Top 40 Jordan Peele Quotes

I didn’t know my father very well; I only met him a few times.

We go to the theater to be entertained, but if what is left after you watch the movie is a sort of eye-opening perspective on some social issues, then it can be a really powerful piece of art.

I define ‘social thriller’ as thriller/horror movies where the ultimate villain is society.

As a black man, sometimes you can’t tell if what you’re seeing has underlying bigotry, or it’s a normal conversation and you’re being paranoid. That dynamic in itself is unsettling. I admit sometimes I see race and racism when its not there.

I find campfire stories and urban legends are kind of the bread and butter that inspires a lot of people who are making horror and thriller. There is a nugget of truth behind these sort of cautionary tales.

I’m obsessed with giving the audience something they don’t see coming.

New York is about as cosmopolitan as it gets. It’s a fairly mixed and woke town, so there weren’t a lot of situations growing up where I felt like the outsider or the alien.

You hear it said time and time again by successful directors: You have to make a movie for yourself. Don’t make it for anyone else.

As kids, there’s somehow the fear that these bullies can end your life if they want to. Everything is blown up, and occasionally that kind of awful thing does happen.

When I talk about movies like ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ and ‘Stepford Wives,’ I really noticed that these movies were able to address fears surround the women’s lib movement in a way that was engaging, not preachy, but fun.

It was definitely during the Obama administration that talking about racism, or calling it out, suddenly seemed taboo. It seemed like talking about race was somehow summoning the evil of racism.

I want to produce untapped voices, find people and help them get their platform.

You boil down your influences to a soup, and it all informs you.

I was a very scared child. Not, you know, not so much of life but of the demons that lurked in the dark. And horror movies terrified me. You know, I’d love watching them but then at night, I would just be up in sweats all night.

You can track elections by who was playing that president on ‘SNL’ at that time. There’s the theory that the more likable or charismatic impression would help get the president elected.

African-American music tends to have, at the very least, a glimmer of hope to it – sometimes full-fledged hope.

Nobody wants to see sketch comedy that’s the same sketch they’ve seen time and time again, or that’s just a rehash of that thing.

Obama was the best thing for black nerds everywhere. Finally we had a role model. Before Obama, we basically had Urkel.

Part of what horror is, is taking risks and going somewhere that people think you’re not supposed to be able to go, in the name of expressing real-life fears.

I wanted to be Steven Spielberg, Tim Burton, Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg, Ridley Scott, James Cameron, and Hitchcock. I’d wanted to be a director since 13, and horror and the suspense thriller were the most powerful genres to me.

Now that the black experience isn’t viewed as box-office death, people are catching up to untapped auteurs.

As far as writing and directing, I’m very focused on the thriller genre.

Part of the desire to live in a post-racial world includes the desire not to have to talk about racism, which includes a false perception that if you are talking about race, then you’re perpetuating the notion of race. I reject that.

Each one of my movies is going to be about one of these different social demons. The first one, being ‘Get Out,’ is about race and neglect and marginalization.

When you start making a movie, people want to know: Who’s the star power? And very early, I realized there’s not a lot of 26-year-old black actors who have been given the opportunity to be the lead of a film. It’s, like, Michael B. Jordan, and then we’re done.

The best comedy and horror feel like they take place in reality. You have a rule or two you are bending or heightening, but the world around it is real.

I think the lesson is that when you give black voices a platform and the opportunity to tell our story, we will tell good stories just like anybody else.

Black people who want to do comedy go into standup, where our heroes opened a lot of doors. Improv doesn’t have a ton of heroes that you can look to.

I love biting off more than I can chew and figuring it out.

I love getting cheers. I love giving scares. Anything that really works with the audience makes me happy.

I think, before Obama, there was a glass ceiling. That’s a big change. As a president, I think he was the best. I felt like I could trust his judgment, and he’d take a measured, empathetic approach. I don’t see there ever being another Barack Obama.

‘Thelma and Louise’ was a pretty important film for me and still is. It’s a social film about many things – gender, freedom – and it puts someone like me into the place of these protagonists. Watching that movie, you are living through the eyes of these women.

Any time I claimed to be white, that would be unacceptable. It just doesn’t make sense in people’s minds. If I’m white, how can I walk through a department store and still have people scared that I’m going to rob them? Which, that can still happen.

The way I look at it is, when you allow people to submerge themselves into a story, they will react by thinking through what it’s about. That’s just so much more fun and effective, I think, than a lecture.

I want to believe in ghosts. I love ghost stories.

You never want to be the whitest-sounding black guy in a room.

I am a huge fan of Quentin Tarantino, who takes time to figure out what his next movie is.

The power of story and the power of a well-crafted film or television show is really all you need to speak to people. I think Hollywood is sort of catching up to that.

I’m a bigger fan of my directing than in acting. Acting is just harder. You know, not harder, per se, because directing is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. But it’s harder to enjoy my work as an actor, you know.

I was raised that emotion was a good thing.