Chris Trujillo

Every so often, a television show will come along and create such a phenomenon with audiences that everything from the individual characters to the art direction becomes a staple in pop culture. The Netflix television show, Stranger Things, created by the Duffer Brothers, has experienced this first hand since it debuted in 2016.

As the show has grown in scale, they’ve consistently managed to create one of the most impressive and multilayered examples of Production Design ever seen on television and that is all thanks to the show’s Production Designer, Chris Trujillo.

In an exclusive Interview with Interiors, we spoke with Chris Trujillo, who is the Production Designer for Stranger Things.

INT: First off, what has the process been like creating the Production Design for Stranger Things since Season 1 and developing this world more and more with every new season?

CT: Nothing essential has changed in my creative approach to Stranger Things since our first season. Back then we were a relatively ragtag bunch of indie outsiders shocked that Netflix had decided to roll the dice and give us a crack at making this improbable project on essentially our own terms. It’s a testament to the Duffer’s tenacity and vision that we’ve managed to continue making exactly the show we all had in mind, for all these years.

As a Production Designer, my goal has always been to ground my design choices in character building and faithfulness to the “reality” of the world I am creating. With Stranger Things, specifically, it has been essential for me to cultivate an aesthetic that doesn’t distract the audience by deliberately drawing attention to itself but rather informs the characters and their stories by giving weight and realism to their world no matter how deep we dive into genre-bending artfulness or period playfulness.

INT: The Creel House is an incredibly important architectural space this season and we learn about its backstory and current state in Hawkins. What was the process like finding the Creel House and how developed was it when it was first described to you? Did certain aspects of the interior or exterior change over time?

CT: The Creel House, our take on the classic “haunted house”, lies quite literally at the dark heart of Season 4. We searched near and far in search of the perfect location and ultimately found it in Rome, Georgia. The house, a Second Empire Victorian mansion with a mansard roof, had such a uniquely imposing air that we committed to traveling nearly 2 hours to shoot practical exteriors. On stage, we painstakingly recreated the intricate interior details of the three-story masterpiece down to the hand carved bookcases and mantelpieces, ornate newel posts, and the beautifully hand painted wall safe. We invented our own labyrinthine layout for the upper floor and attic to accommodate the extended explorations and climactic showdown that take place there. We see the house pristine in a series of 1950’s flashbacks, and we see it dark and infected in the upside down, but it’s true glory, and some of the best scenic work I’ve ever seen, is in its fully dilapidated, present-day look. It wasn’t enough, though, to have the Creel house in the past, the present, and the upside down. In keeping with the exponential expansion of our world characteristic of Season4, we pushed it into full psychological abstraction, making it the exploded architectural framework of Vecna’s Mind Lair, possibly the most fantastically horrific set in Stranger Things history, a testament to the formidable skill of our sculptors and a beautiful example of how seamlessly VFX can extend a practical set.

INT: In Season 4, we're able to see more of the Upside Down, which is created with both visual and practical effects. How has the architecture of the Upside Down evolved since Season 1 and how have you and your team been able to better define this world? Are there specific things that you were able to show in this current season that you couldn't in earlier seasons?

CT: From the start, the Upside Down was a unique design challenge requiring quite a bit of interdepartmental creative collaboration. It was easy enough to discuss conceptually, in the abstract: "a dark reflection of our world, a murky and infected liminal space, crawling with vines, the air heavy with spores, etc." What made it particularly tricky was our intention, as with everything on Stranger Things, to approach it as practically as possible. To that end, during our first season, we experimented extensively with various approaches to the material fabrication of the vines and the spores and the paint treatments necessary to bring the abstraction to life. Over the course of the subsequent seasons we've carried our basic aesthetic approach to creating the Upside Down but learned to scale it up exponentially by continually refining and standardizing the specific materials used and the techniques for applying them.

As was the case for every aspect of Season 4, the scope and scale of the Upside Down seen on screen increased dramatically. Fortunately we were given the resources we needed to handle the enormous increase in the sheer volume manpower and materials required to preserve our mostly practical approach in all of our interior sets and in much of the exterior Upside Down as well, and VFX, applying their previous experience, where able to do a beautiful job extending the Upside Down into the impossible distances.

Conceptually, it was a lot of fun to finally reveal to the audience a bit more of the "physics and history" of the Upside Down which we had to work out years ago in the course of designing its earlier iterations.

INT: We also get to see Hawkins Laboratory again and revisit the Rainbow Room and other areas in the Lab. In terms of Production Design, what was it like getting to go back and fill in the backstory and create these spaces again?

CT: It was creatively very satisfying to have the opportunity to fully flesh out the bowels of Hawkins Lab where Eleven lived her formative years. A few tedious days with a pencil and paper resulted in the psychedelically monotonous labyrinth of hallways and cells that allowed us to practically achieve all the long disorienting shots of destruction, confusion, and revelation that were, for me, the highlight of the season. Arguably the pièce de résistance of the whole season is the Rainbow Room itself. Deep research into institutional spaces designed for children led us to our materials selections and custom built, carpet wrapped furniture elements. I especially love the rainbow mural, the way it starts out stacked in one color order and winds up flipped upside down after it stretches across the floor in stripes of colored VCT tiles and continues back up and around the wall. The ceiling, though, with its coffered grid of fluorescent lighting, inspired, oddly enough, by the administrative offices of a high school I scouted in New Mexico, was maybe the best money we’ve ever spent.

INT: As we head into the show's fifth and final season, are there any qualities or characteristics that you and your team have tried to prioritize as you create this unique architectural language for the show?

CT: I knew from the start that Stranger Things was a project I would want to see through to the end. So, I approached designing it with the intention of maintaining a visual continuity such that all the hundreds of sets across all the seasons feel of a piece, all the product of that initial inspiration. Grandiosity aside, I do like to think that any two random stills from any two random seasons can be juxtaposed comfortably together. You might be looking at a working-class living room, festooned with Christmas lights, next to a decommissioned missile silo repurposed to house a sci-fi sensory deprivation tank, but, if I’ve done my job well, they exist in the same world.

Chris Trujillo is a Production Designer and has worked on various Films and Television Shows.