The Bloomberg 50

David Walters spoke to Soloway and Jenkins about why diversity and bankability in Hollywood shouldn’t be considered mutually exclusive. Edited excerpts:

David Walters: Why don’t women hold a larger percentage of behind-the-camera roles?
Patty Jenkins: The biggest thing holding female directors back has always been that there was only one audience everyone was aiming for. But storytelling is for everyone, and there’s not one type of person it can be done through.
Jill Soloway: I’ve heard the phrase “opportunity hoarding,” and I’m sure you’ve noticed it, too, Patty. When I direct, I think, Oh, my god, I’ve created an entire safe universe around my own desires and dreams. No wonder men didn’t make it easy for us to do this! No wonder they made it seem too hard for anyone else to figure out!

So what can be done?
Soloway: I say to those white, heterosexual men who are telling their own stories over and over: “Produce other people’s work. Find women, people of color, queer people. Meet them at the center of their storytelling, and let them stay as their own protagonists.”

That’s a guiding principle behind your company, Topple Productions—as in “topple the patriarchy,” right?
Soloway: As voraciously and bombastically as we can, we’re attempting to offer jobs and opportunities to women, people of color, and queer people. I’m trying to figure out how much toppling can be done.

Wonder Woman’s budget was $149 million, a record for a female director. What was that like, Patty?
Jenkins: People always want to know what it’s like to take on such a huge budget. I still have 20 percent too little money and 20 percent too little time to do what I’m trying to do. We’re in full-blown preproduction on the sequel. I love Wonder Woman, and I believe in Wonder Woman, and I can’t believe how lucky I am to have this in the palm of my hand right now.

One common industry fallacy is that female directors don’t get megabudget projects because they don’t want to work on that scale.
Soloway: I will take the biggest budget anybody will give me, all the money in the world. Give me all the money.
Jenkins: Women’s movies have been more financially sound and bigger moneymakers across the board. That’s the conundrum in this business—are you guys about money, or are you not? Jill, if we could give you $150 to $200 million right now, what’s the tentpole you’d want to make?
Soloway: A friend of mine once told me that, many times in the Bible, the word “goddess” got translated to “angel.” I’d like to tell the myth of Asherah, the great mother goddess.
Jenkins: I love it. You should make that film.
Soloway: I’ll turn her into a superhero.

Looking around Peele’s office, one may experience déjà vu. Doesn’t his desk chair, with its jungle-pattern brocade fabric and wooden arms carved in the shape of lions’ heads, seem familiar? Sinister and familiar? That’s because it’s set dressing from Get Out, about a young black man (Daniel Kaluuya) who goes to meet the parents of his white girlfriend (Allison Williams) and discovers a nefarious plot against black people. It’s the very chair where Catherine Keener, as the girlfriend’s mother, sits across from Kaluuya, clinking her spoon against a porcelain teacup until hypnosis sets in. Peele also has the leather-tufted chair in which Kaluuya slips into his trance. That’s where visitors sit, and it’s a bit unnerving. “I can’t believe I got to keep these,” Peele says excitedly.

Get Out was his feature film directorial debut after five seasons of Key & Peele, the Emmy-winning sketch comedy he created with Keegan-Michael Key. The film beat out The Blair Witch Project as the highest-grossing debut for a writer-director with an original screenplay and Straight Outta Compton as the top domestic hit from a black director. Most impressively, it’s the third-highest-grossing R-rated horror film ever, behind The Exorcist and Stephen King’s It. Peele, though, was working with a seventh of It’s budget. Now he has first-look deals with Universal Pictures and Sonar Entertainment, where he’ll produce TV shows.

We’re standing in a three-story town house in the hills, right below the Hollywood sign, that Peele has rented as the headquarters for Monkeypaw Productions. It’s the vehicle he’ll use to make his “tippy-top secret” new movie, nurture talent, and make more films and TV shows with social messages. The plan is to model Monkeypaw after J.J. Abrams’s Bad Robot Productions and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, production companies that allow their creator’s voices to carry through on all projects. The name comes from the be-careful-what-you-wish-for fable about parents who prayed on a shriveled monkey’s paw to get rich and wound up with money only after their son was killed. Peele wants “monkeypaw” to become an adjective describing the genre he’s creating where comedy and horror meld into dark satire—think Scream if it tackled systemic oppression. Since Get Out, he’s hired six staffers, soon to be nine.

