Top 30 Ross Duffer Quotes

It’s my favorite, when you see those auditions that you’re just like, ‘That’s the guy.’

We’re from North Carolina originally.

I have social anxiety.

I remember it took us so long to see ‘Gremlins 2’ – all my friends had seen it, but our mom was just like, ‘no PG-13.’

It was seventh grade or something like that when we started falling in love with stuff like Sam Raimi and Wes Craven and John Carpenter. Also, our filmmaking skills were getting a little more polished, so we thought we could actually make something that was not funny.

I have a problem with trailers, because I love them too much. I’m one of those nerds that watches them on repeat.

So many kids nowadays, it’s almost like they go through this Disney training where they’re taught to be cute and play it up for the camera, and they’re trying to get laughs.

There’s a lot of ‘Silent Hill’ in the Upside Down, which people have noticed.

I love playing into those horror tropes of ‘don’t go into the basement, you idiot.’ I love that, so it’s fun to sometimes play into it and sometimes against type and the tropes.

We have vague memories of the Eighties. But we were still pre-Internet and pre-cell phone for most of our childhood.

We still love movies.

We’re 10 or something, and we’re watching ‘Evil Dead,’ which you don’t really see the humor in when you’re 10 years old. It was just terrifying. And same with ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street,’ which is such a brilliant movie and such a brilliant concept.

We always loved that idea of the Amity feel in ‘Jaws,’ in a coastal town.

We have our Upside Down document which describes its rules and its mythology in quite a bit of detail, but I think we’re just going to slowly parse that out, and maybe not even fully use all of it.

One reason I loved ’80s monsters is after I watched the movie, I could go into my room with crayons or markers and I could very simply draw these monsters that I fell in love with.

Jaws’ was a big one. It’s a classic. The shark not working while making that movie made it much better.

It was Tim Burton’s ‘Batman’ in, what, ’89, I think? What we could see was there was someone behind the curtain controlling all of this, and you could see it from one Tim Burton film to the next, that the guy who made ‘Edward Scissorhands’ also made ‘Batman.’ You could connect the dots because his style was so distinct.

There’s so much art out there, and I’m happy to see people who are drawing monsters that are very simple designs.

We had this idea, and I think a lot of people did going in, that you can make some short film and it’s going to get industry attention and that’s going to be your thing. And it was only later on at school that we realized that’s very rare that a short film is going to capture the attention of anyone.

That was always our favorite type of story, and that’s the stuff we fell in love with. The peak of those type of ordinary-meets-extraordinary stories was in the ’80s.

The minute you start calculating and trying to figure out what a huge audience is going to think, you’re going to fail.

We were the last generation to have the experience of going out with our friends to the woods or the train tracks and the only way our parents could connect with us was to say, ‘It’s time for dinner.’

It was strange initially to be directing Winona Ryder. Of course it was.

We weren’t playing much Dungeons and Dragons, we were mostly playing Magic the Gathering, but very similar. And we would go out in the woods and you felt like you were on these adventures.

Most sequels are generally disappointments.

Big crowds scare me.

Of a thousand people, someone’s not a good guy.

All I know is it was very easy for us to write the Barb character and I think that, you know, Shannon Purser – who had never acted before – just did such a brilliant job realizing her. And, again, without very many lines – 25 lines. And I think everyone feels like either they knew this girl or they were this girl.

When you look at it and see, ‘Oh,they made their first movie at 27,’ you feel like a jerk saying it felt like forever, but at the time it did.

We hung out with a group of nerdy friends playing games.