Making Stranger Things took a decade, and the people behind it felt every year of it. At a recent event moderated by Variety in partnership with Netflix, the Duffer Brothers joined other directors of major Netflix projects to talk about how they built their shows, made creative decisions, and handled the pressure of finishing stories that audiences had followed for years.
Ross Duffer opened by acknowledging the long road the show traveled. "Every year we were learning something new, trying something new, and trying to swing for the fences as much as we could," he said. Matt Duffer described wrapping the series as "very emotional," and said the team tried to "tap into what it felt like in that first season" as they closed out the story.
The same event brought together directors from several other Netflix projects. Antonio Campos, who directed The Beast In Me, described his show as "contemporary noir" and said, "we embrace weird ideas... I'm always thinking about the edit as the rhythm of the show and making it dynamic." Campos told Variety he and his director of photography, Lyle Vincent, drew inspiration from 1970s paranoia thrillers and filmmakers like Gordon Willis, as well as the film Michael Clayton.
Max Winkler, director of Monster: The Ed Gein Story, spoke about building the stillness and quiet of the plains to make his central character appear small. He drew from Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and used an actual recording of Ed Gein to help shape star Charlie Hunnam's performance. Winkler also described an extensive research and interview process that informed the production.
Alexandria Stapleton, who directed Sean Combs: The Reckoning, faced a different kind of challenge: documenting a story that was still unfolding in real time as a grand jury trial progressed. "The other thing that we were fighting was that everyone was really obsessed with these really scandalous details," she said. "[There's] a whole doc about baby oil, and so we really wanted to dig under the hood to understand the context, the timeline, all of the origin story: how was this even possible?" Stapleton said her editing process required constantly adapting, including finding new footage and tracking down jurors to interview, because the team did not know the trial's outcome until the final episode was being assembled.
Marc Munden also appeared at the event to discuss his Netflix adaptation of Lord of the Flies. He said staying close to the source material was central to his approach. "I think the main difference is that you're just getting much more of the characters, in a way, than in the previous adaptations, and my take on it really was to be true to that period of the 1950s, in the middle of the Cold War, and bring all those elements in," Munden said.
The directors also discussed working with young performers, a shared challenge across several of the projects represented at the panel.
