IBC
Making the ‘Great American flying saucer horror’ with director Jordan Peele, editor Nicholas Monsour and DP Hoyte van Hoytema.
article hereThe working title for Jordan Peele’s new movie was Little
Green Men. This nods to the film’s close encounter with a UFO and the central
character’s quest to capture undeniable proof of aliens on camera - the money
shot they can sell to Oprah.
But it’s also about society’s troubling relationship with
the ‘other’.
“This is really about all kinds of spectacle from media
celebrity and fame to the kind of deeply disturbing psychological spectacle
that sticks in your mind,” says NOPE’s editor Nicholas Monsour who cut the
director’s previous satire US.
“Jordan’s films always have an analysis of power and a
critique of society running through them,” he tells IBC365. “The dynamic in
this story is we have Black owners of a horse stunt training ranch seeking fame
and recognition in [white dominated] Hollywood so there is this inherent ‘us’
and ‘them’. Then we’re extrapolating that to humankind and whatever else is out
there. What’s the power dynamic then? To me, that’s the big theme.”
Peele is certainly making a movie for cinefiles like himself
who want to make cinema for theatres to celebrate the big screen experience which
for Peele range from The Wizard of Oz to Alien and Point Break.
It is filmed in large-format 65mm and IMAX and given a
Western style location in Southern California’s arid and rambling Santa Clarita
Valley.
“The other part of the equation is that we foreground
characters that have not traditionally been in movies of this scale of pop
cultural spectacle,” says Monsour.
Daniel Kaluuya plays OJ and Keke Palmer is Emerald, siblings
who own the Haywood ranch and, as the film makes explicit, are direct descendants
of the very first film star.
“Did you know that the very first assembly of photographs to
create a motion picture was a two second clip of a black man on a horse,”
explains Emerald in the movie. “Since the moment motion pictures could move we
had skin in the game.”
Yet Black talent has been excluded from the movie making
industry until very recently. That idea is encapsulated in a famous series of
16 sequential photographs depicting a Black jockey on a horse, shown in the
film. Created by Eadweard Muybridge in 1887, the loop of cards, known as Animal
Locomotion, Plate 626, is one of the earliest examples
of chronophotography, which established the foundation for what would
become the bedrock of the entire film industry.
While we know the name of the horse (a mare called Annie G)
the identity of the rider is lost to history. Peele moves this beyond a binary
racial critique.
“I set out to design something that criticised what we do as
much as it honours it,” Peele says in production notes. “It reveals the lives
of the skilled, below-the-line crew —the animal wranglers, cinematographers,
technology experts—who create the indelible images we see on screen but who are
never seen themselves. And it shines a light on the realities of discarded
actors, particularly child actors, who are abandoned by the industry once they
cease to be adorable bankable assets.”
“You don’t have to be a cinefile or an intellectual to be
involved in the story,” says Monsour. “It can be funny and scary and, if looked
at from a sideways angle, a social commentary.
“To me it’s a sci-fi horror as much as a documentary, and a
dramatic and comedic project. There’s not really anything off the table.”
Editors face the same challenge on every movie which Monsour
likens to putting together a jigsaw. “You start with a huge pile of pieces that
someone has thrown in the air. Sometimes you have too few to make the puzzle,
other times you have too many. We could have made 100 puzzles from what Jordan
wrote and shot.
“Based on that, my process is to look at each beat, asking
what is scary and which bit of the performance is funnier, and whether that
performance would hit harder if we placed it an hour earlier. You’re constantly
zooming in and out. It wasn’t a challenge to convey the film’s ideas other than
to hone in on which ones we wanted to layer in more.”
Peele’s challenge to himself was to bring something
impossible to the big screen, like King Kong or Oz. Part of the solution was
sound design on which Monsour worked with supervising sound editor Johnnie Burn
(Under the Skin).
“While I was doing paper edits of a scene, Johnnie was sound
designing using a library of wind effects to give Jordan every tool to help realise
his vision,” Monsour explains.
“We are imagining abstract sounds for things that don’t
exist but equally challenging is the creation of a reality in which, when the
extraordinary happens, it is believable. That means paying attention to detail
so you understand the sound of the location and to the sounds that might be
heard subjectively in a character’s head.”
Shooting day for night
Another part of the solution was the camera work of DP Hoyte
van Hoytema FSF NSC ASC (Dunkirk, Tenet) who was tasked with filming
several sequences in the valley at night.
Shooting day for night is a classic cinematographic problem
usually overcome by placing actors at a very specific direction into the sun,
preferably backlit, and then darkening the image so that it looks as if the
scene is lit by the moon.
