Stranger Things star Gaten Matarazzo, who plays Dustin in the series, talked about season 4, also comparing its production process to the previous seasons.

We know that Stranger Things season 4 has been hard to film because of the pandemic. Almost every major production’s filming process came to a hiatus at one point during the times of lockdown, but that effect was really influential especially on Stranger Things, whose fans are waiting desperately for season 4.

Playing as Dustin in Stranger Things, actor Gaten Matarazzo talked to Collider about producing and shooting season 4, mentioning a plus of this season compared to the others. He revealed the scheduling problems usually arising throughout the first three seasons, but we now know that there is not going to be such a problem for Stranger Things in the fourth season. Matarazzo also said how far they were with the productions, unfortunately not hinting at a release date.

Recently, we have seen some photos from the Stranger Things set, which revealed how Upside Down is going to look in the next season.

The series’ creators Duffer Brothers, who are both showrunners and writers, usually fall short on writing the episodes. This situation requires them to direct only the first and last two episodes of the seasons, as they are busy writing the episodes in-between. This season seems to be going to change it, though, for they had plenty of time during the lockdown to finish writing.

Matarazzo talked about this phenomenon as well, also mentioning how good he thought it has done for the series.

“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 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.”

After explaining why Duffer Brothers fell behind the schedule, Gaten Matarazzo explained how this sort of crunch time helped the scenario to be better.

“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.”

Matarazzo then went on to explain how this situation would be eliminated in Stranger Things season 4. It seems that things did not work out how the crew expected that they would during the first table read.

“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.’”

The young actor also revealed that the filming process has not come a long way so far, meaning we’re not going to get a release date soon. Let alone a release date, even the crew does not even seem to know when they’re going to wrap up filming.

“There are 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.”