We’ve all been waiting for some news from the cast of Stranger Things since the trailer for their new season dropped last year. For instance, we all want to know when is it releasing or is there any progress in filming. The staff at Collider seemed to share the fans’ concerns and reached out to Gaten Matarazzo for the same. The star states that the pandemic has played a massive role when it comes to how things operate now as compared to before. However, he states that all these changes are positive and aid in making the show better than ever before! For instance, The Duffer Brothers never completed the script of the show until the half-point in the season had reached. Therefore, it made for a good amount of panic writing under the pressure to finish the script.
The writers, Matt Duffer and Ross Duffer always planned to complete the script before filming starts but always come up short-handed every year. This is the reason behind them having to direct only two episodes of the beginning and the end of a season. Nevertheless, due to COVID-19, the show had to shut down. With the extra time on the Duffer Brothers’ hands, they have all the time to finish writing the entire season with comfort, which would make for more time in the directing department for them when they return to filming.
Steve Weintraub, a staff member at Collider spoke with Gaten Matarazzo about his Netflix series: Prank Encounters. During the conversation, Steve asked the actor about how much of a difference it must have made, having the entire script for the season before even filming the majority of it. Matarazzo responded by giving us an insider view on what it is like to make Stranger Things so far:
“The goal was never to film before the show was finished being written, that’s just how it ended up happening the first three seasons. We have a certain number of episodes, around five or six out of eight or nine is usually what we’ll start filming with once those are written. And the goal is [The Duffer Brothers] will direct and [then] write at home. They’ll be home and that’s when they’ll write and manage their workload that way, and how it’s always worked out is we’re on like episode 4 or 5 and we haven’t seen episode 6 and 7 yet, and we have no idea what’s gonna happen and they haven’t written all of it yet. So the pressure is usually on and when that happens, usually there’s like a 2-3 week hiatus where we’ll go home and take a break and during that 2-3 weeks Matt and Ross are home and they are writing. Like non-stop, panic-writing.”
The actor goes further to state that this “panic-writing” has seemed to work wonders when it comes to the show itself as a whole. His point becomes even more valid seeing how impactful the ending of the third season was:
“That’s never ideal, but honestly for some reason that spur-of-the-moment, ‘we gotta get this done,’ it seems to me like that’s where a lot of their best work comes in. I don’t know if it’s the pressure, I don’t know if it’s them being up all night caffeinated and they just have really crazy frazzled brains that can write really weirdly.”
However, last year, when production got shut down, Gaten Matarazzo said that the Duffer Brothers will finish writing the whole season before coming back into production:
“This year, because of COVID, there’s no excuse for them not to have the [season] written completely. When we went in for our first table read which was February of 2020 we expected to go right into filming and it was gonna be the same situation, they were gonna start with episodes all the way up through 5 and we were probably gonna do the same hiatus, but COVID hit and we only had like six episodes and so they were like, ‘we might as well finish.’”
“There’s very few dates that are reliable. It really is more of a guesstimation on when we’re gonna be filming next, when we’re gonna be wrapping up, when release is gonna be, all that jazz because we still don’t know on day-to-day if we’re gonna be filming next week. I should be filming like next month for a bigger chunk than I’ve had in a bit, but even though it’s coming up in about two weeks from now, I still don’t know an exact date. So because of that, there’s really no way to figure out when we’re gonna be wrapping.”
It seems as we should not raise our hopes of a proper release date from the show anytime soon. Regardless, Gaten Matarazzo says it has made a positive impact as the Duffer Brothers can now focus on directing properly without the writing holding them back mentally:
“I think they’ve been able to relish in directing in their day-to-day. There’s nothing else distracting them other than what we’re gonna do today while we’re directing, and I asked them, ‘Do you guys sleep at night?’ they’re like, ‘Literally we dream about directing this show. We go to sleep and we have dreams that we’re just directing this show,’ it takes up their entire minds when they’re making this. So I think it’s a good thing because now they can take their focus off of what the show is going to be about, and now that they know it, they can focus on how they’re going to deliver. And I think it shows.”
Since the writers usually direct the first two and last two episodes of each season, it will be engaging to witness how things will operate for Stranger Things Season Four. The previous seasons were nail-biting as they were, but seeing the full force of the directors may just boost the quality of the season as never before seen.
Source: Collider
For more information on Stranger Things Season Four: Things You Need To Know About The New Stranger Things Season 4.
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