Jordan Peele

Conan O'Brien's...

Oh, no, sorry, I fucked it up.

It was going so well.

Hold on, hold on, hold on.

Oh my God.

Let me just take it back.

You should change it.

Oh God.

So, hi, my name is Jordan Peele.

And...

I feel good about being Conan...

No!

Yes!

We had it!

So you guys edit and stuff...

Not that particularly.

As you're...

Fall is here, hear the yell, back to school, ring the bell, brand new shoes, walk in blues,

climb the fence, books and pens, I can tell that we are gonna be friends.

Hey there, welcome to Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend, and I'm starting with an observation

here sitting with my pals, Sonam Ossessian, Matt Gorley, and this is a complete happening

that we just realized as we all sat down. I am wearing uncharacteristically a green

kind of hoodie, olive green sweatshirt that I never wear, and I just put it on, waltzed

in. Sonam, you are wearing the exact same color in like a, what is that, like an overcoat?

It's like a trench coat.

And then over here, Gorley just walked off the set of M.A.S.H., and he's wearing, I guess,

think in the role of Radar O'Reilly, and you are wearing the exact same green, and then

I'm noticing that we're sitting on the exact same green pillows, and that the chairs are

the exact same color, olive drab green, and it's almost as if, I think if when this airs,

it will just be faces floating.

Yeah, zip up your jacket, we're going to look like three floating heads.

Three floating heads just doing a podcast. I mean, of course, yes, this is an audio medium,

but I know that people will look at the clips, so if you want to check out the clip of ... Now,

what could we do? Don't we have to ...

Is anyone actually going to key us out, or ...

We don't need to.

Because we look stupid.

No, we are.

We look smart.

No, we look smart.

We look well done.

Hold on. I worry that there's probably more technology needed here, that the background

also has to be all green, and then some kind of ... Does anyone here understand the technology?

Eduardo, do you understand it, or does Blay understand it? What would we need to do to

make our head just float?

I understand it. I mean, basically, it would be ... Because there's a black background,

we would key out the green, so it would just be your heads on a see-through box, so we

could make ... We could key out the green.

Is this going to cost us thousands of dollars?

No, not at all.

I could probably do it on my phone, maybe.

Key out the green, add in the background color.

Yeah, I'm going to cover up.

Yeah, if you cover up your arms.

Cover up your arms and your head.

I can't do this.

Put them under the table.

Yeah.

This jacket is very small on me, so it's already up half my arm.

That jacket doesn't fit you.

Did you steal that?

No.

Did you steal that jacket off a corpse?

Did you steal that?

No.

Did you steal that jacket off a corpse?

Off a corpse?

No.

Okay.

I didn't steal things from corpses.

Thing, I bought this a long time ago.

I love getting paid.

I love getting paid.

I love getting paid.

I don't steal things from corpses.

You know what I love about Sona?

She has standards.

She has standards.

That's the only time she could say I didn't steal something.

If they're breathing, then I'm leaving.

Yeah, keep doing whatever that is.

Well, listen, I'm just saying, we're trying to create ...

We don't have a big budget here, but we're creating a cool, spooky optical image of our

heads.

Yeah, three days after Halloween.

This is great.

Yeah.

Okay.

And it'll probably air in a couple of weeks.

It'll probably air long after that.

Grim grinning ghosts come out to socialize.

You know?

No, I don't know.

Haunted mansion?

The three heads in the haunted mansion?

Yeah, not all of us did time professionally at an amusement park.

You act like, come on, guys.

Are you with me?

Come on, guys.

The song you hear 75,000 times a day when you work at an amusement park?

If you gave it, you're all doing that performance.

You know what?

I bare my soul for you.

I bare my soul for you two assholes, and this is what I get?

Well, anyway, we should probably quit doing this.

It seems dumb.

What do you think?

We should move on with the show?

We should, but you know what?

What?

Everybody should head over to YouTube.

Oh, for a visual treat.

Do you mean head, as in pun, head over to YouTube?

Because we're floating heads?

Grim grinning ghosts come out to socialize.

I am so angry at you right now.

I hate you so much.

Yeah, he's the worst.

You are the worst.

I usually love you, but I hate you so much.

You're the worst.

Oh, no.

You guys haven't heard?

I'm a little great guy.

All right.

Well, anyway.

I'm saying just go to YouTube.

I'm not saying to watch this.

I'm just saying go to YouTube.

Yeah, go to YouTube.

Switch away from this shit.

Yeah, don't listen to this.

Go on YouTube right now.

Certainly, there's something you would want to watch there.

Yeah, and look up a great Olympic skiing fail.

Do not look at any of this shit of our floating heads.

