The Big Picture - ‘Nope’ With Jordan Peele!

Episode Date: July 22, 2022

‘Nope,’ Jordan Peele’s third feature film as writer-director, is in theaters now. Sean and Van Lathan dig into this complex, fascinating extraterrestrial tale (1:00), before Peele himself joins to talk about how and why he made his movie (1:05:00). Host: Sean Fennessey Guests: Jordan Peele and Van Lathan Producer: Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. I'm Sean Fennessey, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about nope. Yep! Jordan Peele's third feature film as writer-director is out now, and so today we will be diving deep into this extraterrestrial tale in depth with the man himself.

Jordan was one of our first ever guests on The Big Picture, and we have talked to him about all of his films. Simply one of the most exciting filmmakers to come along in the last 10 years. Hope you'll stick around for our chat and see this movie on the big screen. I also hope you will stick around for this conversation I'm about to have with Van Lathan, Midnight Boys, Higher Learning, many other things here on the Ringer Podcast Network. will stick around for this conversation i'm about to have with van lathan midnight boys higher learning many other things here on the ringer podcast network van when we last spoke on the show i asked you to call your shot i said what's the next movie coming out that you want to discuss

sight unseen you picked nope why did you choose nope because like you said jordan jordan pill i like you said in the open jordan pill is not just uh an exciting filmmaker he's a consequential one he means something. You know, he means something. His movies say something, they mean something. They test the best talent in the industry with very heady and highbrow concepts

and they're ambitious. You know, there's a way to do horror that is obviously gore based. There's a way to do horror that's supernatural basedre-based. There's a way to do horror that's supernatural-based, which is my least favorite because it's the scariest. And then there's a way to do horror that folds society in on itself

and makes us look at how scary we are. And Jordan Peele has mastered that art. So tell me about your relationship to his previous two films before we get into the conversation on Nope. And we'll have a two-part conversation on Nope. One that is largely spoiler-free, and then I think we should spoil the movie a bit too for people who've seen it. Because there's a lot to unpack in Nope.

But first, so Get Out and Us. Get Out, massive, almost unforeseeable sensation. How did Get Out strike you? So I was agnostic on Get Out. Wow. Like before the movie came out. Oh, okay. Okay, before the movie came out.

I was pretty agnostic. And I remember I was at the office and I was talking to the kids, you know, because I would go, I stay in the know, Sean, so I go talk to the kids. Sure, yeah. You know, I go talk to the interns. Sure, yeah. I go talk to the interns. I go talk. And they were so excited to see Get Out. And I was like, really?

And they were like, yeah, I hear that Jordan Peele's making the movie. And I'm thinking, we're going back to Keanu. And it didn't sell it for me at first. I wasn't paying attention to it. I wasn't seriously looking at it. It was my film snobbery that was getting in the way. So I'm like, come back home. I tell Kalika, I say, hey, let's give the Jordan Peele Get Out movie a chance.

And she goes, really? I'm like, yeah, yeah, let's go see it. Let's go see it. Walk into the film and blew me away. It blew me away in every way the movie can blow you away. The style of the movie blew me away. The direction of the movie blew me away. From scene to scene, there was an incredible amount of tension and purpose to the film. can blow you away. The style of the movie blew me away. The direction of the movie blew me away.

From scene to scene, there was an incredible amount of tension and purpose to the film. That purpose got perverted and sort of mangled almost. It's like almost the movie folded upon itself and came out in this weird, jagged sort of structure at the end where it was just cutting you from all sides and i didn't know that he had the expertise to do that because it was so masterfully done it was sharp um and after that i was an immediate fan and to do that and to take a concept like cultural appropriation and make something that's so scary to us, but sometimes for reasons that we can't really articulate, and making it to something that's that weighty and that concept-driven was amazing. And I really appreciated that movie. In addition to loving the movie, and I've talked about it a lot over the years. I talked about it a lot when it was up for Oscars, before Jordan won Best Original Screenplay.

I talked about it on when it was up for oscars before jordan won best original screenplay i talked about on the rewatchables um i think one of the things that one of the best takeaways from it aside from the content of the film and the ideas that it it suggests and shares and maybe makes some people aware of who weren't aware of them in the first place is it was a huge hit it was a really big movie and it it i think it paved the way for jordan as a filmmaker obviously to become a brand name and it also paved the way for a certain kind of horror storytelling that frankly most people are not as good at as jordan and so it's a little bit of a double-edged sword there where it's exciting that movies like this can still get made i'm always banging the drum for original storytelling one of the best things about nope is that it's a big budgeted movie dropping right in the middle

of the summer and there's nothing on the left and there's nothing on the right. This is the only movie to go see in movie theaters this weekend, which is fantastic. Us, on the other hand, is a really interesting one because by the time Us came along, the idea of Jordan Peele's next movie was hugely anticipated and we were all waiting for it. And it was very financially successful. And it was fairly critically well-received as well. But I think that there was a little bit of confusion about what that movie actually was, and what it meant, and what he was trying to say with it. And Amanda and I actually did a couple of different episodes about it,

and I talked to Jordan about it. Jordan, to his credit, is pretty circumspect about the ideas he's trying to attack, which I think is very wise. I think over-explaining the intentions of your movie is not necessarily a good idea. But what did you make of Us? How did you feel about it? Didn't like it. Us was a film that was insanely well-made with one of the best performances of that year, in my opinion, Lupita Nyong'o in the movie.

Winston Duke is somebody who I always loved. The movie was intriguing. The movie was visually amazing to look at, but it was more like going to a museum, a really beautiful museum than it was actually experiencing a movie because there just wasn't enough there for me to say that I enjoyed it. I've never seen it again since the first time that I saw it. Watching the movie when I saw it was incredible because of the atmosphere that I

was in around so many talented people and we were all sitting around watching a movie, but I didn't get it. And not only did I not get it, but I wasn't curious enough to go back and try because it just didn't, I would have either wanted that movie to be way simpler or way more complex, but it didn't do either for me. And to be honest with you, a lot of people that were with me when I saw it, they didn't dig it either. But I think to be real with you, there was a little bit of, I think a lot of the response to the film is looking at the movie. I'm going to be honest with you, Sean. I think a lot of people who say that they really enjoyed Us,

I know for a fact that some of those people aren't telling the truth. Are you trying to implicate me in that as someone who really enjoyed it? No, no, no, no, not at all. I'm saying Us kind of ended up being everything that Get Out wasn't. We didn't remember us.

We don't celebrate us. There's nothing from us that really mattered at all to us. Get Out, we still say the sun can place all the time. People still talk about the tea. It's just the movie didn't resonate the same way with people, at least the people that I talked to. I know it's critically very acclaimed and made a shit ton of money, but that one didn't work for me.

