For Jordan Peele, the ‘Nope’ score provides the ‘spectacle and the spectrum’
In his upcoming movie “Us,” writer-director Jordan Peele uses the word “no” as a sign of his contempt for the social conventions that keep him and his protagonist, Dave, apart. In the opening moments of the film, Peele explains that a child of his was, in 2014, molested by a family friend who had been arrested and was awaiting trial on a sexual abuse charge.
“I couldn’t put a ‘no’ to this story at all,” Peele, 38, says. “I thought it was important to him. And me, too. I couldn’t let this be another horror story. I don’t think of myself as a horror writer, or as a horror filmmaker. It’s not my job. I’m the director of an experimental drama. I wasn’t going to be limited by the horror genre. I was, and still am, a storyteller.”
Peele says he didn’t think he could make the “no” of an actor into a movie about a child who is sexually abused. But a week before shooting began, he had another idea: “I said to [director], ‘Could I get [the child], and could I get [the abuser] to say, ‘Nope,’ and then say it back to me?’ And he laughed, and made the suggestion that, yeah, absolutely.”
He had already decided to use a different approach, after taking his own childhood abuse into account.
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“I didn’t want to do a horror story because there was nothing I could do to change what happened to me,” he says. “I didn’t want to do a horror story, or a thriller story or a thriller-drama story because those are all about the ‘spectacle and the spectrum.”
The result is “Us,” an unclassifiable film, in which the narrative of a high school
