“Nope” Behind-the-Scenes Look Reveals Jordan Peele’s Biggest Swing Yet

June 23, 2022

There is every indication that Jordan Peele’s Nope is going to be one of the year’s most thrilling films. Peele has, in just two previous films as writer/director, carved out a singular place for himself in the filmmaking firmament. His movies are instantly recognizable as films only he could make, and having proven himself with his Oscar-winning Get Out and his outrageously Oscar-snubbed, excellent Us, he had an even bigger palette to work with on his third feature.

This brings us to this new Nope video, “It Takes a Village,” which takes us behind the scenes of Nope and delivers a brief, thrilling inside look at just how big a palette Peele was working with, and the way Peele works with his collaborators.

“Everything is bigger. Jordan’s really grown as a filmmaker. It’s a different style of filmmaking he’s doing,” says star Daniel Kaluuya. “Not trying to rush it, trying to get the moments. There’s a value in what we’re shooting. I mean, the whole crew engaged with it differently.”

Nope is centered on the Haywood family, with OJ Haywood (Kaluuya) and Emerald (Keke Palmer) running a horse ranch that caters to Hollywood films. But then some mysterious, sinister objects appear in the sky, and soon the Haywood ranch is ground zero for some menacing, extra-terrestrial insanity. Yet this gives them an idea—if they could capture one of these things on camera, they could change their lives. They’ll just need to survive the attempt.

“Every single department is firing off these huge swings,” Peele says in the video. “It takes a village to make a film like Nope,” says first assistant director and producer Liz Tan. “We’re all important individually and in combination. That sense of respect and integrity for all of us is hugely important.”

“The scale is so huge, we’re working with 65 millimeter and IMAX, which is pretty rare,” says camera operator Kristen Correll.

“The growth going from Us to this film, Jordan pushing not in vain but like, why not?” says costume designer Ruth De Jong, “Then when you add someone like Hoyte [Van Hoytema, cinematographer] there’s nothing like it.”

“Jordan challenged himself a lot,” says Hoytema. “He should from the outset that he was not afraid, so it always meant I had to challenge myself to come up with more interesting ways to tell the story.”

Nope sounds like the kind of film Peele has been building toward his whole career. On July 8th, we’ll see just how far one of the most intriguing filmmakers of his generation has come. And he’s only just begun.