Not a whack movie. He's far too talented to make a bad movie, but he can definitely make films. There are good films I just don't like, and maybe Us is one of those. Can I give you my comparison with Get Out and Us in the world of rap? Sure, let's do it. It was written. Yeah. It's the same person. It's the's it's it's the same person it's the same tone

it's the same storytelling style half of it i think is still him at his best and the other half is just a lot of songs produced by track masters and it's like there's just a there's something that is like it's not incomplete but it almost it's it's the rare case actually where i feel like he was working in service of the big reveal at the end of the movie and it actually would have been well served to be more like a miniseries or a tv show which is odd because i fucking hate when they do that when they make miniseries when they should have been films but you know the movie is is straining so hard to get to this kind of shocking revelation that you don't fully understand

the shape of the story that he's trying to tell. That being said, I agree with you about, I really agree with you about the performances. I think the performances in all of his movies are stellar, which is a sign of a great filmmaker. I think he also, at this point, he kind of codified like his team, you know, his composer, Michael Ables,

his editor who he's worked with on all three films. He has a crew now, the way that the best auteurs, the best genre filmmakers build a crew. And then what you see across their work is a consistency. And maybe they swap in one person and another person to change something up. But I love the idea of him building his little world. You know, earlier this week on the show, we did an episode about The Thing. John Carpenter is another guy who does this. You know, when watching a john carpenter movie even if it's an alien story or if it's a story about you know uh you know an adventure crime story they all kind of feel tonally similar there's a vibe and so us to me like confirm the vibe nope is really

interesting i'm gonna just for the listeners give a little brief rundown of the way this story is about by the way before you do that i just want to make sure that everybody listening knows i don't co-sign any track masters slander you know what it is though legends it's just it's synergy though steve stout was managing track masters he's managing naz he's just trying to make money on top of money i don't begrudge the track masters their opportunities. I don't want to hear Street Dreams. I want to hear I Gave You Power. That's my thing. That's a hard record. You know what? Let's just table this. Let's table this conversation

to when we do the big record. Y'all haven't done the big album yet. Y'all should do the big album. You should be the host of the big album. I don't know about that. I'm not sure. I left music criticism in my past. I'm all about movies now. Give it to Charles so they have another reason to hate his ass.

That's right. Charles can invite us on and we can fight about Nas there. Right. Okay. No. Let me just describe this story as vaguely as I can for those who have not yet seen it. So it's a story about Otis Jr., Otis Haywood, and Emerald Haywood, played by Daniel Kaluuya and Kiki Palmer, respectively. They're caretakers of Haywood Hollywood Horses, a ranch

and horse trainers that have worked in the movie business for decades. After the shocking death of their father, they're left to manage their business in what is a clearly changing entertainment industry. Along the way, they encounter a former child star named Joop, who's played by the great Steven Yeun, who has opened a nearby Old old west style tourist trap amusement park and is interested in buying the horses and maybe even the ranch outright from oj and m the child's back the child star's backstory features a horrifying and brilliant flashback to an incident with an ape on the set of a sitcom that somehow becomes integrated into the story very quickly it becomes clear that something is not right at the ranch.

There's an unidentified flying object that may or may not be traversing the skies. In an effort to capture an image of this possible UFO, M and OJ set out to create this elaborate camera setup on their ranch to draw out the UFO with horses and the help of a tech salesman, Angel Torres, played by Brandon Perea, and a cinematographer played by Antlers Holst.

This is a really elaborate setup. Even just writing the description of what this movie is, I found a little bit challenging. And I wonder if that will be a stumbling block for some people. What I just described is more or less

only the first 30 to 40 minutes of the movie until things start to evolve. I'll just start with this. What do you think of Nope? Pregnant pause. Yeah. How about this?

I've liked the movie the more I've thought about it in the couple of days since we watched it, to be honest with you. And I assume that I'll like it a hell of a lot more on the rewatch. I've liked it a lot, which I'm going to see it again tomorrow. I've liked it a lot more the more that I've thought about it. And we're not to the point to where

we can really, you know, we're not to the point to where we can really, you know, we're not to the spoiler point. When the movie gets going, it is a fantastic, intriguing, absolutely, like, ridiculous, white-knuckle ride, right? It gets to that type of deal when the movie gets going, you know? Nail-biting, amazing. But there's some clunkiness. Mm-hmm. ride right it gets to that type of deal when the movie gets going you know uh nail biting amazing but there's some clunkiness along the way there's some clunk there's some the significance of the

ape backstory i am struggling to understand and like when we start talking a little bit more in depth i'll tell you why that to me is part of something that derails the movie from being like a classic right but um you know there was a long time and there was a long time in the film where i was kind of like what the hell is going on you know what i mean not that i didn't understand what was going on it was it didn't seem to be doing anything now those things get paid off at the end they do they do but the reality of it it had a shamalan-esque sort of tone and rhythm to it to where you know m nights made a couple of movies that are only rescued by the twist. That are only rescued by the twist at the end.

And you can't do it that way. The brilliance of The Sixth Sense or even Get Out is those movies are able to manage a kinetic energy through the time that they're establishing the rules of the world that you don't even know that they're giving you to where you're so intrigued by what might be going on that you're not looking for what is going on and this movie doesn't quite do that as expertly this movie is it leads you to be like well what the hell is happening you know why are we doing this why are we going here why are we doing this why are we doing that and then by the time you get to it you're like oh cool great let's go cool i get it i understand but for some people i think it probably is going to come a little bit too late to be honest with you i i think that you are right in almost everything that you said but that didn't really bother me at all and one of the reasons why is jordan peele i think as a filmmaker gives his audience a lot of credit and he is betting that people will wait they will make their way through the first hour which is doing something that his

two other films have done as well which is it's this very tricky blend of comedy and thriller horror. And there is a kind of almost like a sitcominess to some of the setup of this, of this film and Kiki Palmer's energy versus Kaluuya's energy is very different. You know, they're sort of like, you know,

bratty younger sister or more taciturn older brother. And they're giving different kinds of performances and then they introduce this angel character who is almost like comic relief almost like full-blown comic relief and and we're waiting a long long time to figure out what it is that they're trying to do what it is that kaluuya's character is thinking he wants to do what it is that is essentially like the mission of the movie the reason to continue moving forward with the film but everything you said about the movie revealing itself more and more

and becoming more and more interesting the more you think about it and the more I unpack the little details that he is sprinkling at the beginning of the movie, the more excited I am by it. And it's kind of fitting to me that we just did an episode about The Thing because this is also true of The Thing.

It's a movie that when you watch it again and when you kind of deconstruct its disparate parts parts it feels even tighter and smarter and more interesting and deeper and this is a movie that like is i don't it's not conventionally challenging the way that an art house film would be challenging but it's more challenging to me than say what shamalan or even steven spielberg does and i think I think Steven Spielberg is the other significant kind of influence on the movie. There's a lot of close encounters in this film in terms of the characters kind of constantly

looking up in the sky and wonder. And the kind of like the fear and excitement that the possibility of life from another world kind of builds in us, you know, that it's like they could be here to destroy us. They could be here to help us. The angel character is kind of like almost like um parodying that sentiment at a certain point in the film for sure the fact that they go to fries to meet him you know what i mean exactly

um i think that the difference is there is a self-reflexive quality in the movie because the movie is so much about movies and the images that we make that is so rare and so outside of what I think Spielberg and Shyamalan are after those guys are about something that I feel like is deep but not always complex and I feel like Jordan's ideas and messages in the movie are much more complex I'm being vague here obviously because I'm not trying to give away too many things about the film itself but it's a really interesting blend of like like i said like steven spielberg and i think you're right with shamon but also you know like hp lovecraft and it's kind of like it's a little bit disgusting in a way it's a little bit um absurd in

a way that those other filmmakers aren't necessarily and the other thing is just like i think every director who's been making movies in the 21st century by by their very nature kind of have to be like self-aware and almost like referencing movies all the time because now we have a hundred years of movies to look back on sure so you kind of can't make a movie without acting like you've seen every movie and i like the way that jordan acts like he's seen every movie his references are more fun for me they're more clever they're more interesting just like seeing you know the chud video cassette and the Goonies video cassette at the beginning of Us when we're watching that little TV from the 80s. This is a very similar thing where his reference points, I think, are really clever. But I wonder, do you think most audiences will get to the end of this

movie and be like, I don't know if that worked for me or that was too challenging or that was too boring or too conventional? What do you think the perception of that stuff will be? I am intrigued to see. I am super intrigued to see because most people that watch movies, for me at least, you go down there and what you're actually in search of aren't the things that we are, right? we're in search of films to be important for some reason and a movie is important to us for a litany of different reasons even though either the movie is so fun that that makes it important either the movie is so subversive that that makes it important either the movie is so ambitious that that makes it important. Most people don't think of it like that. To most people, the movie becomes something because of their connection to it. They

want to connect to it. And for certain people, I think this might be a hard movie to connect to. Like in Get Out, right? I'm not comparing this movie to Get Out. I really want to say that that's... I really want people to know this. I'm not comparing this movie to Get Out. I'm talking about Jordan Peele when it worked

100 out of 100. In that movie, you're connected to every scene because you have no idea what's going on, right? You really don't know why these people are acting this way.

