Jordan Peele Says His Movie Ideas Are Born From “Human Sin”

With three feature films under his belt, Jordan Peele and his “social thrillers” have become a fan-favorite in recent years. With Get Out‘s thesis on racial politics in America, US becoming a meditation on privilege and class, and recent hit Nope acting as a jab at obsession with spectacle (and even the movie industry at large), one might think that Peele starts his projects not with an idea for a story but an idea for a moral lesson he wants to impart. If you thought that, you’d be mostly wrong however, as Peele himself confirmed in an interview that his movie ideas begin from the point of view of teaching the audience, but exposing them.

“I guess I don’t look at it as much as ‘what I want to say,’ I think about it as focusing on something about humanity I haven’t seen nailed. A ‘human sin’ is how I put it,” Peele revealed to Empire. “If I can discuss what I feel like is part of our downfall and I haven’t seen it in a cinematic way, I feel like that works. I made a film about spectacle and our addiction to it, our hopeless addiction to it, and then I just trusted that the imagery would…if I follow the truth and follow the fun and follow my spirit, I’m inviting a conversation about that topic.”

He continued, “I think we don’t really go to film to hear what someone’s trying to say, we go to film to see and to hear and to feel and to all of it, what someone’s trying to communicate. It is one of these things where I love watching people dissect film because a movie, a really good movie, is just worth a million conversations.”

When asked by the outlet how he reconciled his most recent film being a movie that reflected on our “hopeless addiction” to spectacle while also being a huge summer blockbuster from Universal Pictures, Peele revealed he doesn’t let himself off the hook.

“I basically say to myself, I know what I’m here to do, and I’m not going to let myself off the hook without talking about it and dealing with it in the film itself. And that’s my only responsibility, my responsibility is to do what I’m here to do and it’s a fascinating duality I’m dealing with. Cinema and movie making is penetrative, it is dangerous, it has a history of exploitation to it, and I wanted to have mine but I just didn’t want to turn away from that.”

Nope is now playing in theaters.

(Cover Photo by Rodin Eckenroth/FilmMagic via Getty Images)