Their student short film Eater, about a cannibal on the loose in a police precinct station house, showed tremendous promise. Veteran producer Mace Neufeld (The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games) served at Chapman as filmmaker-in-residence and worked with the brothers, and he was struck by their talent and their unique visual style. “I quickly realized they were ready for prime time,” Neufeld says. “They really knew what they were doing.” While attending Chapman, the Duffers took as many internships in Hollywood as they could find and continued to write scripts. One idea, about a Cold War–era mystery, seemed to have potential, but they couldn’t find the right way to shape the story, so they shelved the idea. Then, in 2011, they had an aspiring filmmaker’s dream experience.
Warner Bros. picked up their screenplay for Hidden, a tightly scripted thriller set almost entirely in a bomb shelter, and green-lit the project with the Duffers at the helm as directors. Alexander Skarsgård (HBO’s True Blood) and Andrea Riseborough (Birdman or [The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance]) were cast as the parents of a young girl who are forced to take shelter after a viral outbreak decimates their town. Venerable producer Richard D. Zanuck briefly came aboard to help shepherd the project; before filming could begin, however, the Hollywood legend—who had produced six of Tim Burton’s films, including Big Fish (2003) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)—suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 77.
Shooting began in Vancouver in August 2012, but during production, the twins began to get the sense that Warner Bros. was having second thoughts. “We were at this studio that we looked up to when we were kids,” says Matt Duffer. “Warner Bros. is the studio that made Batman. At the end of the day, Warner Bros. didn’t know what to do with the movie because it was so small. We got a call. Someone high up at Warner had just realized the whole thing is set in a bomb shelter and wanted to know if we could open it up. We were in the middle of shooting. There was nothing to do.”
The unfinished film sat on a shelf for nearly a year before the Duffers were able to complete postproduction work on the project. It received only a cursory release in September 2015. “It was a hard experience to go through,” says Matt. “It felt like we were pounding on the door, begging to get let into the party, and then we were kicked out almost as soon as we got in. Our ‘big break’ suddenly felt like an accident.”
The Duffers’ promising career appeared to have come to a screeching halt. But in an unusual twist of fate, M. Night Shyamalan intervened. (The man does have a knack for creating twists of fate.)
The Oscar-nominated writer-director (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable) had read the brothers’ Hidden script, and he was impressed with their sense of storytelling. The screenplay follows contours viewers may recognize from the best of Shyamalan’s productions—it’s a melancholy story about characters who find themselves imperiled by a vaguely supernatural threat that finishes with a gut punch of an ending. Shyamalan invited the Duffers to his Pennsylvania home, where he offered to hire them to work on the sci-fi TV series he was executive producing for Fox, Wayward Pines.
“They were family-based storytellers, which was something of great interest to me, probably because I grew up on Spielberg,” says Shyamalan. “That kind of a doorway into talking about unknown things and supernatural things has always felt very right for me.”
Although the Duffers had no background in television, they accepted the assignment and headed back to Vancouver, where the show had gone into production in August 2013. A mystery set inside a small town harboring a dark secret, Wayward Pines (pictured below) featured a stellar ensemble cast that included Matt Dillon as Secret Service agent Ethan Burke and Oscar-winner Melissa Leo as the nurse who cares for Ethan when he wakes up in the seemingly bucolic Idaho community after a nasty car accident. Slowly, Ethan learns that the residents of the town abide by an unusual set of rules that prevent them from leaving its confines.
The Duffers penned four of the first season’s ten episodes, including a bloody finale that sees Wayward Pines overrun with monstrous mutants known by locals as Abbies (short for aberrations). That experience would change the course of their career. They began to take note of the creative possibilities afforded by serialized storytelling, and they learned to write and revise scripts on the fly. They also watched experienced actors move through scenes efficiently. “We were forced to figure out how to work fast,” says Matt Duffer. “We came out of that feeling we had enough tools to at least pretend like we knew what we were doing.”
They also came away with a newfound respect for the medium, underlined further by the premiere of HBO’s compelling crime mystery series True Detective. All eight episodes of the first season of the dark drama were directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga (Beasts of No Nation), and the brothers were struck by how intensely cinematic the series felt. The notion of crafting a narrative that would unfold over a season of television became intensely appealing, and the brothers began to cast through discarded script ideas for a possible story line. One stood out: the sci-fi story set during the Cold War.
The original concept for the story as a feature film was a found-footage-style project (though they were never fans of that genre). But as they thought about a possible television series, they realized the mythos around covert government experiments in the 1950s and ’60s had real potential. The brothers also drew inspiration from director Denis Villeneuve’s harrowing 2013 thriller Prisoners, which centers on the race to find two girls after they are abducted in suburban Pennsylvania. “Because we’re still children at heart, we started talking about monsters,” Ross Duffer says. “Then we got really excited.”
Secret CIA testing. A missing child. Storybook monsters from another world. Seemingly disparate elements began to come together in the brothers’ minds. “It happened very quickly,” Ross Duffer says. “We had the base, and once we agreed on the setting, we realized we could also pay homage to the stories that inspired us in the first place.”