All right, let's do it.

Okay.

Yeah, one more transition, because we were all laughing.

I'm like, okay, my next guest.

All right, everybody.

Okay, enough of your giggling.

Let's get to it.

No screwing around today.

My guest is an Academy Award winning writer and director behind such films as Get Out,

Us, and Nope.

He also starred in the hit Comedy Central sketch series, Key and Peele.

To say I'm excited is just not adequate.

I'm thrilled.

I'm overjoyed.

I admire this gentleman so much.

So glad he's here today.

Jordan Peele.

Welcome.

Can I say something to you?

I have been dying to have you on the podcast, and this is a huge delight for all of us,

but I-

I didn't know.

Sometimes offers come in, and they just don't sort of penetrate the wall of advisors.

No, I went to your house, and I rang the bell, and you answered.

And I said, hey, Jordan, would you want to do the podcast someday?

And you said, and it wasn't convincing.

You said, I just had drops for glaucoma surgery, and I can't see who I'm talking to.

And then you did that bit every time I came by.

And the truth of the matter was, and I want to say this on the record, this is such, it

is such an honor.

It's always an honor, because from us comedy people, you are the GOAT.

Oh.

You know what that means?

I can get up hard, rocky mountains easily.

I can digest tin cans.

This one's like within the last 20 years.

That is so nice of you to say.

I, okay, I'm going to say when I first discovered you, as a lot of people did, watching Key

and Peele sketches, and I would watch these sketches, and I would say, okay, these are

so well-written.

These are such great ideas.

These are such perfect sketches.

I mean, some of the sketches, I've spent years relating them to people.

Like, you know that one?

You know that one?

There's the burn victim in the Insult comic.

That one, a lot of comedians really connect with this one.

Yes.

Yes.

And I mean, that one, I mean, there's so many great sketches, but that one, comedian, insult

comedian going around the audience, and then respectfully passes over someone who clearly

has been in a horrible situation.

Burns all over them, and he's just, but passes over.

And tries to start heckling, doing crowd work with the next guy, and the guy goes, do me.

Do me.

And he says, no, no, no, sir, I wouldn't do you, and he goes, I can take it.

And you make him do it, and then he does it, and you're like, too far.

I thought I could take it, but I can't.

I was crying when I first saw that.

I've watched it multiple times, and you guys have many sketches like that, but I was like,

okay, that's up there with, you know, take your favorite SCTV pieces, take your favorite,

you know, your favorite sketch from SNL ever, take your favorite Monty Python, I mean, just

the whole pantheon.

You guys have a bunch of sketches that slide in there.

Thank you.

God damn it.

They're amazing.

I believe Alex Rubins was the writer on that sketch as well, and we had an amazing team

of writers, so if I'm wrong about that, I'm desperately mortified.

But look, I...

But also the commitment, it's the ideas, and then the performances.

I was raised on Warner Brothers cartoons, and my sense of humor has always been very

cartoonish, and when you guys would go into that cartoon world where reality bends in

this beautiful way to frustrate the expectation, I was just over the moon.

Thank you.

Look, I have to...

And I have to bounce that right back at you.

So much of this, I mean, so much of this is born from your work, and your heightening,

your sort of textbook, the Simpsons, this, you know, and it was a type of sketch comedy

that you see in the best sketches, where it's just kind of an aggressive and ridiculous

heightening, and Mr. Show did it.

Yes, yep, yep.

And so we were just like, okay, we have this opportunity to do this thing.

Yeah, it's so...

And then I'm, you know, one of the reasons I've always, you know, I've chatted with you,

we've talked, but I've always thought, okay, if I get you in this format, because I've

spoken to Keegan, and now it's like, you're here, and I want to know, like, I always want

to find out, where do these minds come from?

At what point do you realize, I think of very strange things, and I really like comedy,

or was your first true love film, or was it comedy, or both, or horror?

Where does it all start?

I probably fell in love with comedy at the same time I was getting really scared by shit.

And I mean scared, like, as a kid, like, you know, a kid growing up in New York, I grew

up next to a building called the Stratford Arms that was a hotel for transients, is what

it said on the side.

And it was basically, it was, you know, very interesting characters, let's just put it

that way.

And so I had a very blessed Upper West Side, you know, upbringing, I was, you know, cultured,

and that whole privilege, but it was also, it's just like, there's a creepiness to it

as well.

So those two things, I think, developed side by side, but at some point, they collided

for me.

Yeah, yeah.

And they did in film.

So you start, what are the movies that you're watching that terrify you when you're a kid?

