As brothers, you still get in plenty of disagreements, but I think that generally we work stuff out.
We wanted it to have a simplicity to it, so that if you're a 12-year-old and you're watching the show and you get inspired, you could easily sketch this thing out with your markers or crayons or whatever, then you'd show your friends and they'd instantly go, 'Oh yeah, that's the Demogorgon, that's the monster from 'Stranger Things.'
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.
At the end of the day, 'Hidden' was a great experience. Because we know what it's like to fail. And we know it will happen again.
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.
Even when 'Stranger Things' was finished and we couldn't touch it anymore, we saw all these problems still and we were begging Netflix to go back in and fix stuff. They were like, 'Guys, stop, just leave it alone.' But it was torturous, honestly.
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.
Of course, watching 'Stand By Me' is, to me, the pinnacle of child performances in movies or shows. It doesn't get much better than that, and those kids, you feel like you know them instantly and they feel real.
If you look back at a lot of these Spielberg movies and Stephen King books, even though there's a lot of fun and a lot of camaraderie, there's also a bit of sadness there, whether it's 'E.T.' with the divorce or in Stephen King's 'It,' where there's racism. There's always some sort of evil - there's sadness and people aren't happy.
We were so focused on the production aspect of it that it wasn't until later in our college experience that we realized we needed to focus on writing. And once we did, that sort of became our way into Hollywood.
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.
Chapman pushes internships a lot, and starting the summer of sophomore year we started interning because we knew that was the best way to make connections.
There's so much art out there, and I'm happy to see people who are drawing monsters that are very simple designs.
The format of Netflix was the dream for us. It allowed us to make cinematic, longer episodes without interruption.