The Big Picture - Interview With 'Get Out' Director Jordan Peele | The Big Picture (Ep. 6)

Episode Date: March 9, 2017

Ringer editor-in-chief Sean Fennessey sits down with writer-director Jordan Peele (of 'Key & Peele' fame) to discuss his new hit film, 'Get Out,' how and why he made it, and its overwhelmingly positive reception. Peele also talks about ideas for alternate scenes and endings as well as his reasoning behind some of the movie's most pivotal moments. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Thanks for spreading the word. Hello, and welcome to a special edition of the Channel 33 podcast. My name is Sean Fennessey, and I'm the editor-in-chief of The Ringer. Today, I'm joined by a very special guest, Jordan Peele, who many of you probably know as one half of Key and Peele, and is now the writer and director of one of the best and most successful movies of the year. It's called Get Out. It's about a young African-American guy visiting his white girlfriend's parents for the first time. It's a horror movie. It's a comedy. It's a satire. Jordan describes it as a social thriller in the vein of Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives.

Jordan, congratulations on Get Out and welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you very much. This is a wild time. It is. Yeah. It doesn't get any more wild than this past couple of weeks here for me, for old JP. So it's two weeks since the movie's been released, about 10 days.

It's been incredibly financially successful. What's the number on that? You got that in front of you? I honestly think I know what it is, but I think it's 75.8. Is that right? Damn. I don't know. I'm looking to you to help me out, but damn.

It's your money, not mine. So I want to go really way back to the beginning with the movie. It's obviously a very complex and thrilling thing, but it's a little bit hard to explain. So I'm curious, you started writing in 2008, is that right? I would say 2008 to 2000, say, 12, I was in what's called like the outline phase, just kind of coming up with the premise.

I was working on this premise as well as several other movies and scripts. And then, yeah, about three years ago, I actually wrote the script. So yes, I started writing it in the Vegas sense in 2008. So you were still on MADtv at that time, right? It was about right after I left MADtv and Barack Obama was running for president. It was around, it was just around that sort of general area. Yeah.

Was that like an inciting incident? Did you find yourself watching cable news and seeing how people were talking about the world? Yeah. I mean, we all were, right? I mean, Barack Obama was, that was just a total game changer, a culture shifter, an eye opener. But I think what we sort of found after he got elected, shortly after he got elected, it was this – it was a sort of self-congratulation, self-congratulatory thing where it's like, OK, we've cured racism. And many of us know that that just wasn't the case. So it just, it struck me that this movie now had a place in culture, that there could be a

modern horror movie about race that discussed these issues that were sort of being swept under the rug. When you started writing, was your expectation that you were going to be the director of the movie? No. My expectation really when I started coming up with the concept was like just developing this idea that would help me become a better writer. It would be – I think the best thing I ever did was I took the, just the shackles off, pun intended, of having to write something that could be producible, so to speak. So I wasn't thinking about this in terms of it getting made. I was thinking of it in terms of what's my favorite movie that doesn't exist. That's really smart. So when you're doing something like that, are you talking to friends

and colleagues and saying, I'm working on this thing, or would you read it for me, workshop it, or is it very private? No, I'm fairly collaborative. So I feed off of people's opinions. And I'm generally the type of guy who, if someone gives me a note or a thought even if I don't agree with that note or thought I'll try and get to the root of what it's about um yeah so that's that's you know I've got some very close friends I really depend on their opinion a lot and you know certainly by the time I wrote the script and we were moving on the production, it's like any thoughts or reactions I could get from the script are – I'm hungry for. Did anything significant about the movie change from that time?

If it's got a six or seven-year germination period, did you think you were going to be writing one kind of movie and did it change a lot over time? A ton. Yeah. A ton. I mean, the very first notion that this movie came from had nothing to do with race. It was about a guy whose girlfriend brings him to a party with all of her old high school friends he's meeting for the first time.

So it was more, it was really about the fear of being the outsider in a social situation and people are telling, you know, doing, hey, remember junior high, man, when old doozer, you know, spilled the beans on the prom floor, you know, all that stuff. And you're just looking around like, what, what, what, what? So there's some of that in the scene with Jeremy at the dinner table where it, especially when you feel like the outsider or the lone African-American somewhere. I'm curious if kind of the tone or the approach in the movie changed when you were in production because obviously the nature of the country changed a lot in that time too. Were you shooting in 2016? Yeah, we shot at the end of 2015, beginning of 2016.

