The creators of the most popular Netflix series break down why key decisions were made and what to expect in the final season.
EDITORS NOTE: This article contains spoilers for Stranger Things Season 4 Volume 2.
If you’re a fan of Stranger Things and curious how and why key decisions were made in Season 4, you’re in the right place. That’s because shortly after watching Stranger Things Season 4 Volume 2 (episodes 8 and 9) I conducted an extended interview with creators Matt and Ross Duffer.
During the extended conversation, the Duffer Brothers pulled back the curtain on the making of the most popular series on Netflix and were more than willing to talk about everything. This included how they figured out the season finale, why Max (Sadie Sink) was Vecna’s target, Noah Schnapp’s heartbreaking scene in the car with Finn Wolfhard in Episode 8, and how they want to release a VHS pan and scan version of Stranger Things.
But that’s not all.
During the sprawling conversation, the Duffer’s also revealed a lot of new information about Stranger Things Season 5 including where it takes place, the pace of the season, how the final season will reveal a lot of new information about the Upside Down, how they already have the last twenty minutes of the series finale figured out, and a lot more.
Trust me, if you’re a fan of Stranger Things, you’re going to learn a lot about the making of the series and what’s coming in the final season.
You can either watch the Duffer brothers in the player above, or you can read the conversation below.
COLLIDER: So episode nine is two hours and 20 minutes. It's a straight-on movie. At any point did anyone say, "Well, maybe we should just do nine and 10 instead of making it two hours and 20 minutes?"
ROSS DUFFER: Yeah, it was discussed. We talked about it too. I think we just couldn't find a good spot to break it because there's almost an hour of build-up tension, and then it just goes hard for an hour. Then we have our 25 minutes of coming down the coda. It would've just not been a very satisfying episode to stop it after that first hour. In our opinion, it just would've petered out. We didn't want to force an ending so we just figured, well, it'll just be this monster episode. If you want to pause it, go ahead.
Did you originally have any different ending for this season? Because sometimes seasons go through big changes, and I'm curious if anything really big changed in this one?
ROSS DUFFER: Not that I remember. It's just sticking the landing. For Matt and I, it's such an important part. So when we're breaking a season, that is one of the first things we're talking about is, where do we want this story to end up? So the ending is always that goal post. Even as we're breaking episode one, we know exactly where we're going. I don't think we've deviated truly in any season for the finale, we've always stuck to it. I believe the case is the same here.
MATT DUFFER: In terms of who makes it, who lives or dies. I think there was a version where Dimitri, AKA Enzo, didn't make it.
ROSS DUFFER: That's true. But other than that…
MATT DUFFER: Then he ended up making it. But that's just radical of a departure from the original idea versus what we ended up with.
The ending of Season 4 sets up a massive thing for next season. It's basically, that Hawkins is F'd with that huge thing in the middle. What can you tease people about Season 5?
MATT DUFFER: Well, I think one reason we're excited about it, we always have wanted to do an Empire Strikes Back ending, which we tried to do with four. Where it's the sense of loss. In an unusual, for us at least, Season 5 is going to start pedal to the metal. We're not going to do the ramp-up. There's no time. There's no normalcy, obviously, once you've reached the end of four. That's not like there's going to be time to explore our characters' love life and how is Steve’s dating going? There's going to be none of that, it's just going to be going 100 miles an hour from the beginning. We have the opening scene for five mapped out. I don't know if it'll stay like that, but it's pretty wild. It's going to be intense from beginning to end with not so much ramp-up.
How much did you debate having another victim? How much did you debate Max being the person who was the fourth victim, and all the stuff that happens with her?
MATT DUFFER: We always knew. I mean, we did debate what exactly we wanted to do with Max, but we knew that she was going to obviously be putting herself in real danger. I'm trying to remember exactly how we landed on where we did with Max, but it was pretty early on, I believe, that we decided that was going to be her fate for the end of this season.
It had to be Max. Because she was targeted and she had never rid herself [of] this curse. She was just putting on a bandaid. She was using, effectively Kate Bush, her music as an armor. So it was very early on. That was the plan that she was going to remove that armor and more or less sacrifice herself to back them in order to give them a chance to kill him.
ROSS DUFFER: Both her and Eddie, from the get-go, they are targeted and they're both screwed as a result of Vecna and circumstance, in the case of Eddie. So in some way we see [in] the season they're both doomed in a way since the beginning of the season. Different from something like Bob or where it's just a shocker. It's like, these characters are hurtling towards disaster from very early on in the season.