All you know is that the white people are acting normal and the black people are acting crazy. That is in and of itself an incredible way to keep an audience engaged. In this film, there's nothing to really sink your teeth into until we start moving. There's nothing that's making you ask more questions besides what you're there to see, which is an extraterrestrial. But because you understand the premise of this movie is an extraterrestrial film, you're kind of like, give me the aliens that it kind of simplifies a really complex and he does in a way that is that has never been done on film before you know literally what like i'm telling everybody to go see the movie because the way he gives it to you in this i've never seen it done

this way can you i i couldn't either and i completely agree that is the reason to go where there's it's a it's a wow it's a yeah that this is really cool that he did this i've never seen it done that way before ever right and so but i guess my point is by the time that sort of happens i'm kind of looking back trying to understand why some other things in the movie needed to be there or why they made sense. And what I'm curious to see is in this era of microwaved film of superheroes,

of very direct movies with very telegraphed messages, if people will be there and give the film the patience that it needs to get rocking. And to be honest with you, I really don't know. I don't know because at first I didn't.

When I left, the more I thought about it, the more I felt it, the more I stood on it, I'm like, yo, that was a pretty good time. But initially, because I lost myself getting to the point. You know what I'm saying? I lost myself a little bit. I kept checking my watch. I know you saw that. I kept checking my watch.

Not in a... When you see me checking my watch in a movie, I'm not checking my watch to go. I'm checking my watch to say... To track where we are in the story. Where we are in the story, right? You know what I mean? I do the same thing. Yeah, I'm like, okay.

Well, shit. We only got... We're this this we're here like when when are we going you know what i mean but anyway i uh i i relate to that i think one thing that's interesting with peels films is get out's about an hour 45 minutes us is about an hour 55 minutes nope is about two hours and 10 minutes should have been shorter dog and you know this is something that happens when you get a little bit more power you get a little bit more ambition as a storyteller you start to stretch your run times you've seen

this with many filmmakers over the years it's definitely a case this movie could have been a little bit shorter it's definitely a case it could have been a little more truncated in the in the first third of it i felt like the from the end of act two all the way through act three i was like this is a fucking home run like i absolutely i loved where he took it and i thought it was really really exciting um but i i hear what you're saying i think it's a movie that has been i think critically acclaimed particularly by critics who i really like who i feel kind of you know in league with in a lot of ways and so maybe that's maybe there will be an interesting divide over time i think you're right too that audiences might struggle with a little bit of the pacing and a little bit of the decision making but i sometimes see that as a good thing i sometimes see i sometimes see like the rejection of some of the more challenging ways of telling big idea genre storytelling as a sign that a

movie is likely to endure um i will say well let's just talk a little bit about how it's made because i think that's an important part of what's so effective about it you and i saw this movie together we saw it on an imax screen I think people should try to see it on an IMAX screen if they can it's very purposefully shot that way Hoyta van Hoytema the Dutch cinematographer this is his first time working with Peele this is the guy who shot Interstellar who shot Tenet who shot Ad Astra who shot Dunkirk you can see it I, this is like the best IMAX DP in Hollywood right now. And it, the movie is meant to be, it's a cloud gazer. Literally you're meant to be looking up all the time. I felt myself turning my head. I don't know if you were doing this by the way, the camera's

moving and trying to see what was in the clouds, different parts of the screen. Yes. I was doing that. Yeah. That's a, that's a a skill that's not something you can't take stuff like that for granted and and it's really cool to see Van Hoytema and and Peele working together on something like this and then like I said you know Michael Ables is back this the composer and he's doing kind of a John Williams thing in this movie it's a lot different from those kind of tense quiet you know eerily looming scores from Get Out and Us. It's big. It's very big. The movie, in a way, is kind of a western as well. Set in kind of a western part of California.

He's got a little bit of The Magnificent Seven in there. There's a little bit of that old school Hollywood sound in there too. It's edited again by Nicholas Monster who I think is really one of the best out right now. The way he's cut Jordan's movies is really, really impressive

and really drives a kind of exciting pace. So I like how the movie is made. What the movie is actually about is deeper, a little trickier. I've been enjoying reading people's interpretations of the movie. I'm excited to talk to Jordan about why he wanted to make this movie

and why it's important and interesting to him. One thing that popped out to me is I think he's really hung up in an interesting way and maybe a little bit of a Spielbergian way on what our parents give to us. All three of his movies are very much about how parental figures drive legacy for good and for bad you know if you look at that white family in get out and you look at the grandparents and what they build in this kind of like the coagula and this cryptic system and then the way that the mother and the father figure kind of control their children and then in us obviously this idea of the doppelganger and the parents at the beginning of the film kind of you know letting the child walk away and go into this kind of funhouse mirror circumstance that leads to the telling of the story. And then in this movie, the great Keith David plays Kaluuya and Kiki Palmer's father, genre legend himself, Keith David, and him leaving this ranch to them and this business to them and their great-great-grandfather, who is a significant figure in

the telling of the story. It's the burden and the joy of what your parents give you and that really really resonates with me i love that as a theme for him did that cross your mind at all as you were watching this movie yeah so in this particular movie they keep saying nope right um i will give you that little spoiler you know and this by the way that's a very black thing that's why we understand this movie and jordan's also good at that jordan is also good at making a movie that deals making a black movie in a way that how can i say this making a movie that's so accessible to to the black audience but also deals in all of these things that black filmmakers sometimes don't deal in. You know what I mean?

Like just seeing something and going, nope, that's how we react to it. Like, oh, hell no. Right now, me and Kalika are going through something where I'm in there and she's watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

And every time I look at the TV on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer, And every time I look at the TV on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it's some crazy looking creature on there. And I'm not trying to go through that at 10 o'clock at night. I'm like, oh, hell no. I'm going in the room and watch Django. You know what I mean?

Gore that I can get into. Anyway, but in this one, in this movie, when you talk about, they keep saying that, but there's a reason why they stay and go through with this. There's a reason why this family doesn't allow fear to just make them get the hell out of town. If I see some aliens over here where I live right now, I'm out, Sean. I'm out.

I live in San Diego now, and I surf. You know, I'm gone but in this particular case it's important to understand the legacy because really OJ's character is fighting for what he's been given he's fighting to not give away what he's been given and the death of his father was so so particularly traumatic that he feels like he owes it to his family name to stick around and figure out how to stay there and without the basis of that this movie really wouldn't make a whole lot of sense because you'd ask yourself well why not why not get away from there why not leave why not go to the authorities you guys are going to see once you see the movie that everything that happens ends up being a way for them to continue to like maintain and set their roots there and

like not have to leave and go some other place which was very interesting it was interesting in that most movies about extraterrestrials are about understanding them and this or making contact with them and this movie is not this movie is not about understanding the alien it's not about making contact with the alien it's not about it and it's a very contemporary film in that sense um but none of it works unless you understand OJ and his connection to that land and why his father matters in that connection to that land. So it's very much about family,

which most great movies are, to be honest with you. I think it's an amazing point about their relationship to the idea of aliens, which is that they actually just have one purpose which is basically to profit off of the aliens yep to make some bread and once that's done you get the clear

impression that they're ready to just move on like there there is no curiosity it is means to an end and that in and of itself i think does it says a lot about our contemporary media it says a lot about our society it says a lot about people trying to hold shit together in their life and how desperate that makes them to build a surveillance system to capture an image of an alien or that may or may not be an alien just so they can make some, some money. It's fascinating.

