The teasing, cryptic marketing campaign for Nope didn’t reveal much other than it was from the mastermind of Jordan Peele. From the director of Get Out and Us, audiences might imagine a new psychological horror, perhaps just not one that involves UFOs and filmed as a popcorn spectacle, not an arthouse satire.
It prompted articles like one at Vanity Fair from Chris Murphy, “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 a genre. It seems to be sci-fi horror with comedy and drama, shot through with Peele’s trademark satire.
READ MORE: Everything We Know About Jordan Peele’s Nope (Vanity Fair)
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 theater.
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.
Daniel Kaluuya and writer/director Jordan Peele on the set of “Nope.” Cr: Universal Pictures 
Daniel Kaluuya as OJ Haywood in writer/director Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” Cr: Universal Pictures 
Daniel Kaluuya as OJ Haywood, Keke Palmer as Emerald Haywood, and Brandon Perea as Angel Torres in writer/director Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” Cr: Universal Pictures
“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 Brande Victorian at 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 1977 sci-fi epic that made a lasting impression on Peele, who was born two years after it was released.
“I set my sights on the great American UFO story,” he said in an interview for 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.”
Jordan Peele told us why he went @IMAX big for #Nope and the specific audience reaction he hopes to elicit.
— Fandango (@Fandango) June 23, 2022
On the biggest screens, July 22! #NOPEMOVIE tickets are on sale now! https://t.co/ZccKmIkXvM pic.twitter.com/lZ4qQpN2BQ
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 said 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.”
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Threaded throughout the tale, overtly and more subtly, is what it means to be addicted 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. “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, etcetera.”
READ MORE: Your Favorite Director’s Favorite Actor: Daniel Kaluuya (Essence)
Daniel Kaluuya as OJ Haywood in writer/director Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” Cr: Universal Pictures 
Keke Palmer as Emerald Haywood in writer/director Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” Cr: Universal Pictures 
Steven Yeun as Ricky “Jupe” Park in writer/director Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” Cr: Universal Pictures 
Steven Yeun as Ricky “Jupe” Park in writer/director Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” Cr: Universal Pictures 
Writer/director Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” Cr: Universal Pictures
In an otherwise vacant interview with Uproxx’s Mike Ryan, 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 revered retired cinematographer).
Writer/director Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” Cr: Universal Pictures 
Daniel Kaluuya as OJ Haywood in writer/director Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” Cr: Universal Pictures 
Daniel Kaluuya as OJ Haywood in writer/director Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” Cr: Universal Pictures 
Writer/director Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” Cr: Universal Pictures 
Daniel Kaluuya as OJ Haywood, Keke Palmer as Emerald Haywood, and Brandon Perea as Angel Torres in writer/director Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” Cr: Universal Pictures
“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?” Peele recounts. “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.”
READ MORE: Jordan Peele On The Secrets Of ‘Nope’ And His Love For ‘Tremors’ (Uproxx)
On his side in this endeavor was Hoyte Van Hoytema, ASC, the Swiss-born Dutch-Swedish cinematographer whose last sci-fi works were Ad Astra and Tenet.
He was 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, both 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,” said Van Hoytema.
Keke Palmer as Emerald Haywood in writer/director Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” Cr: Universal Pictures 
Keke Palmer as Emerald Haywood and Daniel Kaluuya as OJ Haywood in writer/director Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” Cr: Universal Pictures 
Daniel Kaluuya as OJ Haywood in writer/director Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” Cr: Universal Pictures 
Keke Palmer as Emerald Haywood and Daniel Kaluuya as OJ Haywood in writer/director Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” Cr: Universal Pictures 
Keke Palmer as Emerald Haywood and Daniel Kaluuya as OJ Haywood in writer/director Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” Cr: Universal Pictures 
Keke Palmer as Emerald Haywood in writer/director Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” Cr: Universal Pictures
They built a special rig which combined of a variety of cameras (principally the ARRI 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 Slash Film’s Jeremy Mathai.
Keke Palmer as Emerald Haywood in writer/director Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” Cr: Universal Pictures 
Writer/director Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” Cr: Universal Pictures 
Keke Palmer as Emerald Haywood in writer/director Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” Cr: Universal Pictures 
Writer/director Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” Cr: Universal Pictures 
Writer/director Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” Cr: Universal Pictures
“I’m always talking about something human, a human flaw,” Peele said. “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.”