How Jordan Peele Shoots A Film At 3 Budget Levels
INTRODUCTION
Jordan Peele is a director who possesses a true love of genre - especially the horror genre. His films have used genre as a structural framework, which are filled in with satirical stories that explore wider themes, ideas and issues in society, told through the eyes of his protagonists.
Telling stories in such a bold, direct manner, that at times challenge and poke at the audience’s own insecurities and deep set fears has sometimes meant that his films have gotten polarised reactions.
In this video I’ll explore the work of Jordan Peele by looking at three films that he has directed at three increasing budget levels: the low budget Get Out, the medium budget Us, and the high budget Nope to unpack the methodology behind his filmmaking and his career.
GET OUT - $4.5 MILLION
From his background in sketch comedy, Peele transitioned to another genre for his debut feature film.
“I think horror and comedy are very similar. Just in one you’re trying to get a laugh and in one you’re trying to get a scare.” - Jordan Peele
Both genres rely on careful pacing, writing, reveals and filmmaking gags that are used to invoke an emotional response from the audience. He also brought his appreciation for direct satire and social commentary from sketches into the horror screenplay.
In fact, some of the films that inspired him were stories written by Ira Levin, like The Stepford Wives and Rosemary’s Baby - built around the horror genre and underpinned with a satirical commentary on society.
“Those movies were both extremely inspiring because what they did within the thriller genre was this very delicate tightrope walk. Every step into ‘weird town’ that those movies make, there’s an equal effort to justify why the character doesn’t run screaming. That sort of dance between showing something sort of weird and over the top and then showing how easily it can be placed with how weird reality is. That’s the technique I brought to Get Out.” - Jordan Peele
Justifying the actions of the characters so that the audience does not question the decisions that they make is particularly important in the horror genre or any genre that incorporates elements of the supernatural into a story.
Slowly backing the characters up into a corner until they have no escape is what creates the necessary suspenseful environment.
He pitched the script to Blumhouse Productions - who have a track record of producing low budget horror films, under the $6 million mark, that they are later able to get wide studio releases for that catapult them to financial success due to the wide commercial audience for horror.
It was through Blumhouse that he was connected with DP Toby Oliver who had previously shot other films for the production company.
“It began as the fun of a horror story. In the middle of the process it turned into something more important. The power of story is that it’s one of the few ways that we can really feel empathy and encourage empathy. When you have a protagonist, the whole trick is to bring the audience into the protagonist’s eyes.” - Jordan Peele
Peele puts us in the character’s shoes through the way that he structures almost all of his stories around a central protagonist. He also uses the placement of the camera, how it moves and the overall cinematography to make us see the world from the point of view of the main character.
Oliver lit most of the film in a natural way, presenting the world to the audience in the same way that the protagonist would see it.
“My pitch to him was that I thought the movie should have really quite a naturalistic feel. Not too crazy with the sort of horror conventions in terms of the way it looks. Maybe not until the very end of the movie where we go towards that territory a little bit more. With the more stylised lighting and camera angles.” - Toby Oliver
Instead, the camera often tracked with the movement of the protagonist or stayed still when he was still.
They also shot some POV shots, as if the camera literally was capturing what the character was seeing, or used over the shoulder shots that angled the frame to be a close assimilation of the actor’s point of view.
This framing technique, combined with a widescreen aspect ratio, also stacks the image so that there are different planes within the frame.
“What I love to do as a DP is to have story elements in the foreground, midground and background. When you’re looking through the frame there’s depth that’s telling you something more about the characters and story as you look through it.” - Toby Oliver
One of the challenges that came with the film’s low budget was an incredibly tight 23 day shooting schedule. To counter this they did a lot of planning about how the film would be covered before production started - which included Peele drawing up storyboards for any complicated scenes and walking through the scenes in the house location and taking still photos of each shot they needed to get, which Oliver then converted into a written shot list.
They shot Get Out using two Alexa Minis in 3.2K ProRes to speed up the coverage of scenes, using Angenieux Optimo Zoom lenses, instead of primes, which also helped with the quick framing and set up time that was needed.
