Video: Around the Table with Jordan Peele and the Cast of ‘Nope’
A 25-minute conversation about the film offers insights into Peel’s creative process as writer-director.
A 25-minute conversation about the film offers insights into Peel’s creative process as writer-director.
This weekend, the highly anticipated movie Nope debuts in theaters across North America. Plot summary: The residents of a lonely gulch in inland California bear witness to an uncanny and chilling discovery.
Here is the final trailer for the movie:
Writer-director Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us) sits down with four cast members of the movie to discuss the film and his creative process. Here is that roundtable discussion hosted by Entertainment Weekly.
I am excited to see this movie as it appears to be both a film as spectacle and a film which critiques spectacle. That figures to be a nifty trick, but as Peele has demonstrated in his previous two movies, he can pull off stories with surprising dynamics at play in them.
With the advent of CGI and Hollywood’s fixation on franchise movies, spectacle storytelling has grown both bigger and more prominent. I have mixed feelings about that. While part of the function of entertainment can be to pull the audience into a unique story universe, a higher function (if you will) is to help us understand more about who we are, why we are, and how we are. Spectacle for spectacle’s sake is a path toward empty storytelling.
I’m often reminded of Aristotle’s six elements of story: plot, character, thought, diction, music, and spectacle. In my view, it’s no wonder that spectacle is last on the list in terms of importance.
Which brings me back to Nope: Film as spectacle. Film which (appears) to critique spectacle.
As a bonus, you can listen to Jordan Peele in an audio interview on the Filmmaker’s Toolkit podcast (Indiewire): LINK.
Twitter: @JordanPeele, @nopemovie.
For 100s more interviews with screenwriters and filmmakers, go here.