Welcome back to a History of Film of Film Festivals in 100 Movies. We’re on episode 5 - Us by Jordan Peele and SXSW, an event that truly celebrates the convergence of tech, film, music, education. The event just wrapped its 37th year in Austin Texas this weekend. And yes, Jordan Peele was there! Why? We’ll get to that later…
First a little backstory
Jordan Haworth Peele was born in New York City on February 21, 1979. His mother, Lucinda Williams, is white, from Maryland. His father, Hayward Peele, Jr., was African American, and originally from North Carolina.Peele last saw his father when he was seven years old, and was raised by his single mother on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
He attended the Computer School in Manhattan, graduated from The Calhoun School on Manhattan's Upper West Side in 1997, and then went on to Sarah Lawrence College, where he majored in… puppetry. After two years, Peele dropped out to form a comedy duo with Sarah Lawrence classmate and future Key & Peele writer Rebecca Drysdale.
Peele had been a cinephile ever since he was a young child and decided at 12 that he wanted to be a film director, early influences included Glory, Edward Scissorhands, Thelma & Louise, and Aliens.
South by Southwest - The Early Years
SXSW
Around the time this teenager was dreaming of a future in filmmaking, a small group of people in Austin were engaging in long discussions about the value of creating a music festival in their town. It was 1986, and in the offices of the Austin Chronicle, 4 people, including Austin Chronicle co-founder Louis Black, shared the opinion that the local creative and music communities were as talented as anywhere else on the planet, but were severely limited by a lack of exposure outside of Austin, Texas. Black came up with the name, as a play on the name of the 1959 Alfred Hitchcock film North by Northwest.
Finally, in October of 1986, the announcement of the first South By Southwest was made. The SXSW group expected initial resistance from the locals, but it was quite the opposite. Almost everyone wanted to be involved. Resistance would come later.
The first event, held in March of 1987, saw an expected 150 registrants swell to 700 on the opening day. As hoped for, Austin’s charm won over the visitors, and SXSW took on a life of its own.
The event began as a music driven event, with 177 Artists & 15 Stages.
In 1988, Spin Magazine’s Bob Guccioni gave the keynote address, and artists included: Billy Ray Cyrus (Nashville TN), Poi Dog Pondering (Austin TX), Material Issue (Chicago IL), Jayhawks (Minneapolis MN), Ten Hands (Dallas TX), Dangerous Toys (Austin TX), Robert Earl Keen (Austin TX)Gin Blossoms (Scottsdale AZ), Lucinda Williams (Los Angeles CA), Dixie Chicks, Barenaked Ladies (Toronto CANADA), Pariah (Austin TX),
By 1990 they had 424 music acts on 24 stage, and more than 40 panel discussions with leading managers, producers and recording industry professionals.
In 1994, Johnny Cash would give the Keynote Address. You can see the 20 min clip below:
In 1995, Return of the Texas chainsaw Massacre would premiere at the Festival. In the movie, a group of teenagers get into a car crash in the Texas woods on prom night, and then wander into an old farmhouse that is home to Leatherface (Robert Jacks) and his insane family of cannibalistic psychopaths. The film starred Renee Zellweger and Texas’ very own Mathew McConaughey.
The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre would later be one of Peele’s March Horror Madness picks.
Over the next few years, the film section continued to grow alongside the music showcases and panel discussions. Richard Linklater, Robert Rodriguez, Kevin Smith, Steven Soderbergh, and Quentin Tarantino would participate in panel discussions.
By 1999, 828 music acts performed on 46 stages, including Tom waits & Jeff Beck. And there were 68 panels and workshops, as the film section continued to grow.
At the 2002 SXSW Film Festival, the documentary Spellbound won the jury award for documentary feature and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Meanwhile Jordan Peele was working on his comedy
Peele's breakout role came in 2003, when he was hired as a cast member on the Fox sketch comedy series Mad TV, where he spent five seasons, leaving the show in 2008.
In 2007, his Mad 50 Cent skit went viral.
SXSW Explodes with Growth
The Festival would go on an explosive run of growth over the next 5 years. In 2007, the social media platform Twitter notably gained a good deal of early traction and buzz at SXSW Interactive.
The 2008 SXSW Interactive got media attention due to a keynote interview of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The 2009 SXSW Film screened 250 films, including 54 world premieres, including the United States premiere of the film The Hurt Locker, which went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2010.
At the 2010 Film festival, Magnolia Pictures bought the film rights to the science-fiction film Monsters on the night it screened, in what was the first-ever "overnight acquisition" at SXSW. Journalist Meredith Melnick of Time magazine called this purchase a turning point for SXSW, leading to a greater interest among film studio executives in attending the festival in person.
At least two films screened at the SXSW Film festival gained distribution deals: the documentary Undefeated (which went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature) and the thriller The Divide. As a result, film critic
wrote that in 2011, SXSW Film went from being
“A well-regarded but fundamentally regional event has joined the big leagues of film festivals around the world."
Christopher Kelly (Film Critic)
Key & Peele
In 2012, he would join his MadTV partner to do a sketch comedy for Comedy Central, aptly titled Key & Peele. Pre-taped skits starred the two actors. The sketches covered a broad range of social topics, from American popular culture to social awkwardness and race relations. Key & Peele premiered on January 31, 2012 and ended on September 9, 2015, with a total of 53 episodes. Over the course of their run, Key & Peele won a Peabody Award and two Primetime Emmy Awards.
While Peele was doing his comedy sketches, sxsw continued to thrive. Genre pic reboot Evil Dead premiered at the 2013 SXSW.