Overall, Get Out was crafted in its writing as a contained, satirical horror film, shot with limited locations, fairly uncomplicated, considered cinematography through the eyes of its protagonist, and pulled off on the low budget by shooting on a compressed schedule with pre-planned lighting diagrams and shot lists.
US - $20 MILLION
“It really is a movie that was made with a fairly clear social statement in mind, but it's also a movie that I think is best when it's personalised. It’s a movie about the duality of mankind and it’s a movie about our fear of invasion, of the other, of the outsider and the revelation that we are our own worst enemy.” - Jordan Peele
Building on the massive financial success of Get Out, Peele’s follow up film took on a larger scope story that demanded an increased budget. Again, Blumhouse Productions came on board to produce, this time with an estimated budget of $20 million.
Like Get Out, Us was also written as a genre film, this time leaning more into the slasher sub-genre of horror.
“I think what people are going to find in Us is that, much like in Get Out, I’m inspired by many different subgenres of horror. I really tried to make something that incorporates what I love about those and sort of steps into its own, new subgenre.” - Jordan Peele
This time Peele hired Michael Gioulakis to shoot the project, a cinematographer who’d worked in the horror and thriller genre for directors such as M. Night Shyamalan and David Robert Mitchell.
One of the early challenges that they faced in pre-production was a scheduling one. Because they had four leads, who each had a doppelganger in the movie, and changing between shots with those doppelgangers required hours of hair and make-up work, they needed to precisely plan each shot.
“Because you could never shoot a scene like you normally would where you shoot this side and then shoot the other side, we ended up actually boarding pretty much the whole movie. Which helped us to isolate who would be seen in which shot in which scene and then we could move that around and structure our day accordingly with costume and make up changes.” - Michael Gioulakis
The actors would arrive on set and do a blocking from both sides of the character. When shooting they then used a variety of doubles and stand-ins, who would take up one of the dopplegangers positions so that the actor had an eyeline to play to. They would shoot the scene from one of the character’s perspectives and then usually come back the next day and do the other side of the scene.
For some wider two shots they left the camera in the same position, shot one shot with one character, one empty plate shot without the characters and one shot with the character in new make up. Or they would shoot the scene with a double and did a face replacement in post production.
Not only was continuity very important for this, but also the lighting setups had to remain consistent between shots.
“I kind of like the idea of heightened realism in lighting. Like a raw, naturalistic look, just a little bit of a slightly surreal look to the light.” - Michael Gioulakis
A great example of this idea can be seen in the opening sequence inside the hall of mirrors where he used soft, low level LED LightBlade 1Ks with a full grid Chimera diffusion to cast a cyan light to give a more surreal feeling to what should be darkness.
Like in all of his work, Peele’s cinematographers often play with the contrast between warm and cool light and the connotations that warm light during the day is comforting and safe and bluer light at night is colder, more scary and dangerous.
This isn’t always the case, but generally in his films, Peele paces moments of comforting characterisation during the day with moments of darker terror at night.
One of the trickier sequences involved shooting on a lake at night. Instead of going the usual route of mimicking moonlight, the DP created a nondescript, key tungsten source, punctuated by some lights off in the background to break up the darkness.
His gaffer put a 150 foot condor on either side of the lake, with three 24-light dinos on each condor to key the scene. They then put up a row of 1ks and sodium vapour lights as practicals in the background.
The film was shot with an Alexa and Master Primes - on the 27mm and 32mm for about 90% of the film. He exposed everything using a single LUT that had no colour cast at the low end which rendered more neutral darker skin tones.
In the end, Us was shot over a longer production schedule that accommodated for double-shooting scenes with the leads, stunt scenes, bigger set design builds, and digital post production work by Industrial Light & Magic.
