Jordan Peele on why Nope's called Nope

gamesradar.com:

Jordan Peele has quickly become one of horror's top-tier maestros – the filmmaker having terrified the world with both Get Out and Us, two unique spins on the genre. Now, Peele re-teams with Daniel Kaluuya on Nope, a movie that broadly centers on two ranch-owning siblings, OJ and Emerald Haywood, who have a close encounter with the third kind. The film's title, however, gives little away.

"The story behind that title is a little similar to the title of Get Out," Peele tells SFX magazine in the new issue, featuring Prey on the cover (opens in new tab). "I wanted to acknowledge my audience’s perspective. In African-American culture there is an innate understanding of what ‘nope’ means. It means that we will not step into a haunted house. We will not do a lot of things we see in horror movies. So with this being the great American UFO film, I wanted to once again acknowledge that there is another ‘nope’ situation for us."

Though the twists and turns of Nope remain under wraps, there's a lot to look forward to, and Peele says there was one keyword when tackling the film: spectacle. Make no mistake – this is a movie movie, consciously engineered for the big screen. "I started this film in a time when I thought the theatrical experience was in jeopardy," he says. "So I wanted to save my magic place. I wanted to make something that when the world returned to some kind of normalcy – not that that’s what we can call this – and the theatres came back, that this would be something that would bring people out and would validate the theatrical experience.

"That’s why I went big. I said, ‘Look, I have a responsibility here. There are few people who can get a studio behind them to tell a story, to tell a really big, ambitious vision.’