And yes, we were – I really wrote the movie before the country sort of got woke to police shootings and elements of the prison industrial system and all that, the biggest shift was realizing that the movie had to – it was about – spoiler alert, but it was about kind of giving us a hero from the pain and the place for this movie is a place to not – not only is it about not ignoring race and the racial horrors of this country, which is kind of the first idea behind the movie. It's not only that, but it also has to be something that gives us an escape, gives us a hero, gives us a fun way to enter further conversation. Yeah, it feels like we have this boomeranging effect now where people were talking about a post-racial society. Then, as you said, America gets woke. And then we enter into a very charged political climate where people are more aware of sort of division between race, sex, gender, for any number of reasons.

Were you concerned that because we weren't in an Obama administration anymore, we were in this sort of new political moment, that the movie would not be as effective or that audiences wouldn't get it as well as you wanted to? Yeah. I mean, that crossed, I didn't know how it would change things. It did cross my mind for a second that, oh my gosh, I wrote this movie in a response to the post-racial lie, the racial cover-up. We're saying race isn't a thing. This movie was a response to that. So by the time the country was now middle and sort of we have to face, we all know we sort of have to

face this conversation. There was a period where I was like, oh my gosh, so the, yeah, the point of the movie is shifting. But then we, you know, I sort of found the new purpose for it, that being a sort of release and an escape. And, you. And pretty quickly I realized it's actually going to connect with more people, because more people are gonna give it a shot. Like in the era that I wrote the movie, I feel like less people would be inclined to actually go see it, because they'd be like,

"'No, come on, I don't wanna engage. "'If you talk about race, if you see a movie about race, "'it's just perpetuating something we're, we're, we're done with Obama. Yay. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That, that, that white liberalism that you kind of have a magnifying glass on probably more people would have been inclined to say like, Oh, this isn't, this isn't as big a deal as it seems like as this movie is trying to make it out to be, you know? I think so. And I think so in some ways, I think it would have had a more important statement back then slightly, but you know, now I think the, the release, the hero, the escapist part is more welcome. So, you know, I'm curious how you balance this movie, right? Because

we're talking about some very heavy themes. It's a very serious movie in some ways, but in other ways, it's hilarious. And it's also quite scary in a way that is not scary. The most horror movies are scary. How do you balance all those kind of elements into a movie like this? I mean, there's not a lot of comparison points. You reach back kind of to the 70s for some of your touch points. So when you're writing and directing, how do you say, well, I know exactly how I'm going to hit the tone? Stepford Wives and Scream. I looked at those movies very closely. They both have a lot of the more lighter, ironic, comedic choices in the fabric of the script. So in The Stepford Wives, the way that they all speak like they're in a Clorox bleach ad, you know, where they're the good housewife, it has this really satirical

tone that is dark, but it is funny in a subtle way. So I've got those elements through. And then, you know, I think where Scream was effective was it sort of addressed horror movies within the, you know, had this postmodern sort of reference. And so in that way, it's more realistic than a normal horror movie where there's not, there's no knowledge of any horror tropes or anything. So, you know, I took cue from that with the character Rod that we could have a character that expresses what the audience wishes somebody would say, and that wouldn't be breaking the reality.

It would actually be grounding it more. So besides those two elements, I just tried to tell a straight thriller. Yeah, it works really well. There's not a lot of the sort of traditional jump scares. You don't have, in fact, like, rather than don't go in that house, you literally have a character who's trying to get out of the house. You know, you're kind of

inverting some of the... And I do have some jump scares. I got a couple. Just a couple. It was a tough choice because, you know, I do, I respect movies like The Shining, you know, that's like one jump scare for this entire creepy thing and it's like the scariest movie of all time. At the end of the day, I realized this movie was,

I had to use every part of the buffalo. That is a horror, that is horror movie. You made the movie with Blumhouse, which is obviously a very successful, largely horror driven production team. Do you get notes from a company like that, that knows really well how to create and sell a movie like this? Or are you operating on an island when you're making your movie?

