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The teasing cryptic marketing campaign for Nope didn’t
reveal much other than it was from the master mind of Jordan Peele. From the
director of Get Out and Us audiences might imagine a new
psychological horror but perhaps not one that involves UFOs and filmed as a
popcorn spectacle not an arthouse satire.
It prompted articles like one at Vanity Fair ‘Everything We
Know About Jordan Peele's Nope’– which it turns out, is not a lot.
That’s as it should be. Far better to go into a film without
the preconceptions of critics – or even of a plot – or in this case of genre.
It seems to be sci-fi horror with comedy and drama, shot through with Peele’s
trademark satire.
Peele also aims to deliver pure entertainment, feeling
that’s what we missed and what cinema needs to drive us back to the darkness of
the big screen.
The Universal Pictures film, which stars Daniel
Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as a brother and sister who run Hollywood’s only
Black-owned horse ranch, has prompted plenty of speculation from cinephiles
about its UFO plotlines.
On verge of release Peele has been doing interview rounds
and revealed a bit more info. But not much more.
“It’s so tricky being considered in the vanguard of Black
horror, because obviously Black horror is so very real, and it’s hard to do it
in a way that’s not re-traumatizing and sad,” Peele told Essence
magazine. “I was going into my third horror film
starring Black leads, and somewhere in the process I realized that the movie
had to be about Black joy as well, in order to fit what the world needs at this
moment.”
It’s partly a homage to Close Encounters of the Third
Kind, Spielberg’s epic that made a lasting impression on Peele (it was
released in 1977 two years before he was born).
“I set my sights on the great American UFO story,” he told Fandango
“And the movie itself deals with spectacle, and the good and bad that come from
this idea of attention. It’s a horror epic, but it has some points in it that
are meant to elicit a very audible reaction in the theater.”
Spectacle means more than just a blockbuster canvas,
although this film is made with large format 65mm and IMAX film cameras.
“When you're shooting on IMAX you just know you're doing
something cinematically special,” Peele says in the production notes. “The
image is so overwhelming it feels like you're there. I wanted immersion, an
awe, a fear and a wonder we all had when we were kids.”
Threaded throughout the tale, overtly and more subtly, is
what it means to be addicited to spectacle (the cinema-going experience if you
will), and to be the subject of spectacle passed through the Hollywood machine
(one of the characters is a washed-up child actor), and also what it means to
be passed over by the film factory. This means below the line artists from
stunts to wardrobe as much as it calls out the history of film’s blindness to
people of color.
“The first film clip [Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal
Locomotion] was essentially a Black man on a horse who has been forgotten and
erased,” Peele told Essence, quoted in Variety “Part of this film, to me, is a celebration and a response to that. We can be
the leads not only of a horror movie but also action, adventure, comedy, etc.”
In an otherwise vacant interview by Uproxx, Peele reveals that he deliberately wrote a story
about an extraterrestrial without any regard to how possible it was to actually
film it (not coincidentally this is also the dilemma of one the film’s
characters which includes a retired, revered cinematographer).
“Whereas Get Out started with this notion of:
what if I write a script that no one would ever let me make? And how can I make
a movie that’s impossible? Well, with the fortune of success, I’ve had greater
tools I can work with. It’s very important to me to continue to push and
continue to start from that same starting point of, what can I do that’s
impossible? What is the movie that I’m not supposed to make? That I can’t make?
That I don’t know how to make? And that was the starting point.”
On his side in this endeavour was Hoyte Van Hoytema ASC, the
Swiss-born Dutch-Swedish cinematographer whose last sci-fi works were Ad
Astra and Tenet.
He tasked with filming several sequences on location day for
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 director and DP 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.
All of the guessing games about the film might have been
rendered null and void had the writer/director kept the project’s working title
"Little Green Men."
“Though that would more directly reference the concept of
aliens, it's actually a double entendre that speaks to the larger themes his
story has in mind,” notes Slashfilm
“I'm always talking about something human, a human flaw,”
Peele says. “And there was something about our connection with spectacle and
money and our monetization of spectacle. And so, the 'little green men' that I
started talking about [were] the little green men on the money."
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