Are we done with seeing Russia?
MATT DUFFER: Listen, things change. It's odd, because we did outline. We shut down for six months, like every show, everybody, the whole world shut down for six months. We do have a full outline for it. Currently, Russia is not in it. I think one of the things that's exciting about Season 5 is [that] Season 4 was interesting to us because everyone was scattered to the winds. That's what was unique about it. But this is about everyone finally coming back. Coming back together, coming back to Hawkins. Hopper is back in Hawkins. The original group [is] back together—the original group of boys plus Eleven. The OG group. There's something interesting to re-explore some of the season one dynamics again, except on this grander scale.
ROSS DUFFER: Yeah. Come full circle.
I loved the scene with Will in the car talking about Eleven, but he's talking about himself. It's just such a great scene. What can you tease about Will in the future?
MATT DUFFER: Oh, good. Thanks, man. Yeah. I mean, Noah's amazing. We shot that scene, it was half a day shooting that scene from getting every angle, it was an important scene to get right. We felt. But Noah was, I thought, just incredible in that scene. Will's going to be a big part and focus, is really all I can say of Season 5, in his journey. We're starting to see his coming of age, really. Which has been challenging for a number of reasons, some of which are supernatural. But you're starting to see him come into his own. I also love that scene between him and Charlie, him and his brother, Jonathan. His brother being there for him. I think that reconnecting with his brother…
ROSS DUFFER: And again, that's setting up us coming full circle back to Season 1. I think you'll see that with a couple of the character arcs, not just with Will. But also with Steve and Nancy, and her relationship with Jonathan where things are not fully resolved. The characters have maybe made steps, like in the case of Will, but that journey isn't over yet. All of that is going to play a huge role as we try to wrap this thing up next season.
Do you think Metallica is ready for the amount of people that are going to be listening to “Master of Puppets,” based on what happened with Kate Bush?
ROSS DUFFER: I heard Metallica is excited about it, but I don't know. I haven't spoken to the band or anyone in the band, but hopefully. I hope it does. We were talking about this the other day. I was like, I wonder if that's going to happen for “Master of Puppets.”
MATT DUFFER: The “Running up that Hill,” the Kate Bush thing, [is] so bizarre. I'm not on TikTok, but people are like, “Oh, it's all over TikTok!” I don't even really understand what that means, but it's just bizarre how that stuff happens. Whether it happens again with another band, I don't know. It's certainly the type of thing you're not going to, in Season 5, attempt to replicate. I'm already getting asked that question, it's like, "What song are [you] going to do in Season 5?" I'm like, "We're not going to do that again." Because if we do it, it will fail.
Oh no, it has to be organic. It's like the box office success of Top Gun: Maverick, you can't predict it's going to make a billion dollars. It sort of happens.
MATT DUFFER: No. Every phenomenon at Netflix that I can think about, when you're talking about Squid Game and Queen's Gambit, you just can't…
MATT DUFFER: Yeah. There's nothing mathematical. You can't figure it out. Studios have been trying to figure it out forever. Same with creatives. Oh yeah, this is the formula that works. The minute you try to use that exact same formula it's going to fail. We won't even attempt it again. It's an unreal or surprising, by chance we have this other big musical moment. Which, it's a very different type of musical moment, I guess, with “Master of Puppets.”
ROSS DUFFER: But we had to give Eddie his big moment there.
Completely. I had a blast with it. What can you actually say about the hierarchy of the Upside Down? How much have you actually pulled back the curtain? Is there some big reveal that you guys have been holding back for Season 5?
ROSS DUFFER: The big reveals that are coming in Season 5 are really about the Upside Down itself, which we only start to hint at. There is that moment where we realize in episode seven this year that it's frozen in time. That is something that, obviously, we do a couple more big reveals in Volume 2, but it's all related to Vecna, Henry, and his journey. But what we haven't really discussed is exactly what the Upside Down is. What was that where Henry was when he was found? The Mindflayer, where is that? Those are the last big reveals coming in Season 5.
How much did you debate exactly the final shot of episode nine, where you really wanted to end it?
