How’d the story become this compact? 

Definitely in the edit, we did play with it a bit. We always wanted it to be more streamlined. A lot of that heavy lifting had been done with Scott Teems before I was on the project. But once I got there, it was kind of like, “Yeah, how do we keep this thing moving?” It’s a father-daughter on the run. How do we get to that farm and then get out? How do we get here, get there and streamline some of the stuff? There’s lots of great stuff in the book that I love, but we just couldn’t find a way to bring it in without getting bloated.

But you do tell the story of Lot Six in the opening credits alone.

That’s a good place to hide, that you can hide a lot of the backstory and all that sort of stuff and freak people out. I definitely wanted to take advantage of that. And that was definitely something that we had in mind from the beginning of like, “How do we show Lot Six? Let’s bring it in like this.”

In the past, visual supervisors have said water and fire are two of the hardest effects to get right. Was that your experience?

I tell you, it’s right. Those things they tell you, don’t work with animals [or] children, or shoot on water. I guess the one thing we didn’t have is a shooting on water, but we had the fire instead. There are definitely challenges when you’re trying to make all these pieces work. The other thing, because we’ll be judged against the 1984 film, I wanted to have as much practical fire as possible. I wanted these effects to be real and in camera as much as possible. And so, I would say all of our fire scenes involve real fire.

I set fire to our lead actors. At the end sequence, in the film, a big flame thrower sequence, it’s enhanced with VFX stuff that you can do now, in terms of clean-up. You can have a lot of safety gear that the audience doesn’t see right there and you just clean it up and post. The flames themselves, I wanted to be real. The key to that is just tons of preparation, just getting the right people, making sure everyone’s safe. We know what we’re doing, everyone’s protected. It is kind of letting loose, because fire’s unpredictable. You don’t know what’s going to happen with it.

How character-driven was the fire? Would you say to the crew and VFX team, “This is what Charlie is feeling right now, so we need this fire to help express that”?

Yeah, definitely. They started very early on. How are we going to visually show it? So obviously, you’ve got all these tools on set, like fans and whatever, practical, simple things that you can do to enhance the atmosphere. But then we spent a lot of time talking about the shimmer that happens in the film when the air heats up and things start to wave and shimmer. We did a lot of practical tests with that.

It wasn’t really feasible to shoot it that way, so we ended up kicking that over to VFX and shot a lot of test stuff that they were able to use later. It was about coming up with this visualization of Charlie’s powers or maybe Andy’s powers in terms of how the audience is going to be able to understand what’s happening and how this works.

The other thing I would say is, I was trying to get away from imagery we see in tropes in superhero films, because there’s a lot of characters that shoot fire. It’s kind of a thing. I wanted to make it much more grounded, much more realistic. If someone was in this room and actually doing this, what would it feel like? What would it look like? What would it sound like? How can we make this as real as possible?

On top of that, a lot of movies have ripped off or homaged “Firestarter.”

Yes. 100%. It’s been robbed mercilessly since the early ’80s, from comics to movies. I mean obviously, “Stranger Things” owes a huge debt to “Firestarter” in terms of the story and the lab, the girl in the lab and the powers, that sort of thing.