I mean, they don't have to sell the ranch. Exactly. The thing that, that makes this movie about though, ultimately too, is just image making image, capturing, making movies. That's why I say that is because this quest to capture this image has become so vitally important. The whole movie becomes about how we see things. And in the movie, we see them a variety of different ways. Security camera footage, photos, through window panes, virtual reality headsets. There's all of these different ways of seeing the world and the movie doesn't get too cute with like using different kinds of camera stock or anything like that but perception versus reality is like one of the key themes of the movie and the perception of

reality versus say the steven young character and what he thinks he can get from this opportunity versus kiki and kaluuya's characters and what they can get from this opportunity i think is so fascinating you know if you've seen the trailer of the movie you know that the Edward Murray Bridge galloping horse animation which is kind of one of the first films uh ever made the first moving image that we we've seen before is kind of a it's kind of a skeleton key to the movie in some ways um and the idea of a black man on a horse is a pretty significant thematic image in the history of movies. We see these great movie posters in their home, the Duel of Diablo and Buck and the Preacher, these Sidney Poitier westerns that not a lot of people have seen. And Peel is building this historical world of image making and then saying, well, where are we at now as a culture as image makers you

know like what are the things that we value do we value big beautiful films do we value say the work that tmz does in capturing images do we value personal recollection or do we value like what can give us money like this is this is heady stuff for a genre movie. You know what I mean? It's, it's a big idea and it's really exciting for me, honestly, to have a big summer blockbuster horror movie that cares about these things that is invested in maybe not answering these questions, but at least forcing us to look at some of these questions while also telling a movie about what happens if aliens came,

you know, I like, it's just, it's very, very special stuff. And it's part of the reason why I think I'm so high on the movie itself is it's not afraid to say,

you should think about this. You should consider when you look at the Daily Mail what you're really doing. You know, you should consider when you watch a movie, who made the movie? It's not just the director

and the actors. It's all of these other people, you know, making a cinematographer, a character in this movie. That's not a mistake. No, it's not at all it's like some michael hanky in there as well you know what i mean definitely it is in its criticism of that stuff also in its criticism of nostalgia for a lot of the fact a lot of people should i say are going to movies right now to feel things that they felt in the past right to see characters that they felt in the past again in new and different ways and maverick jurassic park all that think about our summer right now yeah and so like a subplot in this

movie is the fact that somebody that is a is a fixture of that nostalgia had a traumatic, really crazy thing happen to them that just might have scarred them for their entire life. And because of who they used to be, they're actually doing something pretty horrible to make ends meet now. And they end up kind of being on the other side of that. You know what mean now i still don't think look man like there's a part of the film when you talk about the the old television television show and steven yun's character that i actually want to ask you about right now because you know he plays a child star do you want to make this do you want to officially set up our spoiler conversation here so we can dig into some of the details we have to yeah i think that we have if you have not seen the film

and you don't want to hear any more about this movie, you know, stop listening. Come back to the show, hopefully. I do think it's important for people who have seen the film for us to dig into some of the more specific decision-making.

This is the part I was most interested to speak with you about as well, which is I'll just set it up for us quickly. Okay. The film opens with a flashback as actually all of Jordan's films do now. They open with these

kind of like little mini stories the same way Stanfield's character opens Get Out the same way we see this television screen at the beginning of Us.

And in this film, we don't really see very much, but we hear a lot about what happens at the shooting of a sitcom in what seems like the mid-90s.

A sitcom about a family. It's 1998. 1998. I said it. Yeah. A family who has a pets, a sitcom about a family... It's 1998. 1998. Remember they said it. Yeah. A family who has a pet ape, a pet chimpanzee. And there is a terrible tragedy

on the set of this show when the chimpanzee loses its bearings and gets very violent and really badly hurts and maybe even kills some of the cast members of this show during filming. And Steven Yeun's character is a young boy during this filming, which we later learn as we start to

meet his character in the movie. So they show this ape in very significant detail. One thing I learned actually is that Terry Notary, who did a lot of work on the Planet of the Apes films and also in the film The Square, plays the ape in a kind of CGI fashion. So we see the sequence a couple of times in the film from different angles. What are you wondering about? I'm wondering about what it has to do with anything. I understand that it's maybe a commentary on something and it has to do with Steven Yeun's characterization,

but it felt shoehorned in for just the purpose of adding a scary and really disturbing sequence in the movie uh the scene that you get in the first scene of the movie when the the the chimpanzee the chimpanzee turns around and he looks he looks directly into the camera but we don't know that he's actually looking at the kid in that scene that is actually pretty fucking disturbing it's harrowing yeah it's very scary um we come back to that scene in the middle of the movie and we get kind of this whole he gets we get a description of it before it actually happens and i still was unable to connect what that really means to the movie. Even Steven Yeun's character in and of itself, he's fantastic in the role,

but I don't know how much that whole thing worked for me. And it actually, it felt like after a while of watching the movie, that what they were trying to do was just string together enough really terrible things. Like even the way Keith David dies in the movie is fucking terrible. Enough terrible things to keep you watching until they get you to the point that the movie is actually trying to make. Like watching the scene of the chimp freak out on the cast was really fucked up. It does feel like it's possible that he had this vision in his mind of this sequence and he found a way to integrate it into this movie because there are times when it doesn't feel connected. Now, I'll tell you what I think it means. I'll tell you why.

Yeah, give it to me. You mentioned that the young character is traumatized by this, but is also effectively profiting from it by creating a kind of mini museum of the tragedy inside of this amusement park that he's built. And that people come and they pay big sums of money to stay overnight in this little museum of tragedy. Simultaneously, his characters come up is when at jupiter's claim this amusement park they attempt to have a kind of show to draw out the ufo and to show us what the ufo actually is right and they use a live horse to do so which is the the horse is sort of like the tractor beam for the ufo we learned because the ufo itself this is a major spoiler reveal is not actually a spaceship it is an organic super being that flies around yeah and it can transmogrify itself to be shaped like a ufo to fly faster or what have you it's not explained but it is like it is a giant alien flying through

the air yeah and it's sucking things up through this mouth that we think is this sort of tractor beam so anyhow you know the young character i think what we see here is like he didn't learn his lesson the same way that when you see that you shouldn't be putting a chimpanzee on the set of a sitcom that we shouldn't be trying to control nature we shouldn't be trying to profit from things that are not meant to be contained in this way i think the idea here is that we do not have control over our fate when we fuck with earth and in the same idea here is that we do not have control over our fate when we fuck with Earth. And in the same way

that that chimp should not have been trying to control them and if a balloon pops on set it could lead to some terrible outcome. Trying to draw out a UFO to earn a little extra scratch

at your amusement park is a dangerous game. And how we profit off of the natural world, you know, we see this. We see the cinematographer watching this footage in other parts of the natural world. You know, we see this. We see the cinematographer watching this footage in other parts of the film of, you know,

snakes and lions and alligators attacking and the kind of uncontrollable sense of the world around us. And yet we constantly try to conquer it. We constantly try to say, we are the leaders of this space. And I think it's an interesting contrast to M and Oj who are like

i don't need to beat this thing i just need to get something from it and then i'm going to get out of dodge and but they did beat it though so that to me i think is where a lot of people have identified the critical flaw of the movie is the ending of the movie, which is that the, the movie has a kind of Spielbergian uplift in M's character, basically like tricks and defeats this alien, this giant alien. And when that happens, it does,

it kind of, it corrupts what we think is kind of the core theme of the movie. I had that same reaction. You know, I don't, I don't think Jordan is going to talk about that with me, but I really want to hear him talk through setting us up, I think,

with this really intelligent and thoughtful message about what we have done to our planet, to wildlife, to all of these different concepts. Literally, the world is on fire right now. I mean, there are wildfires all over the world at the moment.

