- Hello friends.
Jordan Peele's Us is now in theaters.
And, I sent my doppelganger to sit down
with the director, as well as stars
Lupita Nyong'o and Winston Duke.
This video does not contain spoilers,
but if you've already seen the movie
then it will shed light on a lot of the mysteries
and myths in the new film.
Wait, what if I'm the doppelganger?
(evil laughing)
(upbeat music)
You've knocked it out of the park, yet again.
- Thank you.
- No sophomore slump for Jordan Peele, it seems.
Were you a little bit anxious following up
an Oscar win with your last film, with this one?
- You know, I don't think anxious was the word.
I was glowing, you know,
everything I ever wanted was just
the opportunity to make another movie.
So, you know, I looked at some of my favorite directors'
second features to kind of get hints of how to approach it.
Pulp Fiction, Unbreakable, which I think is his third film,
but you still, you know what I mean.
- It counts. - It counts, yeah.
It came, basically came back down to this idea
of make your favorite movie that you've never seen before.
(dramatic music)
(screaming)
- What are you people?
- It's us.
- I had heard that Jordan made the cast
watch horror films before you guys started shooting.
Were any of those films really stick out to you,
anything that kind of influenced you in a bigger way?
- Well, the idea of watching the horror films
that Jordan gave us was to give us a shared vocabulary.
He talked about wanting to be able to talk to us
as though we were horror geeks like him.
For me, the main one was The Shining.
And really just getting to see a family
in this kind of scenario.
And, seeing what was essentially a monster
that had a lot of familiarity but also seemed
very foreign at the same time.
Mainly The Shining helped me see
how a family could function in this space.
And, that's what I carried into Us.
- It was really about getting the things that had
influenced him, the themes that he was interested in.
Exploring the aesthetics, you know,
certain metaphoric executions, those kinds of things.
Not really like, hey, scream like this,
or you know, Hide like that.
- Did you become a horror geek in the process
of watching those movies?
- No thank you. - No? (laughing)
- No, I prefer to scare people, than to be scared.
- [Patrick] Nice.
- Definitely, I think that I was scared of Lupita the most.
You know, just her movements, and her physicality.
You know, it was kind of like disturbing
to see her all like that.
- I mean, the scariest thing about Lupita, for me,
in this is that I had to go into her dressing room,
to like talk to her or something,
and like it'd just be us.
And, you walk in there, when she is the Red character,
she's fully in character, even when she's alone.
And, she was terrifying.
You didn't want to look at her in the eyes.
You didn't want to be like, I couldn't understand that line.
You know, you're afraid you're going to die.
She was an incredible partner for this film.
I mean, she dug so deep, both emotionally
and intellectually, stepped out of her comfort zone.
In what was really one of the most physically demanding
roles I can imagine any actor taking on.
(suspenseful music)
- Be careful.
(creepy laughing)
- [Patrick] You have a voice as your doppelganger,
how did you find that voice?
- Well, it was inspired by this condition
called spasmodic dysphonia. - Okay.
- What happens is, is that your vocal cords
involuntarily spasm, creating this odd sense, airflow.
So, I'd heard someone speaking with that condition,
and I decided to look into it.
And, I worked with my ENT, and a vocal therapist
to be able to do it but keep my voice safe.
And then, I built off of that.
- [Patrick] What was it like being able to play
both the good guy and the bad guy in the movie like this?
- Incredible.
I mean, when I read the script that was one of the things
I was like, I get to work with Jordan, twice in one movie.
Yes, yes, yes.
And, I was so intrigued by that, so excited.
And then, I was like, oh God, I have to do two roles
in the time it usually takes me to do one.
- It was challenging because we have to be able
to understand another character.
Like when we were playing our good self,
Jordan would make little mood, like oh,
look at the bright side.
But, in our bad self, we had to like get like deep
in emotions, and like out of the box, like think outside.
- Essentially, it gave me an opportunity to really
distill two distinct point of views and stuff,
playing a good guy and a bad guy.
I never, ever, judged Abraham, not once.
I never said he was a bad guy that would do bad things.
He was just a guy, finally getting a chance
to live in the light.
You know, Gabe gets to have health care,
which manifests in his glasses, he gets to see,
he gets to talk, he gets to express himself.
Abraham doesn't, he's squinting, he's very, you know,
tactile, and has to like feel, and be super precise,
and be a lot better of a listener than Gabe is.
You know what I mean?
Which makes him super powerful, and dangerous.
And, all those things were just really great to distill.
- It means like she's getting closer.
- Who?
The mirror girl?
- You don't believe me.
- Yeah, I have a pretty elaborate mythology
of what's going on in this film.
And, the dilemma that comes up is,
how much of that do you tell.
I wanted to give the audience enough to,
people to have a good conversation about it.
But, I didn't want to give them so much
that it stopped being scary.
'Cause I think when there are questions left,
and you know there's more to the story,
your imagination is left to run wild.
- Well, like with Get Out, there's a lot
of seeds planted in this film that pay off later.
How much did you put in for people to
kind of unveil on their second, third viewings?
- There's a lot, there's a lot.
It's, I'm sort of weaving those hints in different ways.
And, I would say this movie probably has
twice the amount of Easter Eggs,
and little treasures hidden here and there, as Get Out.
- And, that's the thing with this Jordan Peele world,
is that there are so many layered things.
And, you can pick up as many as you can,
but then someone else will be like,
that t-shirt is from blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know.
So, that's a lot to do, but it's fun.
You know, you get to, he treats the audience
as smart as they are. - Right.
- And, gives them a lot of presents
for being able to work through his world.
- You mentioned Unbreakable before,
is it possible that these two films are connected,
a la the way M. Night kind of did with his Glass trilogy?
- Anything is possible.
(laughing)
(upbeat music)