Interview (Written): Jordan Peele

Writer-director of the horror movie “Get Out”.

From the New York Times:

No serious fan of the sketch comedy show “Key & Peele” will be surprised that Jordan Peele (the shorter half of its starring duo) is making his directorial debut with a horror film. Their acclaimed Comedy Central series may have been best known for President Obama’s “anger translator,” but it often lampooned scary movies with a specificity that could come only from a connoisseur of things that go bump in the night. (No one has made a funnier parody of “The Shining.”)

In his new movie, “Get Out,” he plays the scares straight, writing and directing the rare horror movie that tackles racial politics head on. In a scenario that has been described as “The Stepford Wives” meets “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), an African-American photographer, is about to meet his white girlfriend’s parents for the first time when he’s rattled to learn that she has not told them he is black. His anxiety increases when her father goes out of his way to tell him that he would have voted for Mr. Obama for a third term and when the forced smiles of the parents’ exclusively black servants start seeming a little uncanny. Racial micro-aggressions and ominous signs (bad dreams, dead animals) mount, as this fish-out-of-water story takes a foreboding turn.

Excerpts:

What do horror and comedy have in common?

The best comedy and horror feel like they take place in reality. You have a rule or two you are bending or heightening, but the world around it is real. I felt like everything I learned in comedy I could apply to this movie.

When a rule bends, how do you keep horror from becoming comedy?

In horror, the second you have people doing something you know they wouldn’t do, you lose the audience. With “Get Out,” what needed to be believable was the protagonist’s intentions. Why he’s there. I followed the “Rosemary’s Baby”-“Stepford Wives” model of inching into this crazy situation and alongside, justifying how the character is rationalizing staying.

In “Key & Peele,” Keegan-Michael Key once asked you what scared you most. You made a joke. What’s the real answer?

Human beings. What people can do in conjunction with other people is exponentially worse than what they can do alone. Society is the scariest monster.

For the rest of the interview, go here.