However, after testing this option Peele and van Hoytema
were not satisfied with the result. “We
wanted to create nights that felt spacious, epic and grand and gave us the
possibility to peer into the night. Yet at the same time, we didn’t want those
nights to look fake in any way,” says van Hoytema.
They built a special rig which combined of a variety of
cameras (principally Alexa 65 with an infrared enabled chip) all perfectly
aligned without parallax.
VFX supervisor Guillaume Rocheron enhanced the process for
an effect that van Hoytema feels obtains “a magnitude that I haven’t really
seen before unless it’s pure CGI. But CGI never looks as close or as tactile as
these images do.”
Filmmaking as spectacle
Just as Steven Spielberg cast French director François
Truffaut in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, so NOPE gets meta with
the inclusion of a character who is a cinematographer. Antlers Holst (Michael
Wincott) is a reclusive DP asked by OJ and Emerald to film a mysterious
phenomenon that seems, in fact to be unfilmable.
The character is apparently based on Robert Shaw’s grizzled
‘Quint’ in another Spielberg classic Jaws – a Captain Ahab obsessively
pursuing the perfect shot.
Wincott shadowed van Hoytema to pick up some tips and the
camera department supplied Holst with plausible equipment. This included an
IMAX Mark II camera which had been into space aboard the Space Shuttle. The
camera was re-engineered by Panavision with a hand crank so that it could be
used without electricity - an important script element in the movie.
“Kitted out, [Holst] was even nerdier than most
cinematographers I know in real life,” observes van Hoytema. “I wear a scarf as
part of my day-to-day kit. And in the movie, you’ll see that Holst is wearing a
scarf as well. It’s actually one of my scarves. Authenticity is very
important.”
About 40 percent of the film is shot with IMAX cameras and
nearly all the film is shot on Large Format 65mm, 5-perf film, with the
exception of some 1997 sitcom footage which was shot on 35mm film, as would
have been used at the time, and footage from the hand-cranked IMAX 35mm. Security
footage depicted on monitors was shot with Blackmagic cameras.
Look up
To pull off “the quintessential flying saucer horror film,”
the filmmakers had to take into account the huge canvas of the sky.
“Close Encounters is a huge influence of mine in its
scope and in its vision,” explains Peele, “but more than anything, in
Spielberg's ability to make us feel like we’re in the presence of something
from another world. That immersive experience was something I desperately
wanted to chase as well.”
This required clouds to be in the exact same formation for
three straight days of shooting or more, which is obviously impossible. Instead,
the VFX team created a CG cloudscape system to art direct the composition and
speed of the clouds. They spent nine months implementing this system which
contributed the majority of Nope’s 700 VFX shots.
An engineering professor at CalTech helped conceptual
artists to imagine how the alien entity would move and behave. They discussed
ion propulsion and underwater animal biology (like jellyfish) as well studying
origami for clues as to how the ‘creature’ might reveal its inner self.
Another inspiration was the hyper minimalism of ‘90s Japanese
anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion, which has a “biomechanical design
flair.”
One of the film’s most striking visuals features miles of
brightly coloured sky dancers a detection system for the alien entity. Gaffer
Adam Chambers (Tenet, Ad Astra) and lighting console producer Noah Shain
(Tenet) were responsible for programming and controlling the sky
dancers, up to 70 of which featured in one scene.
Production designer Ruth De Jong adds another layer of
thought: “There’s an underlying theme we’re addressing there—exemplified by the
colour palette, like a bag of Skittles—that the sky dancers are in of
themselves a representation of mass consumerism.”
The Meta Hollywood machine
NOPE features a Gold Rush theme park called Jupiter’s Claim that is intended by Peele as
an allegory for capitalism. It contains
a gold-panning station, a sheriff’s office, and Sea World-esque stadium
all built by De Jong at three-quarters scale.
In the film, ‘Jupiter’s Claim’ is run by a former child star
exploited and then discarded by Hollywood.
Now – and you really can’t make this up – the set for Jupiter’s
Claim has become a permanent
attraction on the world-famous studio tour at Universal Studios Hollywood
opening day and date with NOPE.
The teasing marketing campaign for NOPE has kept
audiences in the dark about what the movie is about and that’s a good thing,
says Mansour.
“This is unlike anything I’ve seen before but there’s also a
familiarity with great cinema of the seventies to the 2000s, and an organic
poetry that originates from being shot on film,” he says.
“I like going into a movie not knowing all that much or being
told what to think about it. I want to make up my own mind.”
ends
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