Jordan Peele Says Weed Helped Him Write Oscar-Winning "Get Out"

Source: Kevin Mazur / Getty

Writer-director Jordan Peele talked to the African American Film Critics Association Awards gala about the journey leading up to his Oscars win for “Get Out.”

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Via Hollywood Reporter:

“It started as a fun project… I didn’t know it was ever going to get made. I’d go home, smoke a little bit of weed and I would write. I would watch this movie in my head, this movie that I wish somebody would write for me to watch and that was it.”

But then he wrote the now-famous sunken place scene where Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) is hypnotized by Rose’s mother (Catherine Keener). “I knew that something scary needed to happen.”

“I knew that in some ways my movie was an allegory for slavery. But I also I knew that at this point, the structure of the film, it needed to take us on a ride because it’s the horror genre. I wrote this scene in a very vulnerable state. I put my worst fears out there and onto the page, and when I was finished writing that scene, the experience of writing this movie changed.”

“I realized what this movie was about. I realized that slavery was not something of the past. The sunken place to me, shouted to me, that in today’s time, in modern time, we have black men and women abducted and put in dark holes. We have our freedoms taken away. … I realized at that point that there were people being locked up and taken out of the world and taken from their families for holding less weed than I was smoking while I was writing this movie.”

“I used to go to the movie theater and watch horror movies — and you know black people, we yell shit at the screen,” Peele said. “I’d go watch like a Freddy movie and you’d hear people saying shit like, ‘Oh, bitch, get out of the house!’ or ‘No. No, no — don’t walk backwards!’ or ‘You’re white — call the cops!’ I got it in my head that there was a missing piece of the conversation. There was a film that we were asking for, begging for that wasn’t there for us.”

Hit the jump to see the AAFCA’s full list of winners.

via Hollywood Reporter:

Hosted by Entertainment Tonight’s Nichelle Tuner at the Taglyan Complex in Hollywood, the night also included appearances by Ava DuVernay, Keegan-Michael Key, Courtney B. Vance, Frances McDormand, Paula Patton, Mike Epps, Sherri Shepherd and Sheryl Lee Ralph, among others.

The full list of winners is below.

Best Picture: Get Out

Best Director: Jordan Peele, Get Out

Best Actor: Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out

Best Actress: Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Best Supporting Actor: Laurence Fishburne, Last Flag Flying

Best Supporting Actress: Tiffany Haddish, Girls Trip

Best Comedy: Girls Trip

Best Ensemble: Detroit

Best Independent: Crown Heights

Best Animated: Coco

Best Documentary: Step

Best Foreign: The Wound

Best Screenplay: Get Out

Best Song: “It Ain’t Fair” by The Roots, Detroit

Best New Media: Mudbound

Best TV Comedy Series: Black-ish

Best TV Drama Series: Queen Sugar

Breakout: Lakeith Stanfield, Crown Heights

AAFCA TOP 10 FILMS OF 2017

Get Out

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Coco

Girls Trip

Detroit

Call Me by Your Name

The Shape of Water

Gook

Crown Heights

Marshall

AAFCA TOP 10 TV PROGRAMS OF 2017

Queen Sugar

Underground

Insecure

Master of None

Black-ish

The Handmaid’s Tale

Dear White People

She’s Gotta Have It

The Defiant Ones

Tie: Guerilla/Snowfall