So it's a very resonant idea. But I guess does he reject his own premise is a very valid criticism. Yeah. And our relation to spectacle, how we've become addicted to spectacle, how we've become addicted to the next spectacle, to where it seems like we're living our lives only between spectacles. You know what I mean? We mark time that way. Yeah, you know what I mean? So he's

indicting all of that and he's discussing all of that in a very clear way. And so for me, there's a part in the movie where you feel like the chimpanzee might attack Steven Young's young character, but he does their gimmick with him. He reaches out to give him a fist bump.

So for some reason, there was a connection there between them that made him not kill. And then he gets domed right there. After that, he gets shot in the head. So I was wondering if that was going to happen at the end of this film if there was going to be some understanding between this extraterrestrial being um who by the way might be an extraterrestrial but for all we know could be from like the ocean or the center of the earth or great point it's not it's not explained and wonderfully so there's no like we don't get a moment where a scientist comes in and is like

here's what i believe this creature is which i fucking love i love that there's none of that yeah so it for all we know this could have been something that rose in the last a thousand years and it's been living out whatever but um i thought there was going to be a moment where oj and the creature or kiki and the creature understood each other but no like man triumphed in the end like they do and everything so i was kind of wondering what the purpose the steven yun stuff and all of that stuff all that backstory for me, it clogged it up a little bit. Maybe that's it, though. Maybe it's just that

we are a brutal people and that we are constantly trying to defeat what we can't understand. You know, like, maybe that is ultimately what he's trying to say. I mean, I think the spectacle

point you're making is the other major theme of the movie and maybe the one that is more effectively unpacked. Because what we learn is this creature,

whatever it is, if you don't look it in the eye it won't come after you it won't bother you yeah and that's a pretty easy to understand message about that spectacle and that kind of you know that tragedy porn that we kind of surround ourselves with all the time which is if you start to pretend like it doesn't exist maybe it'll go away or the incident the the events it'll go away or the incident, the events won't go away, but the way that we commodify the events might be lessened. You know,

I, I'm so, so happy to be talking to you about this because there's literally a moment where a TMZ reporter arrives to capture what's happening in this story. And it's a moment of the movie. It's an incredible sequence. We see this guy on a motorcycle in a mirrored helmet.

He's got a portable camera. And you, of course, worked for TMZ. You've always been very thoughtful about your time there and what it represents to our culture. What did you think about

the way that they introduced that aspect into the part of the story? Small story here. Just a little one. I know the stories, some people love them, some people hate them. Small story here. Just a little one. I know the stories, some people love them, some people hate them.

Small story here. Tell a story. Manny Pacquiao said something homophobic back in the day. He said it, he's done it a couple times to be honest with you. But he said something homophobic

back in the day. And they sent a camera guy to wild card boxing on Vine. I guess wild card is on Vine um might be on highland anyway but they said they sent the they sent the guy to wild card right to get a shot of manny pacquiao walking in i can't remember who he was preparing to fight and the guy missed the shot he was fired immediately. It wasn't like, it wasn't like, hey,

how did you not get the shot? Manny Pacquiao walked in, he was given the question and given the parameters and given the means to get the shot that the TMZ felt like they needed and he didn't get it automatically fired.

I was sent to wildcard the next day to wait, to see if Manny Pacquiao would come. I walked up into wildcard. I looked around. He wasn't in there. I saw Freddie Roach wasn't in there, but I was just told whatever you do, do not miss this shot. Don't miss it. Your entire life is now about getting one piece of video, one soundbite. And it's the scariest time to work there because it really doesn't matter if you see Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears having sex on the side of the thing. If you don't get what they ask you to get because that shot is not content, it's money. That obsession is so well played out in that scene. That obsession with getting the video, that obsession with getting the shot, even after he's all broken up from having fallen off of his motorcycle, he's desperate to succeed in the reason why he's there. As are they, by the way. They're risking

their lives to get a shot of this thing for the money steven yun's character is risking his life either unbeknownst or be known to him to get a shot of this thing our cinematographer friend who is only in the movie for a little bit but that's a fucking thousand like in the movie that's a dion waiters future award winner right there he's played by michael wincott the iconic horror movie thriller villain who you'll recognize instantaneously even if you don't know his name and who has the the graveliest voice in movie history right he like he everybody is risking their life for one piece of content for some money for some fame not trying to understand this thing not trying to connect with this thing like we said before the tmz part of it sets the tone for that because tmz

is trying to make money off of them so everybody is doing that and the way that that guy was in the scene unfortunately that's what it is your mom on the phone fuck it you need the shot uh you see a car accident somebody's on fire fuck it you need the shot there was a tmz reporter one time between me and you and the millions of people that are here this this podcast there's a tmz reporter one time that they actually had to move out of the city because he captured a murder on camera facts oh facts they have to move the guy to new york for a while because somebody got shot outside of a club but he got on his camera rather than not publish it they published it and moved him to another city what the fuck so so all of that is real that's a and that's the thing is that as a absurd and

ridiculous as some of this story is a lot of it feels we're pretty grounded and it does take as we said i would say about 45 to 55 minutes for the story to kind of coalesce and for us to feel like we really know at least some of the motivations of the characters and he does a little bit of wrong footing you know there's that scene in the in the barn or in the in the stable where the kids dressed as aliens pop out that is like really effective it's scary until you learn it's very and that scene is particularly shamalan-esque it feels almost like a nod to signs um and really well shot but even then we're kind of like is this even a movie about aliens like is this even where is

he taking us and part of that is when you're a filmmaker who understands your own power you can force people to wait it's like yeah but it's like y'all here because you saw get out and you liked it and so you will check this movie out almost on the strength of my name which I think is so cool but also you know it might frustrate some people might challenge some people

and he's definitely going to challenge people i mean the other thing this storytelling style does is it just creates the opportunity for amazing images like the likes of which we don't really see in a lot of movies i mean it's notable that von hoitomo only really works with like christopher nolan i don't know if jordan peele is yet on the level of a christopher nolan in terms of image making but he's he's making his way this is the most grand scale movie he's made i'm interested to see if he goes bigger and bigger and bigger but you know that that cloud in the sky that doesn't move with the flag dangling from it that is you see on the poster that's an awesome original image you know when they when yun and the jupiter's claim audience gets sucked. You know, when they, when Yun and the Jupiter's Claim audience

gets sucked up into the creature and we see them in sort of like the, the esophagus of it. It's so fucking nuts. Amazing. I mean,

just so sick and scary and the sound design. It's fucking terrifying, man. It's great stuff. That's really, really good. And the chimp attack, like you said, the chimp looking into the camera is really, really powerful powerful and then the one that really sticks with me is the the

blood soaked rainstorm you know the creature like i don't even know what it was it's sort of like vomiting or yeah because greeting it had uh at that point it had had the yeah it was vomiting well not really vomiting it was it was spitting out all of their stuff it i think i don't know if it was used to eating that much at one time ah okay so it ate all of those people and remember because all their cheese and all of their stuff is coming out too but a lot of the blood is coming too because he ate like 30 people at one time actually maybe even more you know i like that you say he's a he are we sure he's a he it's toxic it's got to be a man the other thing too is i wanted to get your take about the transformation of the creature in the final 10 minutes of the film so what we see is mostly this saucer like figure and then it transforms into this i would say like kind of kubrickian ribbon like