And The 2013 SXSW Interactive saw another huge jump in registration, now with 30,621 paying attendees. This was over three times the number that had attended in 2008. The keynote talk for the 2013 SXSW Interactive was given by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.
In 2016, Jordan would get his next big break with Keanu
Keanu (also known as Cat Boys) is a 2016 American buddy action comedy film directed by Peter Atencio and written by Jordan Peele and Alex Rubens. The film stars Peele and Keegan-Michael Key in their first film as lead actors following five seasons of their sketch TV series; it also features Tiffany Haddish, Method Man, Nia Long, Will Forte, and Keanu Reeves. The plot follows two cousins who infiltrate a gang in order to retrieve their stolen kitten.
The film premiered at the South by Southwest Festival on March 13, 2016 and was theatrically released in North America on April 29, 2016. It received generally positive reviews from critics and grossed $20 million against its $15 million budget.
GET OUT Exceeds Expectations
In February, Peele's first film as a writer/director, Get Out, was released to critical acclaim, eventually scoring a 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The film received universal acclaim for Peele's screenplay and direction, as well as the performance of its lead, Daniel Kaluuya, and was chosen by the National Board of Review, the American Film Institute, and Time magazine as one of the top 10 films of the year.
Get Out proved to be popular with audiences, and it eventually became one of the most profitable horror films, and films of 2017, and grossed over $255 million on a budget of $4.5 million. For his work on the film, Peele received significant attention, as well as numerous accolades, including the Bingham Ray Breakthrough Director Award at the 2017 Gotham Independent Film Awards.
The film also received four nominations at the 90th Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay nominations for Peele, as well as a Best Actor nomination for Kaluuya. Peele won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, becoming the first African-American screenwriter to win in this category.
Get Out also earned him the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay. The success prompted his Monkeypaw Productions company to a first look deal with Universal Pictures.[
In early 2018 Peele announced his intention to retire from acting, stating in an interview with CBS "Acting is just nowhere near as fun for me as directing.”
Next came Us
Peele has said that an inspiration for Us was The Twilight Zone episode "Mirror Image", which was centered on a young woman and her evil doppelgänger.
The project was announced in February 2018, and much of the cast joined in the following months. Peele produced the film alongside Jason Blum and Sean McKittrick, having previously collaborated on Get Out and BlacKkKlansman,
Filming took place in California, mostly in Los Angeles, Pasadena and Santa Cruz, from July to October 2018.
Here’s a brief synopsis:
Accompanied by her husband, son and daughter, Adelaide Wilson returns to the beachfront home where she grew up as a child. Haunted by a traumatic experience from the past, Adelaide grows increasingly concerned that something bad is going to happen. Her worst fears soon become a reality when four masked strangers descend upon the house, forcing the Wilsons into a fight for survival. When the masks come off, the family is horrified to learn that each attacker takes the appearance of one of them.
Us premiered at South by Southwest on March 8, 2019,, as the OpeningNight film
Here’s a clip from the Q&A
Us was theatrically released in the United States on March 22, 2019, by Universal Pictures. It was a critical and commercial success, grossing $256 million worldwide against a budget of $20 million.
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 93% of 553 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.9/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "With Jordan Peele's second inventive, ambitious horror film, we have seen how to beat the sophomore jinx, and it is Us.”
Monica Castillo of RogerEbert.com gave the film four out of four, writing that: "Us is another thrilling exploration of the past and oppression this country is still too afraid to bring up. Peele wants us to talk, and he's given audiences the material to think, to feel our way through some of the darker sides of the human condition and the American experience."
Peele later explained in the film's digital release special features that a central theme of the film is American privilege:
"One of the central themes in Us is that we can do a good job collectively of ignoring the ramifications of privilege. I think it's the idea that what we feel like we deserve comes, you know, at the expense of someone else's freedom or joy. You know, the biggest disservice we can do as a faction with a collective privilege like the United States is to presume that we deserve it, and that it isn't luck that has us born where we're born. For us to have our privilege, someone suffers. That's where the Tethered connection, I think, resonates the most, is that those who suffer and those who prosper are two sides of the same coin. You can never forget that. We need to fight for the less fortunate." Jordan Peele
Nope is Next
Jordan followed US with the genre bending Nope, an American neo-Western science fiction horror film.
He cited King Kong (1933), Jurassic Park (1993), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Jaws (1975), Signs (2002), and The Wizard of Oz (1939) as his main inspirations.
Nope grossed $123.3 million in the United States and Canada, and $48 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $171.2 million.
Peele was just at the 2024 SXSW to support dev Patel’s Monkey Man, a movie he joined in its later stages to help it secure distribution by Universal.
Here’s a clip from their introduction at SXSW, where you really get a sense of Jordan’s passion for movies, the value of seeing them on the big screen and his support of fellow filmmaking artists.
Filmmaker Favorites
I’ve started doing a deeper dive into what I’m calling Filmmaker Favorites, as video programs that share more insights into our featured filmmakers top 10 lists, directors and films that have influenced them and more. These take time to produce, so we’re offering them exclusively to our paid subscribers.
Click here to learn more about Jordan Peel’s influences, see clips from his favorite films and see his March Madness horror film brackets. Fun stuff.
And that a wrap for Episode 5, Us - Jordan Peele and the SXSW Festival.
Thanks to all of our subscribers for your support.
Sources
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Peele
Entertainment Weekly
These are the 10 horror films that Jordan Peele gave Lupita Nyong'o to prepare for Us
FEAR
Jordan Peele Ranks His Top Horror Movies | March Madness | Fear
Episode 5: Us - Jordan Peele