Nope follows Hollywood horse trainer OJ Haywood and his younger sister Emerald (Kaluuya and Palmer). After their father dies under mysterious circumstances, they set out to capture evidence of everything in the sky stalking the quiet ravine where their family ranch is located.

It’s a complete tonal shift for Peele, but a natural step for him. “I felt like the big blockbuster show movie of the summer, and specifically the story of the Great American Flying Saucer is something where I didn’t feel my perspective was represented to the fullest,” Peele says. .

But Peele’s collaborators are impressed with his flexibility and commitment to disrupting genre films. Palmer adds, “It’s so unexpected. Of get out at We and [now] Nope, he is not really bound by anything. The guideline is an exceptionally thoughtful piece of work, but none of the frameworks it exists in should be the same. »

The gloom of 2020 inspired Peele to write Nope, during this traumatic and forgotten haze of lockdown amid an endless cycle of grim and inevitable tragedy. “We were going through so much,” he tells me. “A lot of what this world was going through was this spectacle overload, and kind of a low point in our addiction to spectacle.”

But Peele soon realized that Nope should do something a little different from his first two films. “I was someone who spent so much time trying to reintroduce what dark perspective can be in a horror movie. It puts me in very dark places in my imagination and we were in a very dark and are [still] in a very dark place,” Peele told me. “It became a really important thing to figure out how to bring joy into it because, well, I felt like I touched the other things.” The result is a big summer blockbuster that knows how to delight and challenge moviegoers, but is filled with the kind of joy of, say, the golden age of Spielberg. Which is to say, it’s a movie that only Jordan Peele could have made.