Somebody with Blumhouse and QC Entertainment. The real reason these guys are so good at what they do is that they're in just such support of the director and the auteur. That was my experience was I got to make the movie I wanted. You know, it's that's the beauty of these micro budget projects is, you know, I think Jason realizes that the, you know, the spark for these most successful films he makes is in somebody's sort of singular vision. Was anybody expecting more of a comedy from you on this? You know, or was it always clear that this was going to be as straight a thriller as it is at times? Well, you know, that was like the biggest question mark for me, too, with this shift.

You know, it really did take me, you know, years ago, you know, telling my reps and telling people, okay, there's just, you know, this, I'm going to make this big change, you know, it's. You would literally say that. Yeah. Oh, interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That, that was, this was my, you know, once I sort of realized that the opportunity, you know, the, the work I'd done in, in comedy and, you know, all that was sort of providing me with opportunities. Yeah. I mean, it was, it was all very strategic. This is cause I knew this was what I wanted to be doing. Um, I didn't necessarily think this movie would get made, but, um, yeah, I had to, uh, yeah, I had to let some reps go at a certain point because I felt like they weren't quite latching on to – it's kind of a crazy thing, right?

Sure. Especially when you have a successful comedy career. It seems like something – you can make movies. You've forged ground in that territory to say, OK, now I want to do something else before I've even like really capitalized off of that. Yeah, some people have pointed out that there have been certainly Key and Peele sketches where you can kind of see hints at horror and hints at satire in this specific way, but nothing that's quite so overt. How did you actually get it made then? How did you actually get it across the line? Did it just have to get into the right hands?

Yeah, I mean, this wasn't a situation where I was like going around shopping this thing and having doors slammed in my face. Like I said, I did not think this movie was ever going to get made. Part of that was because of the state I put myself in to write it. I thought that was not the goal. And then the other part was I felt like the, yeah, I mean, the issues and the imagery was so edgy racially that no one would give me money to do this. And also, you know, just because, you know, the perception of movies in general is that, you know, white people direct movies. So that seemed like that was almost insurmountable odds with this movie, because if you watch this movie and don't realize it comes

from a black perspective, you might have different kind of feelings or different takes on it. So all these things were stacked up against it. I went to Sean McKittrick at QC Entertainment maybe three years ago, sat down with him for a general meeting and started the meeting by just saying, OK, so here's – this is one of my ideas. It's one of my favorite ideas. It's never going to – no one is ever going to make it, but I want to tell you about it just because I think you're going to get a kick out of it. By the end of that, I told him the whole plot. By the end of it, he was like, let's make that movie. So that was the beginning.

And then cut to a few months later, I've written the movie. Blumhouse gets wind of it, and they pounce. And there were a couple other partners that did pass on it. They didn't get it, which is very satisfying. Happy day. Yeah. So I'm really curious about the cast. Sort of the three white leads are these like low-key icons of white liberalism. And a lot of the black performers are not as nearly as well known. I'm curious if that was a specific choice that you were trying to make to show new faces

on one side and people who have a lot of built-in identification on the other side. 05.15 DMH Well, that's of course a symptom of the industry, right? I mean, we've nurtured white talent and careers and not black ones in any sort of widespread fashion. When I'm just looking to cast this movie, first thing you go, okay. So it would be great. We need a 26-year-old black leading man. Okay.

So let's see. Who is there? Who is there? Okay. Michael B. Jordan. Okay. That's so let's see. Who is there? Who is there? Okay, Michael B. Jordan. Okay, that's one. And right, it sort of runs out real fast. You know, there's some great actors out there, Chadwick Boseman, John Boyega. But, you know, that's it. They're a little tied up with franchises right now, too.

And they're also tied up with franchises. That's it. So, you know, very quickly you realize that part of the purpose of this movie, part of what I'm trying to say with this movie is about the representation. And, you know, Daniel's a very accomplished actor, but he's a guy who, quite frankly, he should have been a lead already. He's my favorite actor in the world right now. So, yeah, that's why we don't know the black characters, I think. Yeah, we should say, isn't it? Daniel Kaluuya is the star of your movie. And I had seen him from Black Mirror and Sicario.