yeah it was beautiful hayo miyazaki kind of you know animation really it's like it's an unusual creature that changes its shape what did you think of the decision to have it changed do you think do you did you did you understand it right away did you get what he was trying to do? I mean, I think I did. I think at that particular point, what we're looking at is, I mean, look, in a lot of horror movies, you get this situation where the antagonist of the horror movie stops fucking with you and goes, hey, here's what I really look like. You know what I mean? The mask is removed. Yeah, here's what i really look like you know you know what i mean like like the mask is removed yeah here's what i really look like you know like oh you think you know this is my real form um i don't know if it's actually doing that uh what i took from that part is that we had looked at this thing as this big chunk it almost had zero personality it was

this force of nature but it was a living being and it was a living being that wasn't looking to get along with us right where it's food but at the same time it was beautiful and elegant in a way it was beautiful and elegant um and should i be feared or am i just am i just living being am i just a living being? Am I just, yeah. I watched a video just before we came here today and it was about this bear that attacked this guy at the circus. The guy's fine. The bear's somewhere chilling in Russia.

So everybody's okay. The people at the circus freaked out, but I'm on the bear side. And watching this, when it started started to turn it actually changed my emotional connection to it because i was like it's pretty like it's pretty it's not some round circle with a hole in it it's this beautiful living part of whatever ecosystem it inhabits that might not even have the wherewithal to understand who we are or why we're afraid of it um and that's actually the picture of it that she got she didn't get the picture of in its flying saucer predator form she got the picture of it in its full regalia i don't know if it's its true self but it's a

different version of it um i think obviously it's very cool visually but for me i just think at that time all of the all bets were off and it was showing us what it really is or maybe even going into some type of actual predator mode where it's trying to scare you right or where it's trying to you know animals get to the point where they're like they're trying to show you what they are. Because at that point, it's feeling threatened as well. So I really didn't know what it was trying to do. But for us as the viewer, I think it was to connect us to it as a living being that's multifaceted, you know? I had the same read on it.

I know I've made this point a couple of times, but come on. This is like, this is not what happens in a Fast and Furious movie. You know, like a giant alien doesn't transform into like a beautiful ribbon sculpture and then make us wonder about how we operate. They've been to space. And a Honda Accord. Yeah, it was bite your tongue.

Dumb as hell. You bite your tongue. Dumb as hell, man. You bite your tongue. Nothing against Luda. I love Luda. You know, nothing against Tyuda i love luda you know nothing against tyrese he's fine it was dumb as hell compared to a movie like this um did you um i i did bump a little bit

on the happy ending you know i thought it was i thought the reveal of kaluuya's character surviving and in the dust and in that kind of perfect framing the the way that you'd see like Jimmy Stewart or John Wayne in a, in a Western, you know, in the swirl and then standing astride and his Scorpion King sweatshirt, by the way, we neglected to mention the Scorpion King sweatshirts, fabulous stuff.

I thought that was a great image. I did. I, I wanted a little more tragedy and consequence and to show us that it costs something to make a little dough off the world, but maybe it doesn't cost anything. I don't know. What did you think of that? Well, I mean, it costs something to make a little dough off the world. But maybe it doesn't cost anything. I don't know.

What did you think of that? Well, I mean, it cost Steven Yeun something. Sure. So, you know, it cost him. I think for our protagonist, we lost enough, man. It killed his dad, you know, on accident. You know, like he, remember another thing that we haven't mentioned is he was trying to buy back these horses. He didn't realize they were all dead, you know like he remember another thing that we haven't mentioned is he was trying to buy back these horses he didn't realize they were all dead you know and so i think we had reached

really in the entire movie all we did was watch his family lose they needed a win what i didn't like is that our extraterrestrial creature or whatever it is that it had to die. I don't think that's right. You know, if these are little green men who are coming from some galaxy far, far away and they're trying to take over the world, then they gotta go. You know,

give them some bacteria, let them turn into stone, they're out of here. Okay? But in this particular situation, this is a thing that's hovering over one area i feel like we can arrange something here like where yo you know maybe we give you some other cows we're not using you you know like you could chill or maybe maybe there's something to be said you don't think so sh? You feel like it had to die? I think communication would have been challenging. I don't think this giant ribbon creature really had much to say to us,

and so there was only one option. Also, you know, the ending, the way that the releasing of the giant Jupiter's claim balloon and then the creature swallowing the balloon and it popping and then exploding it is just a perfect Jaws homage. It's just the ultimate like here's in case you were wondering

what movie I'm most inspired by here. I'm going to put it for you on a platter. I think some people might be annoyed by that. I thought it was great. I thought it was a great nod. I thought it was really exciting to watch peel be like I am leveling up. I am going to Spielberg territory. You know, I feel that I can get into this stratosphere as a

filmmaker so i thought it was very loving um the creature had to die i guess maybe for the same reason maybe we arrived at the explanation for the same reason that the chimp had to die you know it's like we won't survive if we don't take this thing out and maybe there's something a little more primal on his mind you know maybe it's a little bit more like it's kill or be killed it doesn't seem in keeping with a lot of Jordan's ideas about humanity, but there's something interesting there, you know? Yeah. I mean, we don't know if it can reproduce.

Maybe, you know, if there's one creature, that's fine. But if there's 200 of those motherfuckers, we in trouble. Oh, it's a rat. Yeah. Yeah. So we don't really know. But no, this is, I think the most interesting thing

in the movie at the end is, and we talked about the fact that it subverts its point a little bit, but the fact that this family made it through this intact. And they weren't. This was a family that wasn't intact. Kiki hadn't been around.

The father's gone. And she had never, we haven't really talked about her art that much, that this was a male dominated thing and it never included her. This was a father and son sort of situation and she never really got to be a part of it. And because she never got to be a part of it,

she felt on the outside of it um and this whole ordeal ends up making her a de facto part of her family which she hadn't really felt like you know and making her a true artist with the image she captures yeah it will be more iconic than anything that her family had made prior to that up you know connecting her to her great great great great grandfather who was on that horse you know and that's a very elegant connection that the movie makes um i think it's a great point you know just to wrap up kiki palmer is someone who i think is getting a lot more famous right now even if it's not necessarily for all of the work that she does she's been she's been a child star. She's been acting a lot.

She was in Hustlers a couple of years ago. This is probably her biggest starring role to date. Of course. I thought she was wonderful. I think she brings

a real energy and vitality to movies. She has a real sense of humor too and so she's a good fit for balancing those two things. Kaluuya, I thought was really

interesting in this movie. Yeah. I thought he was doing like a little bit of a um i don't know i don't want to say brando necessarily but like really internal and closed off and almost like incoherent at times like incomprehensible his line readings which feels very purposeful and is so different from say judas and the black messiah where he was just like incredibly voluble and and clear figure who's always giving speeches i've always loved kaluuya i think he's such an

interesting actor but i thought this was a really cool balance and a really cool like pairing of performances from those two what do you think of them as as the leads first of all she was delightful she always is they gave i feel like this was Kiki's opportunity to really showcase her skill set on a major, major level. And the fact that she can elevate scenes in movies by bringing a mixture of who we know her to be, and also this dramatic exuberance that just oozes off of the screen right she you can put her with anyone um she can bring the best out of them and she can also like turn a scene up um with that or with some heavy emotional stuff she was just absolutely fantastic with daniel people he was playing a horse dude i've been around these guys my entire life some of them relate to the animals better than they do to people like my father um was a rodeo rider and a horseman i've been riding since i was five years old there are guys that just they're guys

that work horses out and then go live normal lives and then there are guys that just come to your barn in the back of your house sit in the chair and talk to horses all day and just talk to horses call them son you know what i mean like is is like and they don't talk very much outside of that but they know everything that the horse is thinking they know everything that the horse is feeling um and they're like connected in that way which is probably in this movie the reason why he seeks to kind of understand, he gives the alien a name or that he gives the creature a name. You know what I mean? Because he's trying to have that same type.