NOPE - $68 MILLION
“First and foremost I wanted to make a UFO horror film. Of course, it’s like where is the iconic, black, UFO film. Whenever I feel like there’s my favourite movie out there that hasn’t been made, that’s the void I’m trying to fill with my films. It’s like trying to make the film that I wish someone would make for me.” - Jordan Peele
For his next, larger budget endeavour he turned to the UFO subgenre with a screenplay that was larger in scope than his previous films, due to its large action and stunt set pieces and increased visual effects work.
Even though it was a bigger movie, the way in which he told and structured the story is comparable to his other work in a few ways. One - it was written as a genre film, based on horror with offshoots of other subgenres. Two - it was told over a compressed time period using relatively few locations. Three - it featured a small lead cast and told the story directly through the eyes of his protagonist.
With a larger story and a larger budget came the decision, from esteemed high budget cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, to shoot the film in a larger format.
“So I talked to Hoyte. Obviously scope was a big thing and I wanted to push myself and I asked him, ‘How would you capture an actual UFO? What camera would you use?’ And that’s what we should use in the movie. Both in the movie and in the meta way. And he said the Imax camera.” - Jordan Peele
So the decision was made that to create an immersive, otherworldly, large scope cinema experience they would shoot on a combination of 15-perf, large format IMAX on Hasselblad lenses and 5-perf 65mm with Panavision Sphero 65 glass.
They stuck to Imax as much as they could, but had to use Panavision’s System 65 for any intimate dialogue scenes, because the Imax camera’s very noisy mechanics that pass the film through the camera make recording clean sync sound impossible.
They shot the daytime scenes on 65mm Kodak 250D and dark interiors and night scenes on Kodak 500T. They also used Kodak 50D to capture the aerial footage. He developed the film at its box speed without pushing or pulling it to ensure they achieved maximum colour depth and contrast ranges without any exaggerated film grain.
The most challenging scene for any cinematographer to light is a night exterior in a location which doesn’t have any practical lights to motivate lighting from.
Unlike the night exteriors in Us, which were keyed with tungsten units from an imagined practical source, van Hoytema chose to instead try to simulate the look of moonlight. There are two ways that this is conventionally done.
The first is shooting day for night, where the scene is captured during the day under direct sunlight which is made to look like moonlight using a special camera LUT.
The second way is to shoot at night and use a large, high output source rigged up in the air to illuminate a part of the exterior set. However the larger the area that requires light, the more difficult this becomes.
Van Hoytme came up with an innovative third method that he had previously used to photograph the large exterior lunar sequences on Ad Astra.
He used a decommissioned 3D rig that allowed two cameras to be mounted and customised it so that both cameras were perfectly aligned and shot the same image.
He then attached a custom Arri Alexa 65 which had an infrared sensor that captured skies shot in daylight as dark. A Panavision 65 camera was mounted to capture the same image but in full colour.
In that way they shot two images during the day that they could combine, using the digital infrared footage from the Alexa 65 to produce dark looking skies and pull the colour from the film negative of the Panavision 65.
This gave the night sequences a filmic colour combined with a background which looked like it was lit with moonlight and allowed the audience to ‘see in the dark’.
“Shooting on Imax brings its whole own set of challenges to the set. So for somebody that hasn’t shot on Imax you definitely bump yourself out of your comfort zone. By doing tests it became very evident, very early, that the advantages by far outweighed the disadvantages or the nuisances.” - Hoyte van Hoytema
While maintaining many of the story and filmmaking principles from his prior films, Nope was pulled off on a much larger budget that allowed them to shoot in the more expensive large format, with more money dedicated to post production, stunts and large action sequences that the bigger scope script required.
CONCLUSION
Jordan Peele’s filmic sensibilities that value genre, stories which contain broader social commentary, told with a limited cast, in limited locations, through the sympathetic eyes of its central protagonist have remained the same throughout his career as a writer and director.
What has changed is the scope of the stories he tells. Each new film he’s made has seen increasingly bigger set pieces, more complex action scenes and larger set builds which are captured by more expensive filmmaking techniques.
This increase in scope is what has influenced each bump up in budget - all the way from his beginnings as a low budget horror filmmaker to directing a massive, Hollywood blockbuster.