He's just an incredible talent. Yeah, it was it was both sad and, you know, and made me feel good to be able to to to realize and be able to, like, you know, give people who are equally hardworking black actors and performers this opportunity to get these great roles as well. And then of course, I was just so honored, so honored to have actors like, you know, Bradley and Catherine and Allison, you know, take a chance with this, this movie that if it's, if it's done, if the movie's done wrong, it doesn't reflect on them very well. Let's just say that. That's true. They had to, they had to buy into some notion. They had to trust me. Yeah. Were you surprised by how overwhelmingly positive the reception for the movie was? Yeah. You know, I was surprised how overwhelming it was.

You know, it's like you make a movie and, I mean, for me, you know, some people make movies and the idea is like, hey, if you get it, good for you. If you don't, fuck it. This is my voice. I'm in the vein. You know, I love, you know, like Spielberg and, you know, Tarantino. People who are making, you know, they're doing their own voice, but they're also like they're honoring the audience's entertainment. So this movie was designed to catch and to be water cooler conversation, to be, oh, I can't even talk to you about it until you've seen it. I'm more surprised that it got made and got the release that it got. Yeah. Just before we started talking,

you were saying you knew that there were a couple of elements of the movie that you thought would work well because they would create conversation. I will say, like, I think 99% of people that make movies have no idea how to even do that in the first place. Like, how do you create something that creates conversation? So it's kind of amazing that you knew you could use the movie as, like, a Trojan horse for so many of these things. Was that – that was all purposeful? You were like, I'm going to create twists. I'm going to create conversation makers.

I mean, I think probably one of the first things I did when I started writing this movie, it's like you ask yourself, what do I like? And I love twists. And so I was thinking, all right, well, a movie, a good twist can turn a crappy movie into a water cooler discussion. So what if I give them like five twists in this?

Is that possible? Has anyone ever done that? And yeah. I'm curious about the flip side of the reception. So obviously the movies have been very well reviewed and it's making a lot of money. I do think that there is, and this is kind of a complicated thing to identify, but some of the targets of the satire of the movie are potentially not necessarily realizing that they're the targets or they're not properly understanding some of the nuances of the movie.

I don't know if you've noticed that at all, maybe in the way that it's been talked about in the preceding days. So you mean like people who are saying the movie's racist and that kind of thing? Well, I think there's two versions of it, right? There's certainly people who are saying the movie's racist. And that's a very strange and negative reaction. And then there's also people who are like theoretically Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener in the first half of the movie who maybe don't quite capture some of the satire that you're shooting for. I feel like I've seen both.

And I've heard a lot of both in conversation in the last 10 days. I'm not sure if any of that has come your way either. You know, I mean, I haven't gotten that reaction where people are sort of missing the point. And only sort of tangentially do I hear of people objecting to the movie. It sort of seems like most people who object haven't seen it. You know, but, you know, they're also welcome to object. Yeah, in the wrong hands, it probably could be riled up into some sort of faux controversy. But, you know, I don't see too much of that happening right now.

In the wrong hands of, you mean, a filmmaker? Or anybody. Of anybody. Audiences, people, a lot of people. You know, that was a concern of mine is like, you know, of, you mean, a filmmaker? Or anybody. Of anybody. Audiences, people, a lot of people. You know, that was a concern of mine is like, you know, yeah, you never, I'm putting this out there and it's got its intended effect. But, yeah, who knows? Maybe this will create a civil war. Who knows?

That would have been an even bigger response. That would have been a bigger response. So I saw the movie a second time, and it was a very rewarding experience. Thank you. The script is a real Swiss watch, and there's a lot of clues baked inside. I'm curious, and I would encourage people to see it a second time for that reason. I'm curious if you went back after maybe writing it straight through, if you went back to try to add in some little Easter eggs and nuggets,

or if that was something that you were doing kind of from the very beginning. A little of both. I mean, you know, I probably wrote 30 to 40 drafts of the script. So it always evolved. It always, you know, every time I'd pass it, I'd come up with something. I'd be like, oh, you know what? This will plant this payoff later. It was all very intentional.

I have to say my presumption was like any filmmaker is doing this and that I didn't necessarily think the audience would key into all of it as much as they are. So it's very cool, very encouraging. Definitely going to keep that part of the technique in the future. Yeah, you've created a lot of internet content in the last few days. I love it. I'm curious what it's like to see all of your creativity get memed. You know, it's really Get Out has become like a social media monster. It's very cool. I mean, you know, and obviously it's like we had a little practice with Key & Peele, very memeable. This is just hitting the timing of this and it's just hitting in a really fun, ridiculous way.