MATT DUFFER: That came pretty early. We knew we wanted to end with spores falling in Hawkins. I don't remember how early in the process, but pretty early in the process. And we wanted that. Like I said, we were very much inspired by Empire Strikes Back, that ending where they're looking out the window. We knew we wanted to end on the backs of our characters as they're looking out towards this dark supernatural plume that was spitting out these spores all over their town as they're facing this evil, that has not retreated, but very much coming in an aggressive way into their town. We wanted to hand at the notion of war, and a supernatural war coming to Hawkins.
I don't know, we had that image really early. We have an amazing concept artist who's been with us since season two, Michael Mar, and he drew it up. We just were really excited to shoot it and finally see it. We actually just saw it finally come together, the final VFX, a week and a half ago or something like that.
ROSS DUFFER: But the goal of this one, unlike other seasons, like Matt's saying, is that sense of anticipation where you've set up what the stakes are, which is something we haven't done for other seasons. So we've set the stakes and it's just, the feeling you always want to try to get is that Empire Strikes Back feeling of, “oh my God, I'm so excited to see what happens next.” Or Fellowship of the Ring as they're just headed off towards Mordor. That's the dream, that's the hope. That's the feeling you want.
Which we just haven't been able to do before, because generally we really wrap up the storylines and then we go, oh, but there's some horror lurking beneath the surface that the audience sees that our characters don't necessarily see. In this case, our characters truly see the horror. It's like, what are they going to do? How are they going to deal with this? What is their journey going to look like? So those were the two films that we referenced when we were working on that last shot.
You guys have talked about, and Netflix has talked about, and Shawn Levy has talked about the spinoff. I know Netflix obviously will be desperate to get something. And I know you're not going to tell me what it is, I accept that. But I am curious, with how particular you are and how you like to be involved, are you going to be content to just produce a spinoff? Or do you see yourself doing what Vince is doing on Better Call Saul, and all of a sudden he gets pulled back in, and he's on another show.
MATT DUFFER: Right. Yeah. We've talked about that a lot and we do talk about the Vince Gillian situation a lot. No, I mean, ultimately the hope is to pass the baton to somebody else. Because by the time we're done with this, it's going to have been... God, it's going to be almost have been 10 years. It's going to be more or less my entire 30s. So it would be another five to ten-year commitment on this thing. I don't think you can go half in. I was telling this to somebody else, there's not really a great version of us, say, doing a pilot and then abandoning it.
It's like, no you're in the editing room every day. You're in color. You're in sound. You're all in or not. What Ross and I really are interested in is, we've been developing the story, which we haven't told anybody yet. I don't even know if anyone's going to like it. We are very excited about it, that's all I know. But Netflix has been cool, they haven't been pressuring us very much, honestly, about it. They're very shockingly patient with me and Ross
Keep in mind, they still have another season to get out of you, so I don't think they're concerned about the spinoff until you're done with Season 5.
As soon as you turn in Season 5, it's game on.
MATT DUFFER: Maybe. Yeah. The pressure is beginning to mount. I start to get more texts about it, especially as we've been talking about it in the press and they don't know what the idea is. Maybe not driving them crazy, they're not upset, but they want to know what it is. Finn Wolfhard, I think I have said this in the press, knows what it is only because he guessed it. If you actually correctly guess it, I'll tell you, but he's the only one.
Can I do a 30-minute interview of just guesses?
MATT DUFFER: It wasn't in machine gunning, is it this? Is it this? Is it this? He just goes, is it that? I think the only way he could do that is, A, he's a really smart kid. He's a really creative kid and he just knows me and Ross too well. He knows what our sensibilities are and what we're interested in. Anyway, I don't know how he figured it out.
ROSS DUFFER: But we are honestly working on it right before this interview. Because we're done with four, obviously, since it's coming out tonight.
I don't believe you. I'm sure you're going to tweak a shot that's going to be going out after it's come out.
MATT DUFFER: Steve, we did this morning. We did tweak, it was 20 shots.
MATT DUFFER: Yeah. So if you watch it, the people who stay up tonight and watch it, it'll be different tomorrow. I'm told tomorrow, either morning or afternoon, it will be a little different. Not editing, it's just visual things.
No, it's totally. It's VFX shots.
MATT DUFFER: No, no, no. It's not. People think we're changing the edit. I'm like, no, no, you can't.
When do you see yourself filming season five? Do you have a start date in mind?
ROSS DUFFER: What the plan is, to be perfectly honest, we're going to take a little vacation in July, and then we're going to come back. I know that the writer's room is going to start in that first week of August. At that point, we're going to settle on some dates. Because we have actors asking us every day, so we're going to settle on some dates and figure that out.