Well, so, you know, if I'm, first thing out of my gate, this is a lot of people would

say, but Nightmare on Elm Street, was that, that imagery for my specific generation, I

was like too young when that came out, or too young, it was like, it was more seeing

the posters and the thing that it just evoked such terror.

And so that was form, that's a formative boogeyman.

But then falling in love with cinema and stuff, it's like stuff like The Shining.

I know you've referenced Rosemary's Baby.

What I see in that film that I think the best directors, you know, try to harness or a similar

feel is slowly turning the dial, you know, because I always loved about Rosemary's Baby.

And you can relate to this because it filmed, you know, takes place in the Dakota, Upper

West Side blocks from where you grew up.

Something's, it starts out and everything's fine.

And it's the slowly turning of the knob where things are less and less fine, but it's hard

to identify the exact moment when things, is that, does that ring true for you?

I love that style.

And I love that location.

I do have this real nostalgia and connection with that.

Of course, that's where John Lennon was shot.

And so there's all sorts of connotations, right, with that area that are so dark.

But I also think that's such a big part of the horror, kind of with comedy, is the grounding

character, you know, the person that ropes us in and reacts.

You know, with horror, it's the toad in the pot theory, right?

If you throw a toad into a boiling pot, then that person's going to leave the scene.

That character needs to get out of there.

And that's a, you don't want that as a horror film.

You got to keep them in this isolated spot.

So you slowly turn up the heat on the character.

Yeah.

The idea being the toad gets in, it's like lukewarm, kind of feels okay.

And the temperature is slowly rising.

Things are getting more and more uncomfortable.

And you can kind of believe why the character would convince themselves, oh, well, maybe

it's just me.

You know?

It's so interesting because there's like a, I haven't thought about this at all, but there

are their close brothers or their related comedy and horror.

There's a similar thing going on.

It's just because you need to acclimate somebody to something that's very normal.

My favorite comedies are, let's acclimate to something very normal.

And then you slowly start to bend things and twist things.

Of course you get to this insane place, but a lot of comedies that are most effective

work that way.

They get you to buy into a reality and then you have to start accepting a few premises

here and there along the way, but you get sort of spoon fed them.

And I think it's the same thing with probably really good horror or the kind of horror I

respond to.

Yeah.

And just like the comedy, it's like the heightening, the pushening, the fantastical and the imagination,

that becomes a certain type of project and exercise.

But the exercise of grounding it is always what makes it work.

To me, in horror especially, is the hardest part because how do you ground this idea that

your protagonist would stay in this situation very long?

It kind of always comes up.

How can they not solve this?

You're putting the audience in this angst of wanting your character to solve it, but

you're not giving that to them.

And so the only way to make that in any way satisfying is to kind of like honor the grounded

experience as much as possible.

When you did Get Out, it's very important.

As you said, if someone shows up, goes away for a weekend with his girlfriend and goes

to a house, meet the family, if things are fucked up right away, they're out the door.

So you have all these reasons which I can relate to, which is, no, no, this is okay.

This is all right.

I'm going to stay here.

I'm going to stay in this.

Okay, I can handle this.

And then things, you can, like you say, turn up the heat on the pot.

But how you do it and how gradually you do it is really important.

And that's the guest who's coming to dinner setup is one that everyone kind of like connects

to, which is like that anxiety of meeting your in-laws for the first time, or your potential

in-laws, and you want to crawl out of your skin and leave, but you can't.

You're there for a reason.

So we all...

I just left too.

Is it Bradley Whifford?

He says, oh man, Obama, greatest president, right?

And you just think, okay, this is...

I would have voted for him a third time.

But I was just thinking like, to me, that's also a funny comedy situation too, which is

this white person is way over, is pushing it.

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah.

Well, yeah, that was the element of it.

And I'm sorry I said that to you when you came in today.

Obama, man, right?

A little tone deaf.

A little tone deaf.

There's just such a thing as being too colorblind.

I'm sorry.

You're good.

I was trying to get in good with you right away, and it was weird.

You're good.

We know each other.

Yeah.

But then I was saying he should be a Supreme Court justice, and you said, let's let it

go.

I like you too.

Yeah.

I don't need to be cast as your judge.

I don't need to be president of the United States.

No, but look, I mean, we're obviously joking, but it's this, and it is in its essence, it's

kind of a Key and Peele sketch, it's an observation of being black in white spaces.

And in that time, I don't remember it having sort of been said like that.

And so I remember just writing that and feeling like, it was the moment I realized I had to

direct the film that I was writing.

Because I was like, I don't know anybody who can do that, who can direct that much.

So that's a big leap.

Yes.

Okay.

You write this screenplay, obviously terrific screenplay, and you're a known quantity writer,

performer, and then you say, I'd like to direct this.

