Quotes from Matt Duffer

The first thing our Chapman screenwriting professors taught us was that all stories share one thing in common: there is a protagonist, and that protagonist has a goal that he or she has difficulty achieving. Does Luke Skywalker become Luke Skywalker if he doesn't get pulled into the Death Star, if his best friend isn't turned into carbonite?

That's why I wanted to say 'Stranger Things 2,' because I don't want to think about it as a TV show. Maybe it's a snobby thing, but it's like: 'Oh, I want it to be a movie. I want it to be a movie sequel.

We were such movie nerds - I hate to say this, but yeah, we would just listen to movie soundtracks growing up.

Every writer you meet, at least in Hollywood, is miserable.

If you're doing a movie, the minute you put a monster in it, it becomes a horror movie.

Often it's scarier when stuff is weird and when you don't fully understand the motive. Pennywise in 'IT' is very weird.

We're not just brothers, we're twins, so I think we're maybe closer than most brothers.

Spielberg shoots with one camera. The Coens, and I think this is right, maybe discarded one shot on 'No Country for Old Men.' That's something you want to aspire to, because nothing's out of place. Everything's necessary.

Television has been breaking narrative rules.

Netflix isn't spending movie-level marketing money - they want people to find this stuff through word of mouth.

I have no connection to Chicago.

Noah - the Schnappster - he's amazing.

When we were growing up, some of those Amblin films, those Spielberg movies, led to the creation of the PG-13 rating because he was pushing it so dark and he upset a lot of parents. I liked that, though.

We're huge, huge fans of the 'Dark Souls' games, and there's something about when you're playing 'Dark Souls.' Immediately when you're in that world, it was to do with the imagery, it has to do with the sound design, and you're just immediately very uncomfortable and on edge. We wanted you to feel that way when you're in the Upside Down.

Steven Spielberg films were huge touchstones for us growing up.

What's fun to me is that we can make movies but we are no longer restricted by this two-hour timeframe. It gives us this bigger canvas to paint on. It opens up all sorts of new storytelling possibilities.

I think when we were developing Season 1 - and to Netflix's credit, they sort of pressured us to make sure we had this mythology really hammered out - we had like a 25-page sort of 'Stranger Things' mythology that only maybe a small handful of people have seen.

When you're a kid, you don't watch a movie one time. You watch it 10, 20 times.

We flirted with popularity in high school, which was when people realized that our videos, if used for a class assignment, would get you an automatic A. It took me a few months to realize I was just being used. They would only hang out with us while we were making the film for them.

David Lynch is very esoteric. He doesn't explain anything.

That's something that Stephen King always has in his works. There's a human villain who's just as bad, if not worse than the supernatural one.

As you're writing it, you want things to evolve. You want characters like that to grow.

We started making movies in the third grade.