Inside the Set of ‘Stranger Things’ Season 5 Part 1

[upbeat music]

Oh, hello.

I'm Chris Trujillo.

I'm the production designer on Stranger Things,

I've been with the show since the beginning.

This is Season Five, and I wanna show you around.

[upbeat music]

This is, in so many ways, the heart of Hawkins,

the heart of our show.

This is the Wheeler house basement.

It's special for a number of reasons.

This was the first set that my team

and I conceived, designed, drew, built.

It was actually the first set

that we shot way back in Season One.

This table right here,

it's actually right about here in the show.

This is the table where we first meet our gang of misfits.

Fireball!

[dice clattering]

Oh, shoot!

Where'd it go?

Where is it?

And we've also seen our characters develop

and evolve as people, and in so many ways too

like in the course of the show,

a lot of very important moments happen here.

Plans are made.

Did you get the supplies?

Yeah, binoculars, army knife and wrist rocket.

Dustin, what did you get?

Nutty bars, bazooka, pez, Smarties,

Pringles, wafers, banana and Trail Mix.

Seriously?

I'm a child of the eighties, a suburban child

of 1980s America.

So it was very exciting to be able to kind of create

what for me would've been just the ideal place

to hang out with my friends as a kid.

The domestic sets oftentimes are the places

where I feel like I can most contribute

to storytelling and character development.

And that's because this really speaks

to who the people who live in these homes are.

In fact, it's a mid-century sort of ranch style house.

So it is very like fundamental Americana American suburbs.

And the layering of these sets, my set decorator Jess Royal,

is very fastidious about period specificity

and character specificity.

So as you look around this space, all of this furniture,

which we saw for the first time in 1983,

is very clearly not from 1983

and would not have been current at the moment.

It's important for us to reflect the reality

of how a basement ends up being dressed

and the family as they're keeping up with the Joneses

and they're remodeling of the upstairs,

mom and dad are very aspirational.

So naturally, when we're upstairs in the Wheeler house,

we're in this very, we're contemporary

better homes and gardens sort of vibe.

But when we're down here, we're looking at maybe

the leftovers from the seventies or even the late 60s

'cause we get to have all of this fun, color and texture

and everything is a little bit more worn and lived in.

We're always really careful in our approach

to set dressing into the life layer

of all of our sets

that they pass the period specificity tests.

Almost everything is directly from the period,

we buy all of our pieces from estate sales.

So we're the people that come in

and literally open up kitchen drawers

and buy the contents of the kitchen drawers.

And that's the lengths that we go to to be very specific.

Light switches, outlets,

all of that is gonna be period correct.

We've got our old eighties washer and dryer.

We may not spend time over here in the script,

but it's important to us to have a sense of completion

and to show that the entire family is represented

and you've got your basement bathroom,

which while we only spent a brief beat in, is very important

to us to have elements like that complete

so that we can play that door open,

we can play it closed,

we get the light coming out of that basement,

and you get the depth and you can see the world

that should be there, even if we're not necessarily

gonna be spending time inside that space.

And just kind of goes back to that ethos of creating a world

that when actors come in, they feel completely engaged

and they can kind of lose themselves in

and feel like, oh, they've walked into this world

that's on the page.

During one of our first days of shooting

with the children in this space,

and they'd been here for hours shooting,

and when one of them walked out back onto the sound stage

and looked around, he kind of like stopped.

And he was like, oh, wow,

I forgot that we weren't in a real house.

And I just happened to be standing by

and it was like the most gratifying thing

I could have ever heard as a production designer,

a testament to the work that my art department

and my set department does to build immersive environments.

Wait, guys, I'm still here, guys.

[upbeat music]

We are standing outside of Hopper's Cabin.

This is primarily our interior Hopper's cabin.

We've actually also got a version of this,

an exterior version out in the woods on location

where we have the exterior duplicated

and it's, you know, finished all the way around.

Whenever we're playing scenes

of exterior hopper's cabin, we're out there.

But this facade here allows us to enter

and exit into our interior set.

Normally this would be surrounded by greens and trees,

and we'd be standing in sort of a fake forest

and there would be a backdrop.

But for the work we're doing here, this season,

wasn't necessary to have the entire exterior world

finished on set.

This is a set that premiered in Season Two

when Hopper was using it

to keep Eleven safe and hide her out in the woods.

The story we built into kind of motivate the design

of the architecture

and the dressing of the space

was this would've been a hunting cabin

that's been in Hopper's family for a number of years.

Maybe his grandfather built it in the 40s

as just a very sort of bare bones hunting shack.

And over the years it's been added to,

and you know, plumbing has been added.

We've got a bathroom in it now

and kind of been in a state of disrepair.

And then suddenly Hopper needed a place to hide out,

and he did everything he could to make it home for him

and Eleven, and to make it, you know, warm.

Oh Jesus.

We were able to bring it back to life.

And this was a chance to do

a sort of rough constructed cabin in the woods

that would've been built on a budget

and built very, very roughly with older rough materials.

So a testament again to our construction department

and our scenic folks, that all of this wood was just fresh,

clean lumber that they painstakingly processed

and painted and texturized so that it feels like a cabin

that's been sitting in the woods

for the better part of 60 or 70 years.

This set as so many of our sets on this show,

does evolve over the course of the show.

I mean, it starts out as Hopper and Eleven's hideaway,

and naturally, there's a monster attack that destroys it,

and then it sits vacant for a while.

And then in this most recent season,

our gang has rehabbed it

and some of our folks have moved back in.

So it's fun over the course of the seasons

to see the set evolve and things move around.

Another of the more interesting modifications to our cabin

for season five was this situation here.

I normally don't let myself get this desigy,

but this was just too fun of an opportunity

and it was justifiable.

The idea being that this might have been an old door

from the cabin, and what we needed

to build was a homemade isolation tank

for Eleven to use her powers, to amplify her powers.

So this was our answer to the need

for a do it yourself sensory deprivation tank

that fit the vibe of Hopper's Cabin.

This is another instance, as is the case

with almost all of our sets

where in the interest of creating a set

that is, you know, real world dimensions,

we needed to accommodate camera nevertheless.

So this bathroom here is actually built on a wagon

and the whole bathroom will just roll away

as needed at a moment's notice.

It's kind of a fun little detail.

Over here we've got Eleven's room,

and in the season that we introduced this,

it was very more deliberately dressed to reflect

than sort of newly teenage girls' bedroom.

But it was funny because obviously

the rest of the cabin is very Hopper

and very rough.

We tried to show that in his effort to make her comfortable,

he took the time to paint her room

and to kind of decorate it as best he could,

likely from thrift store furniture elements.

But we wanted to contrast Eleven's world

and exploring her teenage years

and hanging out with Mike and doing her thing.

It wanted to feel like a space

that was separate from this old man's hunting cabin.

[upbeat music]

Hey.