He wants to saddle break it. He says it in the movie. He wants to saddle break the creature. And having that relationship with the creature is something that horse dudes really do. But sometimes they're not hyperverbal. Remember in the movie, in the movie's beginning,

they set up the fact that he doesn't really know how to communicate with people that well. She has to come in and give the safety meeting, the safety speech when they're on set. So a lot of actors might be too proud or too into themselves to fall into a character like that where they don't get to

have big showy speeches and do all of that he does have one deal where he kind of talks a little bit rallies the troops but for him to be that muted and understated for an entire movie he's dedicated to it any closing thoughts would you recommend this movie to like your friend who's not a cinephile yeah for sure i mean look like it it like i said when i left i was like nah i wasn't really but the more i thought about it i'm like yeah that movie gave me everything that i wanted and i think that when i watched the movie not trying to figure out what's going on i think or not trying to figure out what's the point of everything even though i still think there's some things that didn't quite work for me i'll probably it'll probably be the jordan peele movie that i re-watched the most to be honest with you like even more than get out

it'll probably be the one that i re-watched the most i think that i you know i i dug it i um i I thought that it was cool, but I do think that amongst the average film going public, the film might be a tad more divisive than it will be with the critics. And I can see why.

I think you may be right. Nevertheless, I don't really care about that. Van, thank you so much. I always appreciate you on this show and I thought you were

especially sharp on this one. Thanks, man. Thank you, brother. Okay, let's go to my conversation now with Jordan Peele. thank you so much I always appreciate you on this show and I thought you were especially sharp on this one thanks man thank you brother okay let's go to my conversation now with Jordan Peele in 100 meters turn right

actually no turn left there's some awesome new breakfast wraps at McDonald's really yeah there's the sausage bacon and egg a crispy seasoned chicken one mmm Actually, no. Turn left. There's some awesome new breakfast wraps at McDonald's. Really? Yeah. There's the sausage, bacon, and egg. A crispy seasoned chicken one. Mmm. A spicy end egg. Worth the detour.

They sound amazing. Bet they taste amazing, too. Wish I had a mouth. Take your morning into a delicious new direction with McDonald's new breakfast wraps. Add a small premium roast coffee for a dollar plus tax at participating McDonald's restaurants. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba. What an honor to have Jordan Peele back on the show, one of our favorites. Congrats on Nope, Jordan. How you doing? Thank you. Thank you so much. Pleasure to be back, man. So let's start here. Where did the idea for Nope come from and when did it come to you? Tough question to answer right out of the gate. Good job. No, you know, really the answer is that, you know, it doesn't kind of come in one moment. You know, there's several moments throughout time where things come. saucer film that sort of gives way to being a slightly a more specific sub-genre of film i guess that uh that notion kind of stuck with me and i felt like if i could sort of give the audience

this and have them come out having seen this other movie that there would be a sort of a spectrum of holy shit in between and so that was kind of the notion where it started who's the first person you tell when you have an idea whoever's closest but the person i'm going to cite here is my my producer and that best friend ian cooper who was um you know it's just really as much of a part of this project as I am myself. And from the very beginning, I started sort of telling him this idea and these stories. And I find that if I tell the story as many times as I can before I even start writing, that at some point, I can't not write it.

And that's the right point to start putting pen to paper. One of the key themes of the movie in my interpretation, and it's also one of the key themes of this show is, is who creates or who captures the images that we see and that we come to care about and kind of dominate our lives. Does that idea resonate with you? Is that something that was on your mind as you were making this? Yeah. I, uh, you know, idea resonate with you is that something that was on your mind as you were making this yeah i uh you know as coming into my own as a director and becoming a director really was me coming into my

you know sort of fitting my skin for the first time and um and and and I'm, I'm at this point, a bit of a reflection, you know, I, I, I, or a mirror, I should say, I sort of see my, my job and my responsibility, you know, above all else is to just, you know, take what I'm getting out of the world and turn it into story and that you know through that process you know maybe we can have a connection through that um with with the audience and so obviously for the past few years i've been so in in the industry and on and and my journey has been on so many many different sides of that industry so i think that piece of it was definitely bubbling out, so to speak, and kind of had to be a part of it. Your movies are getting increasingly more complex, and I think maybe more loaded with ideas, but they're also less immediately clear, I think, possibly to audiences, and even a little bit confrontational at times. And so I love the balance in this movie of a classic middle-of-the-summer,

big-budget UFO blockbuster blended together with something that is going to challenge people. And I'm kind of wondering how you feel about the relationship to the audience now that you've got these two films that people really fell in love with and spent a lot of time with,

but now maybe trying to push them a little bit further in how they think about your movies. I think people... I love to do what I'm not supposed to do, first and foremost. And there's something about the process of this film that I've been acknowledging. I think when people think of movies like Jaws and Alien, they think of these big, fun movies. And that's what I love. And those movies pack a message.

But I just don't think people actually want a director who's trying to scream a message at them i think people want to have a good time i don't know what the fuck is is happening have some have an immersive teleportative experience and so yeah i i'm evolving towards an as i've been evolving as an artist in a bit that, yeah, I think people like movies more than messages. And that doesn't mean that a movie can't say something or start a conversation. Does that answer? It does. Well, you're being elliptical in a smart way. And I understand why.

Because you don't want to burden everybody with you. It is. One thing that has been jumping out to me as I revisited your first two films, too, is a lot of your films circle back to what our parents give us and maybe what they take away from us. I feel like that's been in all three of the films in interesting ways. Why do you keep coming back to parents and their children as a story frame it is something i noticed too and not this idea that the the sort of impactful flashback as well in a way which i know in this movie you know the the sort of parent story and the flashback are kind of two different things but yeah i i guess it's just some part of the way i look at you know my existence and

the human condition is that we're just such a you know we don't get away from our past and so it's it's it just it always feels like there's a connection from how what we're going through now to something that we usually are are burying And for me, the beauty of horror is that it allows us to unlock buried things. So this movie looks amazing. I found myself doing the thing where I'm turning my head across the screen as images are flying across the sky

and you lose control of your body as you're watching it, which is a great sign that you're immersed. Tell me about Hoytavan Hoytama as your DP and what you wanted to accomplish visually in the movie. The movie was huge. And for people, I think a lot of people don't realize how difficult, how impossible some of the things that were done in this film were. So, you know, basically, besides the fact that 99 out of 100 cinematographers would have said, you have to change the script or I can't do it. Hoyta, you know, he's the master of scope. He's the master of IMAX.

He is so artistically deft with movies like Let the Right One In and Her. And then so able of just rolling up his sleeves and going for these massive, massive, massive films. And that's what I wanted to do. I want to do a massive film, you know, like, you know, when you look at something like Interstellar or Dunkirk. You see these things where Chris and Hoyta got together and they just tackled an impossible task. So I wanted that. And then, yeah, it's kind of like just getting the coolest first mate on your ship. I mean, he's a real leader and solved a lot of problems. Tell me about visual design because without spoiling too much about this movie, we see some things in the idea of something that's from outer space or in outer space or in the skies.