MATT DUFFER: I think the only thing [that] we want maybe this year is…. It was really nice to have all the scripts written. That is a goal. I don't know if we're going to be able to achieve it or not, which is to have all scripts written before we begin production. It's the final season, it's incredibly important [that] we get the narrative and the story right. We don't want to be doing what we're typically doing when we're writing Stranger Things, which is laying down the track as the train is flying.
I'm going to say to you as a fan of the series, I thought that this season was so good and I know it's a result of having all the scripts.
MATT DUFFER: It definitely helped. It made a difference. And additional time, we never have time to go back. But then you turn in a script and it's shooting the next... It's wild. There's something really exhilarating about that. I do find that pressure really fun. Actually having that gun to our head had made me and Ross better, more creative writers. But that being said, I think we can still move relatively fast and get it all down on paper so we can look at it as a whole. Because never before has it been important to get the whole right. Because as Ross was saying, every storyline has to be resolved. Whether it's satisfying or not to people, I don't know, but it needs to be satisfying to us. The actors need to be happy.
ROSS DUFFER: We want to give the characters their moments and a lot of these characters have been evolving over the course of these four seasons, and so it'll be five seasons of them. We want to make sure that they all land in a way that we all feel good about.
MATT DUFFER: We do feel good about the ending. We do feel like we got-
ROSS DUFFER: The last 20 minutes, they're locked in. Like I told you, sticking the landing is so-
MATT DUFFER: I was like, okay, I think this ending is not... I'm not super insecure. I'm insecure about a lot of things, but I feel like the ending feels good.
Definitely no pressure to end this series right. I'm sure you're not feeling anything.
ROSS DUFFER: No, no pressure at all, Steve.
Let me ask you a few quick things about Season 5. Do you think it's going to be nine episodes, eight episodes, ten? Do you even know?
MATT DUFFER: No. Well, we thought this season... That's why I hate to say, because we thought Season 4 was going to be eight [episodes], and they were going to be regular length. So if you had interviewed us before four, that's what I would've said. I think we're aiming for eight again. We don't want it to be 13 hours. We're aiming for more like 10 hours or something. I think it's going to be longer than Season 1 because we just have so much to wrap up, but I don't think it's going to be as long as Season 4. But, do not hold me to that.
ROSS DUFFER: This season, for instance, it was two hours before our characters even realized the monster was killing people in Hawkins. They know what the threat is now, and so that will help speed it up. We’ll see.
MATT DUFFER: Yeah, exactly. That's where we feel like we're going to lose a couple of hours in that ramp-up.
One of the things about Season 4 is it's just massive, in terms of all over the place. Is Season 5 going to be this world going outside of Hawkins, the way you did in Season 4? Or is it a lot more contained, where it's really about what's coming up out of Hawkins?
MATT DUFFER: Yeah. It's mostly in Hawkins, and there's a lot obviously in the Upside Down. Which is exciting and also not exciting, because I swear half my life is spent looking at spore shots and just going, "That spore's too big. That spore just flew through the body of our character." Anyway. I don't want to think how many hours of my life have been spent watching spore shots and will be watching and looking at spore special effect shots.
You guys divided the release because of VFX shots and getting everything done. The first seven episodes, and then eight and nine. Going into Season 5, I'm sure Netflix wants to do something similar in terms of a staggered release and not give them all at the same time. Have you already started thinking about in the writing process, maybe we want episodes one through four to be part one and five through eight to be part two?
MATT DUFFER: Right. We actually haven't gotten into those discussions with Netflix. I don't know, maybe everyone's waiting to see how this split happened. But yeah, you're right. It was two things. One of it, yeah, the episodes, really, the episodes were not done [and] weren't going to all be done by May. But it was not designed to split.
I like what you're saying, which is, if we were to do a split again, write more to the split. Write to the split, which we didn't do. We're lucky that seven had that kind of ending with the Vecna reveal, that was just fortunate. It was just extremely challenging to get seven episodes out by May. I think that was the most challenging thing we've ever faced while making Stranger Things. So if we were to do it again, I would probably make the split earlier, like you're saying. I would write it into the narrative.
I would love to see all eight at once, but it's also, people talk about it more when it's split up. It's way better that you guys split it up, we're able to keep writing about it. .
