STRANGER THINGS' Shawn Levy Talks About What Got Him to Back the Show and the "Huge Swing" Netflix Took

Director Shawn Levy had some fun films under his belt like Just Married, the Night at the Museum movie and sequels, Date Night, and Real Steel, before he was approached to get involved with the Netflix series Stranger Things.

While he had directed episodes of TV before, it had been a while, and he had decided that he was strictly a “movie guy,” but when Dan Cohen, his 21 Laps producing partner, walked into Levy’s office one day, everything changed.

“‘You need to stop what you’re doing and read this thing,’” Levy remembers Cohen said. “‘It’s one of the best scripts I’ve ever read.’ My memory is that I said, ‘We don’t do TV.’ And he was like, ‘Please, just trust me. Read it.’”

The script Cohen was raving about was called “Montauk,” which would later turn into Stranger Things. And the rest is pretty much history. Levy has directed two episodes in every season, including in the fifth and final one, and his involvement in Stranger Things changed his career too, he went from family comedies and romcoms to blockbusters like Free Guy and Deadpool & Wolverine. Working on the show, he says, “revealed filmmaking muscles I didn’t know I had back then.”

The filmmaker sat down with Variety to explain what sold him on backing the show, explaining:

“For one thing, sometimes you read something and the tone is so confident, so clear — and that script ‘Montauk’ had it. It was not trying to be anything but itself. It was breaking so many rules with confidence.

“It was a period piece. It was a show about kids that wasn’t for kids. It was coming of age sweetness with horror genre darkness. So it broke all these supposed rules, but it transgressed with such assurance.”

He went on to describe the show as “an anthem to outcasts,” and he credits their streamer for allowing the show to even be made, saying:

“The freaking bet the Netflix put on us and this show was staggering — and the kind of huge swing that we don’t see that often at any network or streamer anymore. This was an original show with kids, but not for kids; with two 30-year-old, unproven filmmakers; a movie director who had never done TV and whose movie career at that point was predominantly family comedy — on paper, this made not a lot of sense. But it was just that good. It was just that good.”

Levy went on to add:

“I’ll add this in case it’s useful: It wasn’t just that the script was that good. It’s that the lookbook — which is now famous on the internet, and studied in film schools, by the way —that you can still find for ‘Montauk,’ that the Duffers made before we ever made the show, it was proof that they had it all inside them already. 

“If you go and look at that lookbook, as I encourage readers of this article to do, you’re going to see that they knew what they wanted this to be. It was that clear. And Netflix bet on us big.”

It was undeniable on all accounts that this was a special mix of incredible story and amazing talent behind it. My family has loved it every step of the way- through laughter, tears, and cheers, the Duffer Brothers and everyone who backed them have made us diehard Stranger Things fans for life, and that’s a pretty special thing.