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Watch: Jordan Peele says he wrote 'Nope' without any regard to how he'd actually pull it off
"I wanted immersion...an awe and a fear and a wonder we all had when we were kids."
Jordan Peele's third directorial effort — Nope (out in theaters everywhere next week) — is so ambitious, that even it's writer-director wasn't entirely sure if he could pull it off. In a new featurette spotlighting the project's extensive use of IMAX cameras and the eye-popping cinematography of Hoyte van Hoytema (Interstellar, Tenet), Peele explains that Nope stands apart from his first two movies "in that it's a bigger adventure than I've ever tried to tell ... I purposely wrote something without any regard to how possible it was."
"It was a very exhilarating ride," says van Hoytema of his collaboration with the acclaimed and Oscar-winning filmmaker. "Always creative, fun, never scared, and always pushing in scope of what we could do. This is made for a big screen. We shot on IMAX cameras and we were not shy of doing very extreme or crazy things with those cameras."
Check out the featurette below:
"When you're shooting on IMAX, you just know you're doing something cinematically special," Peele continues. "The image is so overwhelming, it feels like you're there. I wanted immersion...an awe and a fear and a wonder we all had when we were kids."
Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out) and Keke Palmer (Lightyear) co-star as a pair of siblings looking to get rich and famous by committing a genuine UFO to celluloid. The aliens, on the other hand, aren't exactly ready for their close-up and cause all sorts of chaos and destruction in a small California desert town. Oh, and it just wouldn't be a Jordan Peele outing without a heaping spoonful of social commentary to go along with all of those genre thrills.
Steven Yeun (The Walking Dead), Michael Wincott (Westworld) and Brandon Perea (The OA) round out the cast. Peele and Ian Cooper (Us, Candyman) produced the feature under their Monkeypaw Productions banner.
"I started off wanting to make a film that would put an audience in the immersive experience of being in the presence of a UFO," Peele explained during an interview for Empire Magazine's August 2022 issue (now on sale). "And I wanted to make a spectacle, something that would promote my favorite art form and my favorite way of watching that art form: the theatrical experience. As I started writing the script, I started to dig into the nature of spectacle, our addiction to spectacle, and the insidious nature of attention."
Nope exclusively heads for the big screen next Friday — July 22.