Unlike anything I've ever seen. I was just talking with somebody else on this show about how there are images in this movie that we don't really have a frame of reference for are you someone who can draw how do you communicate what you want something to look like when you're trying to invent a new idea about you know a movie subgenre i i it's a great question i can draw my my my my upbringing was as an artist you know first and foremost and And in fact, I, I, you know,

there was a point where I thought I was going to be a puppeteer of some sort. And so that I, I, I essentially draw from those school, those schools and those backgrounds and I'll draw if I, if, if, if it's necessary to get something across, but I, I've I've worked with just, you know, tremendous artists as well. And Guillaume Rocheron, who is just a brilliant, brilliant guy. And kind of, we saw eye to eye

really early on as to the sort of aesthetic of this film. So, yeah, with him, the amazing artist, a guy named Leandre Lagrange, who was working at MPC, it really is taking whatever skill set you have and trying to apply it and describe and be as specific as possible tell me a little bit about um visual obvious histories of hollywood and then maybe some hidden histories

there's a lot of spielberg in this movie you've talked a lot about carpenter in the past with your films a lot of those homages are clear sometimes you'll even put chud in us for example just to say hey don't forget this there's a legacy of this sort of story. But then we see Buck and the Preacher, and we see Duel of Diablo posters in the office space, and it seems like you're trying to tell us something about maybe the history we don't recognize as much or we don't understand as much. What is your impulse when you're picking and choosing these little signals to dot through a film? Well, it's so interesting. It's, you know, the, you know, I knew I wanted to make this story about the, you know, the most prominent horse trainer in Hollywood,

the most prominent African-American horse trainer in Hollywood. And so, you know, when I, when I looked, you know, I, that, that person doesn't exist in terms of somebody who has done, you know, that person doesn't exist in terms of somebody who has done a show of this scope in Hollywood that I could find. And that meant I had to invent a character that didn't exist in Otis Sr., played by Keith David. And in order to invent Keith David's character, I had to understand his career that doesn't exist. And to understand his career that doesn't exist, I had to understand what his breakthroughs were and his moments and all this stuff. So from that notion of inserting a fiction into the real world, just, you know, fuck it, why not? Like, let's go. It started to create this amazing sort of Berenstainian bears effect that I think I'm

encouraging the collapsing of what we actually know and what we remember as being as being real and what is not yeah i love the idea of an invented sitcom in this world but also real movies that we know and love at the same time it's a great idea um so get out and us both had i think for lack of a better word viral moments catch phrases images that we see over and over again obviously get out especially kind of emerged as this like object of social media fascination as much as film appreciation. Is that in your head at all? Do you think I have to have something like that in my movie? Do I need to create a moment that's going to make the movie resonate beyond just

when you pay at the box office? Yeah. I mean, you do. You have to make, you have to, you're trying to make an onslaught of perfect cinematic moments. And, you know, when you catch, sometimes there are things

that catch and become, you know, memed that you're not necessarily expecting or kind of catch its own thing. But I think, you know, really, you know,

it's all about the theatrical experience, right? And it really is, really, you know, it's all about the theatrical experience, right? And it really is all about, you know, there's movies, you know, Tarantino and David Lynch and Paul Thomas Anderson, you know, just people who you'll sit in a film and you just don't know what's going to happen next it's just very simple you just don't know and they've taught you not to know they've taught you not to know and that to me is just there's nothing better there's nothing no more better gift that than a director can give me as a viewer and and i think that a viewer can give a director is that you know my eyes are open and i know and i'm i'm ready i'm ready to not be ready i think the thing i was not

ready for was the ape sequence in the flashback in the film yes it's the chimp sequence it's very very intense. Yeah. Without telling me, I know you're not going to tell me what it means, but what was the thinking about designing it? Because we see it from different angles and we see it multiple times in this film. And I'm just kind of hoping you can help me understand how you made that and how you executed on that. Well, it is a cool story i'll give you a little bit just because you're into the not to demystify um but yeah we have a there's a scene in this movie that is a a chimp attack on sitcom set and it is it was performed by a guy named terryary. Um, originally who is,

um, just an amazing, um, actor. He was in the square. I don't know if you've seen that movie. I have. Yeah.

He does the sort of ape imitation at the dinner. Yeah. And so, you know, what we did is we, we, we built furniture and props and everything that are 30% bigger. We, uh, we, So we upscaled everything

so that Terry's performance would be smaller. And then that's all about the interaction that you get between a real entity and the environment. And so I really looked at it like this. It's all about immersion. It's all about immersion it's all about believing um something is happening and uh and it's and that comes from the subtle the subtle thing that you can't plan you know when somebody goes past a balloon and the balloon moves a little bit or a shadow or something you

know so it's it's it's in through the the use of this ultimately visual effects. You're trying to find the, the unbearably elemental and grounded. When you have a film like this that has basically like an a plot and a B plot that converge, do you write them together? Do you conceive of them together as fitting together? Do you know that the chimp sequence is going to be a part or inform the main sequence?

Or is that something that sometimes comes afterwards? Cause you feel like you need to kind of amp up the story or deepen it somehow? It sort of came right when it did between this scene and ultimately what we're dealing with in the sky. I think, yeah, great it's a moment that I knew would sort of hit audiences in the back of the head with a bag of sand whatever that means but it's one of these moments in a movie where you just like wait a second

what am I watching where are we how did we get here and I can't look away and just sandwich that in this big epic fun blockbuster Mission accomplished, that's definitely how it feels

a couple more for you I want to know about M and OJ and Kaluuya and Kiki I love their contrasting energy in the movie I love the different performance styles, can you tell me about writing those characters and then getting that across to them that that's something you're looking for? Yeah, you know, I mean, it's, it's, it's, I think from, from probably from Key and Peele and all that, I really value how characters can blossom in terms of who they are, in terms of one another. So just to say that O.J. is O.J. because Emerald is Emerald.

And it's this kind of beautiful thing that siblings have that I'm sort of envious of, where they have maybe a clearer sense of self and family in some ways. And so as performers, you know, when they meet there, they kind of instantly become those roles. And, and,

you know, to be fair, I wrote these roles for them. So they didn't, they weren't really twisting up their personalities too much, but, you know, Daniel does transform a bit when he's on, when he's on set.

Last question for you. We end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers, what's the last great thing you've seen? What have you seen that you like? Last great movie? Last great film I've seen? Wow. I've been in the weeds.

So it's very... It's a very... Have I seen a movie? Oh my gosh. Have I seen a movie? Oh my gosh. Have I seen a movie? Oh, I liked the screen. The new screen? I did.

Tell me about... You're a horror aficionado. Why did you like it? Well, I just... I thought it was clever. I thought it was fun. And they gave me a shout out. So I'll, you know,

that's kind of really all you need to do. No, I thought it was really good. I thought all the performances were great. I thought that they have such a tricky task with extending the meta aspect of that, of all those sequels. And I thought they handled it well. I love that the reigning king of original horror

is shouting out the legacy sequel from the slasher franchise of 25 years ago. Something very nice and synchronous about that. Well, you know, Wes Craven is, is, is,

you know, always God here in my, my book. And, um, so he, you know, any,

anything he's touched, I'm in support of. Jordan, thanks so much. Thanks for the movie. Thank you. Really appreciate it. Thanks, Sean. Anytime now.

Thank you to Jordan Peele. Thank you to Van Lathan. Go see Note. You know, it's not going to hurt you. It's worth it. And thank you, of course, to our producer Bobby Wagner for his work on today's episode. See you next week for a very, very special movie draft. You won't want to miss this one. We'll see you then.