ROSS DUFFER: It's such a balancing act. Because I also like, as a consumer, I fell in love with TV, really [the] Sopranos, but I was not watching in real time. I was getting the DVDs on mail-in Netflix and just devouring it. So, it's such a balancing act. I do enjoy what we did this season, and that you get a bit of both worlds, and that you were able to devour a lot of content and get into the characters and story, but at the same time, allow for discussion and all that in between.
MATT DUFFER: We'll see. Well, I don't know. It's interesting. I think that's the kind of stuff that we're going to start talking about.
ROSS DUFFER: I think Netflix is open. I'm sure they'll have thoughts.
Do you have a lot of deleted scenes and cool stuff that has never been seen? Are you purposely saving it for maybe an ultimate box set that could come out?
MATT DUFFER: No, it's so weird. We don't delete scenes. I think there's been one deleted scene in Season 1 or 2. We have two deleted scenes.
ROSS DUFFER: Well, I remember one from Season 1 and then one from this season, but they're so boring. It's not some exciting deleted scene, they're just really…
MATT DUFFER: Oh, yeah. It was just a car scene.
ROSS DUFFER: A 20-second driving [scene]. Because usually what we do is, the scenes, there's always a reason for the scenes. So usually rather than cutting scenes, if a scene is hurting the pacing, or whatever, Matt and I will just really trim it and tighten it up as much as we can. Is generally what we're doing. We're not right chopping scenes. So there's not some magical backlog of deleted scenes.
MATT DUFFER: There are lots of deleted lines, but not a lot of deleted scenes.
Are you thinking though, after the show is done, about doing a big 4K Blu-ray box set type thing? Have you even thought about it?
MATT DUFFER: Am I allowed to talk about this? We're thinking almost the opposite and Netflix finally agreed. I've been bugging them about this forever, but I want to do a VHS. I want a pan and scan version, of at least Season 1. I just want to try to pan and scan it.
ROSS DUFFER: We're going to play it through.
MATT DUFFER: Put it through a VCR.
ROSS DUFFER: Skip the VCR, hit it a couple of times, put it on Netflix. At least the nerd to me loves it, the nostalgic factor. We had our colors do the opening scene of Season 1 pan and scan for us.
MATT DUFFER: It's awesome.
ROSS DUFFER: Just for fun. It just brought back so many memories.
MATT DUFFER: But hopefully we'll do the Blu-ray.
ROSS DUFFER: We'll do the 4K.
MATT DUFFER: We'll do the beautiful thing and then we'll do the pan and scan.
Listen, I do think that it pains me with streaming how many things can be done and they don't do. What you're saying is releasing a VHS version of Season 1 pan and scan on Netflix, so it looks like you're watching a VHS tape. That's cool. People should be doing more of this.
MATT DUFFER: They were like, it wouldn't be embedded, it'd be its own separate thing. Like Stranger Things VHS, whatever it is. Anyway, I'm excited about it, we'll see if it happens. [I] feel like they're annoyed about us asking.
ROSS DUFFER: Well, now that we've said it on this interview…
MATT DUFFER: They have to do it. Yeah. They're going to be not happy. No, I'm just kidding. They'll be fine.
D&D is obviously a key source of inspiration for the series. Can you speak to its influence on the writing, and how writing a season is similar to crafting a campaign?
MATT DUFFER: It is similar to crafting a campaign. Although it's odd. I always say, Ross and I, we actually are big board game players, but did not play a ton of D&D growing up. Because we were actually early 90s kids, and Magic the Gathering was the thing. Magic the Gathering was our biggest obsession. The first movie we ever made was an hour-long Magic the Gathering movie. It was just us hacking at each other with plastic swords. But what I love about D&D, and I've grown to love about it even more so, is the storytelling and the creativity that's involved in it, and the wealth of amazing monsters that are involved.
It was a very early idea that when we settled on, obviously, Magic didn't exist, and we settled on, okay, well, it's going to have to be D&D. Which Ross and I did play, just not obsessively. We settled on that. Then I think it was not until we were a couple of scripts into writing Season 1 that we realized, well, they would call the bad guy, the villain, the Demogorgon. They would name him after one of the creatures in the D&D mythology. So that ended up sticking, the idea that the kids are using this game in order to explain and understand the unexplainable, the bizarreness that's happening around them. We're really glad we accidentally had them playing. Not accidentally, but had this opening scene of them playing D&D, which is almost as much an homage to E.T. as anything else.
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