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8 DGA QUARTERLY FOCUS » Jordan Peele preps actor Daniel Kaluuya for "the sunken place" in Get Out. PHOTO: JUSTIN LUBIN/UNIVERSAL PICTURES Kaluuya as Chris Washington and Allison Williams as Rose Armitage, who bring Chris home for a weekend in hell with her parents (Bradley Whitford, Catherine Keener). "Horror movies allow us to face our fears together and celebrate them," says Peele. "Without outlets, our fears build up and are released in horrible ways." It's not exactly the kind of fare that might have been expected from someone best known as half of the comedy duo Key & Peele. The actor-turned-fi lmmaker is a vet- eran of standup and sketch comedy, which was essential to the direction of Get Out. "The real connection," he says, "is that with comedy you have to have a very precise attention to the audience and where they are moment to moment. Certainly, anybody who's done live comedy knows you're chas- ing the laugh—you're trying to get the whole room to laugh at once, which gives you a very narrow focus. And it either works, or it doesn't." So throughout Get Out, he was preoccu- pied with "where the audience's head was at. And the real win is if you can have the entire audience on the exact same page as one another. If you can work that out, it's undeniably engaging, in comedy or fi lm." Getting there took some choreography of both the script and the performances. "We shot this for $4.5 million, so you don't have the luxury of shooting in order," Peele says. "A lot of the work was reminding the actors, 'Look, the audience knows this much up till this point in the fi lm.' With several of the characters, the ones guarding the secrets of the fi lm, you have to be mindful because one notch one way or the other the whole thing could topple over. That could come from something the actor doesn't realize he or she is doing, or something I don't realize. But when you see it you know." 10201 W. Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064 | 310-FOX-INFO | foxinfo@fox.com | www.foxstudios.com 20 TH CENTURY FOX STUDIOS PRODUCTION SERVICES FILM AT FOX