Top 44 Matt Duffer Quotes

Dragon’s Lair’ we played a lot as kids. It’s a fun game to look at – it’s not a very fun game to play. Everyone who played it as a kid had the same experience: It’s outrageously expensive, it looks really cool, it draws you in like a magnet, and then it just takes your money and is very frustrating.

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

Television has been breaking narrative rules.

I think the PGA Award, when we won that, was so shocking to me. I thought, ‘Absolutely no way.’ I was barely listening when they were announcing it.

Freddy Krueger scared us. ‘Hellraiser’ really messed us up.

We’ve written for network television, where you have to worry about hitting these ad breaks, you have to worry about 42 minutes and 10 seconds exactly.

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.

All of the movies we watched growing up, we watched together.

If you were to encounter something from another world or dimension, it would be beyond comprehension.

We always looked at the movie sequels that we admired, and they always pivot and they always try new things. Even if you swing and miss, at least you’re trying something different.

When we were first writing ‘Stranger Things,’ the first thing we wrote was that Dungeons & Dragons scene. And we wrote it in about two minutes. It just poured out of us because it was so close to us.

When we were kids, every time you left the house with your friends you had it in the back of your head that you could go on a crazy adventure just like the characters in those movies we loved. That’s hard to do if you’ve got your parents constantly texting you.

I love that the Department of Energy issued a public statement that they’re not evil.

A debate about candy bars can get heated.

Yeah, if I’m fried mentally, incapable of directing for a second, Ross is there and will take over. Or at least, together we can somehow manage make it through the day.

We fell in love with movies through directors. Very early on we knew that was what we wanted to do.

I’m as far from a city boy as you can get.

Yeah, I don’t want to put it out like ‘I don’t want to do a movie,’ because yeah, I do.

Two of my favorite movies of all time are ‘Aliens’ and ‘Diner.’

We grew up in Durham, N.C.

Noah – the Schnappster – he’s amazing.

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.

One reason we fell in love with television is we’ve seen so many movies and they tend to follow a very similar pattern.

You know, there’s nothing in ‘E.T.’ that earmarks it as really ’80s.

That’s one of the cool things I love about television, is it’s able to evolve and able to adapt and the actors and the performers are actually a more integral part of the process. So they’re informing not just the characters, but the story.

Most kids, you can turn off their auditions after five seconds, because there’s nothing authentic about it.

When we were kids, the type of friends we hung out with were more creative types.

My brother and I played D&D. We just weren’t particularly great at it.

When you shoot at slow-motion, or a high frame rate, it makes it really difficult to rack focus.

I would feel really nervous doing something, especially something like one of Stephen King’s classic books that meant a lot to me, because there would be nothing worse than screwing that up.

We decided around fourth or fifth grade that we were going to go to film school.

I don’t particularly enjoy parties, but it’s really nice to be able to meet other creatives who work on shows you admire or actors who work on shows that you love.

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

We asked ourselves the question: is there anything we wished we had known before heading out into the terrifying unknown that is the ‘real world.’ Turns out yeah. There’s a lot we wish we had known.

I don’t believe in ghosts, but I believe in aliens and alternate dimensions.

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 push ourselves and each other to be better. We’re close enough that we’re not timid around one another. We pitch so many ideas every day – sometimes good, sometimes bad. But it’s great to have a safety net where hopefully, between the two of us, nothing really bad will ever get through.

You find a movie you love and you figure out who directed it, then you go to the video store and go through all the John Carpenter stuff and all the Sam Raimi stuff.

We were in the last generation to grow up without a cell phone being a part of our lives at all, without tech things and having any of that.

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

That’s the fun of television. You can find an actor and they’ll inspire you to change and evolve a character in a way you hadn’t initially planned on.

You have to go through a big process with the Directors Guild in order to get co-direction credit. They sit you in front of this microphone in front of like 40 legendary directors, and they start grilling you.

We all grew up with loving ‘Ghostbusters.’ So of course our kids love ‘Ghostbusters.’

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