And you can see in the document even,
we do mention certain movies, whether it's
the "Matrix" or a big one when we came up
with the character of Eleven was "ET."
When we write "ET," it brings up a lot of memories for us
and it also brings a specific tone,
which is a tone that you don't see a lot.
And we got excited about, hey, I haven't
seen this a lot in general and I certainly
don't remember the last time I've seen it
on TV, which is your telling something
from the point of view of kids.
But I remember being scared by it as a kid.
Elliott got in danger.
He got really sick.
I was worried for ET.
They find ET and he's dying.
The stakes always felt real.
And I think that was something we realized
early on as we were brainstorming,
this is, we can have fun with these kids,
but at the heart of it, we've got this missing kid and we
got real danger.
And we wanted, even though the kids were young,
we wanted to put them in real danger
and we wanted the audience to feel worried for them.
And I think that was an important part of the evolution
of "Stranger Things."
But I think the bigger point here
is, you don't have to have the tone down.
Let it-- you can discover it, it can change, and it can evolve.
And you can even see in this stuff
that we were reading to you that it was actually
quite a bit more violent and dark than it ended up being.
So we had Eleven exploding heads.
So we do have her killing agents,
but we don't have the Cronenberg scanners thing
where heads are exploding.
I mean, in our heads, initially this
was going to be extremely gory.
So that ended up kind of going away.
So be patient, allow it to evolve,
and be open to the tone shifting and evolving
as you continue to blue-sky and brainstorm.
There are a lot of tones going within "Stranger Things,"
but the tone that we are hoping holds all this together
and holds all these different threads
and different story strands together
is a sense of sincerity.
That's the stories that matter and I fell in love with,
whether it was "ET," or "The Goonies," or any of these films
that made us want to make films in the first place.
If there's a joke, it's out of a result of the situation,
but the stakes are still real, and the friendships are still
real, and we're not making light of anything.
We wanted to put a lot of heart into it.
It really is about friendships, and it's about family,
and not to be embarrassed by that.
To actually embrace that.
It's not-- right.
It's not-- it's not ironic.
We never wanted to be ironic, or meta,
or winking at the audience, or anything like that.
So even though you have all these disparate tones,
in terms of horror, and comedy, and romance, and all of that,
you have something that kind of ties it all together.
So it doesn't feel like a mishmash of things.
It all coheres.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So now what you're going to do is you're going to take
your big idea and you're going to blue-sky it,
which means you're going to come up, like we did,
a bunch of ideas, almost stream of consciousness that this idea
gives you.
Hopefully it's going to open a lot of doors.
And so you're going to just keep opening those doors wherever
they take you.
Whether it's about setting, or character, or plot,
or mythology.
Just whatever doors open, just follow
the stream of consciousness and just get it all down on paper.