How was, what was the reaction?

You know, it was surprisingly okay.

Yeah.

This is Sean McKittrick, this guy at QC Entertainment, who I was pitching to.

And by the way, I pitched it like, no one's ever going to do this movie, but here's the

pitch.

And pitched, you know, this crazy plot and started writing it about a couple months into

writing it.

And again, I knew the whole thing, but a couple months into writing it, I realized, made this

call and he said, go for it.

And it's just like a $5 million movie.

So it wasn't like, you know, it was like kind of the perfect type of risk.

A part of it was we can't afford anyone else.

You know what I mean?

This is like micro-budget.

I'll direct it and I'll be, you can pay me $6.

I thought it would be more controversial, but he said, yes, way too quick.

And I was like, well, let's negotiate.

Tried to backtrack.

Too late.

Wait a minute, $5 million?

Yeah.

That was the, that was the budget.

Now, supposedly it got done for 4.5, but who knows.

The way Blumhouse cooks the books.

No one knows.

Weirdly, I got a check for $500,000.

And I don't even think it was supposed to go to me.

You're not affiliated.

No, I'm not affiliated in any way, but I cashed it.

You did nothing.

Oh, you cashed it.

Yeah, I bought a lot of cars and coats.

I signed something when I did promotion on your show.

You did.

Remember when you did promotion on the show and you thought it was just a standard, I agree to be on this show?

So that's what it was.

Yes.

You were the inspiration for Bradley Whitford.

Well, that's the other thing, right?

It's just an homage.

His name in the movie is Cronin O'Ryan.

I just don't hear it that often.

It's really weird.

I feel like I've produced a film with you.

Let's talk about that.

Do you feel that way?

Well, you and I had an interesting...

And I don't know where this is going or what you're doing with this project.

Yeah, I don't know.

But I'm just going to say that I got this invitation to go to your office and I didn't know anything about what was going to happen.

And then you had this...

It was absolutely fascinating.

I think it was over two hours, you and I.

And I think you've done this with a bunch of other people.

Yes.

But you just presented me with a bunch of decks of cards.

And I would select different cards that would lead us towards the making of a movie.

Yeah.

And so, okay.

And I would...

So I'd pick a...

You'd start out with genres.

And I would just pick three genres and you and I would talk about them.

We produced it together.

And this is your life.

Your life is making films.

That is your life now.

And you're making these films and you think about it and you're clearly extremely gifted at it.

And this is what you've been put here to do.

And then there's me.

And I'm just firing all these ideas at you about how we could make this movie.

It was so fun.

It was really fun.

So, I'll give you a little...

Do you think we ever got close to making a movie together that could be made?

Be honest.

Yes.

Yes.

Our premise was solid.

Okay.

Okay.

And you were a big part of that.

Now, wait.

Can I backtrack for just a second?

Sure.

Yeah.

Because this is something that...

These are a bunch of sessions I've been doing with people whom I admire.

The Ryan Cooglers, the Paul Thomas Sandersons of the world.

I don't know what's going to happen of these, but they really are amazing at sort of like

learning about how other creative people think about the filmmaking process.

Right.

The Daniels.

Some just incredible filmmakers.

And then Conant.

Well done.

You got to break it up every now and then.

Every now and then, it's like, this is this amazing French meal, Vichy Soix, and just

perfectly baked steaks and everything.

And then every now and then, you got to just have...

A new perspective.

Yeah.

Fruit loops.

Fruit loops.

Fruit loops.

With a big...

With a lot of almond milk.

And so the whole thing was we did a...

We ended up...

It's kind of like a D&D, but making a movie.

Yeah.

And it's a fake movie.

And we ended up making a Christmas movie.

A Christmas movie.

Yeah.

We ended up making a Christmas movie that...

I remember thinking at the time, I absolutely think this could be a Christmas movie.

Yeah.

That's the fun of it.

I think this could be a Christmas movie.

And we're not...

I don't want to get too much into it because we did record it.

So you never know.

This could be something.

Right.

I don't know what you're doing with all this.

It could be a movie.

But spoil away.

I don't care.

Okay.

Well, we had...

It was really fun.

It was a lot of fun.

And it was really fascinating because my thing is to just pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch.

And I threw so many bad ideas at you.

And my favorite part was watching the light go out of your eyes.

Yeah.

When I'd be going down a really bad road and I'd see you go, okay, yeah, Conan, maybe...

And we really had to act like we're going to pitch this in a meeting with executives.

So sometimes you'd say, just don't do that whole run in the meeting with the executives.

Yeah.

That's right.

That was really fun.

We had to...

Well, yeah.

And you had to talk some actors off of some ledges and stuff like that.