And it's so satisfying because more than anything, any sort of one point I'm trying to make with this movie i wanted i wanted a to kind of offer a like a fun starting point for racial conversation and uh you know maybe some new touchstones in how we discuss race um so you know when I see things like the sunken place or the teacup kind of creating some iconic meaning, I do feel like it's filling some gap in what our racial conversation was. Yeah, every visual choice too is really loaded. You've got lacrosse stick and the concept of tea and the teacup and all those things kind of being destroyed. Is all of that stuff happening ahead of time before you're shooting? Or was the set, like, more open? And were you guys improvising or adding new things at the last minute?

Both. I mean, there's a lot planned. But then, you know, I'll be on set and, you know, I'm trying to figure out, okay, what's the weapon Jeremy should have? Is it going to be a lacrosse stick or a golf club? Oh, you know what? Funny Games did the golf club. Let's go lacrosse stick. So, yeah, that's every conversation you have with every department head.

You're trying to, like, train them how I'm thinking about this movie and that, you know, every choice is either has some sort of satiric thing or some other meaning or three meanings. It's just a constant sort of state of mind. We're going to take a quick break and hear from our sponsors. Since 1993, the AV Club has produced some of the best pop culture writing out there. And now after 20 years of talking about TV, things are coming full circle for the folks at the AV Club. They're getting a TV show. The show, which is hosted by the talented John Teddy,

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And hey guys, for the rest of this conversation, Jordan and I are really going to be spoiling a lot of Get Out, so be forewarned about spoilers and enjoy the rest of the chat. Was there anything you couldn't get into this movie that you really wanted to? An idea or even a scene or segment? There was early on at one point there is a video that plays in this movie that We're entering a spoiler territory.

We're entering spoiler territory. But there's a video that the lead character watches that answers some questions and sort of sets up this process that he's going to be going through. In the original draft of the script, there's this sort of musical torture sequence that is is replaced.

What was the soundtrack to that sequence? It was James Taylor's You Got a Friend. All you got to do is call And I'll be there, yeah, yeah, yeah You've got a friend Which is a great song, but I'm really into the idea of taking a sort of upbeat or pleasant song and giving it the horror context where now you can't hear it the same way. So I had, you know, Chris is basically forced to listen to You Got a Friend over and over again.

That sounds pleasant. Which, yeah, would – and then there was a whole reason and a way that I tied into why that was necessary for the process. But, you know, very early on it was like, okay, so how many times can we afford James Taylor's You Got a Friend written by Carole King? Maybe once. So that went away. And then I came up with the video, which I think is actually better. Yeah, and you do give us a couple of great musical moments. The song playing in Jeremy's car kind of does that a little bit for us. And we get a little bit of the Dirty Dancing soundtrack in a very – In Redbone.

In Redbone, yeah, exactly. This is the difference between early making the movie when we don't know how good it's going to be. I should say they don't know how good it's going to be. Then a little bit later in the process

when they sort of see the movie and now I can be like, hey, can I possibly add the dopest hip-hop track, soul track? I don't know what Red Bull is. R&B track by Childish Gambino from the last two months. And I'm like, oh, okay. We get it now.

Yeah, it's an amazing thing, too. I mean, that song is two months old, three months old. And it just feels very present. It feels very of the moment. Yeah. And that was, that was such an important, you know, I had Donald in a couple months ago to watch the movie and I knew I wanted to use this track. And he loved it.

And, you know, just getting to put that in, I knew it was just that was going to be the little the cherry on top. As far as telling the audience, this movie is right now. This this you couldn't make this movie half a year ago. Yeah, it's happening now. It's amazingly effective. So we'll just do a couple of spoilery things at the at the end here. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions. You talked last week a bit about an alternate ending that you had discussed.

I'm curious if there was ever a time when you thought that the movie should not end with Chris escaping from the horror. If he should have a – if there should be sort of a down note on the movie. Is that – would it have ended that way? Yeah. You know, I wrote – like I said, I did a lot of drafts. I wrote many endings to it. And, yes, one of the endings does not end. A couple of them didn't end as happily as this.

You could probably sort of figure out the direction that I was going. But, you know, one of the one of the big moments in this movie, spoiler alert, is that when the cops arrive in this movie, the entire audience realizes that cops, this is the one horror movie where the cops arriving is not a good thing. Yeah, you are an icon of the TSA now. Yes. And so when the cops arrived from that point forward, we went a darker route. Or I went a darker route with the script. And it was, you know, that was because the, you know, the time I was writing it in, I felt like we needed this wake-up call and we needed to kind of make that point

that we know what would happen if Chris were to be rolled up on by a cop in the particular moment he's rolled up on. So, but yeah, then ultimately when we got the new ending, you know, by the time I changed it, which I also had written this ending early on too. So it was, it was kind of like I was, I had, you know, I had a little spectrum of like four or five different ways it could go. By the time we were making the movie, it was clear that this, you know, the way it ends with a big cheer was the way to go. And that that moment when the cops arrive is in itself does the whole job of telling the audience, look, you know what this means. And that if you know what it means, I don't need to tell you anymore.

Now let's have some fun. Yeah. I mean, it's just beautifully alluded to at the beginning of the movie with the cop scene when Chris's character and Rose's character are pulled over. And there's already this kind of built up tension in our head where we know there's an untrustworthy cop in the vicinity. Yeah. And you know what? I mean, even without that scene, it probably would have played the same. It's true. Because that's what we've been looking at. So one thing, my producer and I were talking about this yesterday. I'm curious.

The decision to not have Chris kill Rose seemed very specific as well. I'm curious about the thinking behind that and if that had changed at any time either. Yeah. I mean, I had every at any time either. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I had every version of the script. This, you know, to me, the one that we used is the right one. And it was, I was questioned by it, questioned about it in the making. And sort of I wanted to stick with my guns here because the audience kind of thinks they want that in the moment.

I don't think they actually did do want that. And to me, the whole idea is Chris is escaping. He's got to get out. He's committing violent acts for survival. And this moment you're describing is a moment where he's faced with killing out of anger. And so I wanted that, you know, I wanted him to hold on to his humanity and draw that line with what type of violence we should be cheering on. Not that any violence should be cheered on, but violence for survival, violence for self-preservation

is something I think everybody can understand. Self-defense is where it's needed, right? So I just wanted to draw that line and say, look, we're not going to take my lead character's soul. We're not going to turn him into what he's fighting. So you've said you want to make three or four more social thrillers along these lines. I'm curious if that starts now for you or if you feel like you need to do something slightly different to get some room between the next approach. Yeah, good question. I mean, like I said, like these other concepts are things I have begun working on.

I've been working on for a while. Get Out was the first one to reach its sort of maturity. Did Get Out have to be the first one? Was that kind of once you got the sense that you were going to be able to make this movie that you were like this is part of a triptych or a quadrilogy or something? When, when Get Out as a story, you know, started, the connections started coming together. It was a sign to me like, okay, this is the one out of all my ideas. This is the one that's reaching its readiness. I, you know, I, I, not until the movie actually came out, you know, so I buried my head into this movie. Not until it's come out have I realized, oh, okay, this is – I think people want to see more of these and that's great.

I loved doing this and I'm going to – it looks like I'm going to have the opportunity to do more. So let's do these other ones. So I will need some time to make sure they're as good as Get Out. And no, I'm not trying to take any breaks, although I am, you know, I'm EPing the Tracy Morgan show on TBS right now. You know, helping him with his comeback is awesome and rewarding. He's awesome. There's a couple other... I've got the... Monkey Paw Productions is my company. I've got a TV deal with Sonar. So we're going to get the TV side of things started and going in this direction as well.

But as far as my personal passion, writing and directing these social thrillers is going to be it. Yeah, I feel like among film fans that I know, it's like we have a new guy. We have a new, like, great American director. This is a really cool moment. You know, that's, like, the coolest thing. That's the, you know, I'm such a film. Like, there's no dream, no monetary dream, no nothing that's as cool as, like, kind of feeling like I'm in the nerd-dress sphere. That's true.

You're in the great game. I'm in the great game. I love it. Jordan, congratulations. Thank you, man. And thank you so much for coming in today. I appreciate the conversation. Thank you, man.

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