Every inch of Monkeypaw Central, as Peele calls it, is covered with his influences: a Pinhead doll from Hellraiser; a framed replica of the treasure map from The Goonies; posters from The Exorcist, The Shining, and Rosemary’s Baby. “I’m not shy about being derivative,” he says, explaining how his cinematic hero, Quentin Tarantino, “helped us learn that you can pay homage in blatant ways and still be unique.”

Still, it’s not an exaggeration to say that with one film, Peele has changed the face of horror. In a genre that has a running joke about how the black guy always dies (see Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, The Return of the Living Dead, From Dusk Till Dawn, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Freddy vs. Jason, Resident Evil, See No Evil, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, Halloween: Resurrection, and Scream 2, in which Omar Epps and Jada Pinkett Smith die before the opening credits in a sendup of the trope), he’s made a film from the perspective of a black protagonist. In doing so, Peele brings to life in hilarious and terrifying fashion the paranoia that comes from being the only black guy in a room full of white people.

What’s more, he isn’t skewering obvious racists. Get Out is a searing commentary on white liberalism and the myth of a postrace society. The movie’s psychopath dad (Bradley Whitford) insists he would have voted for Barack Obama a third time. “Very early on, I realized if I could pull off The Stepford Wives, except instead of men conspiring against women, it’s Caucasians conspiring against black people,” Peele says, “then it would be at the very least a very, very ballsy film.”

Most horror movies don’t take seven years to write. But Peele kept fine-tuning his idea, drawing on his experience as a comedian to appeal to the widest viewership. “We are trained to be in tune to the audience,” he says. “I’m trying to get the whole audience to jump at the same time, laugh at the same time, cheer at the same time.” He realized that two of the most loyal groups of theatergoers, African Americans and gore enthusiasts, had rarely been courted together. And he wrote Get Out to be a film that people had to see immediately—and then again and again—by studying sleeper hits such as The Sixth Sense and The Usual Suspects. “A great twist makes the word-of-mouth so immaculate,” he says, “because there’s nothing more compelling than someone saying, ‘Oh, my God, have you seen this movie? I can’t tell you anything more. You have to see it.’ ”

When Get Out premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, none other than Malia Obama was in the audience. (Peele impersonated her dad on TV for years, but, he says, he doesn’t know if the president had seen the movie: “I’ve got to think he digs it. He’s been there. He knows that world.”) A half-year after its release, it’s still the most acclaimed movie of the year on Rotten Tomatoes, with a 99 percent “fresh” rating.

There’s a good chance it will be the rare horror film to get an Oscar nomination for best picture, and it will probably be a finalist for best original screenplay. “My favorite expression from people who see Get Out is, ‘I hate horror movies, but I love Get Out,’ ” says Jason Blum, whose Blumhouse Productions co-financed the film. “It was a horror movie. So you don’t hate horror movies. You hate most horror movies.”

Right after Get Out’s success was clear, Peele got offered the chance to direct a remake of one of his favorite movies, the 1988 Japanese animated sci-fi classic Akira. He turned it down. “The response to Get Out was so wonderful,” he says, “that I felt like I would be doing myself and the fans a disservice by not at least trying to put something else new out there.” Beyond proving that a movie can sell at home and abroad without big names and with a black protagonist, Get Out’s legacy for Peele is reminding Hollywood of the value of original ideas. He’ll say only that his next movie is “not another Get Out, but in the same social thriller arena.”

Currently, Peele is working on Tracy Morgan’s comeback series for TBS, The Last O.G.; Lovecraft Country, an HBO series based on a 2016 novel about a young black man battling racists and evil spirits in Jim Crow America; The Hunt, a TV series about a band of Nazi hunters roving the U.S. in the 1970s; and Spike Lee’s Black Klansman, the true story of a black police officer who infiltrates the KKK. Peele, who brought the project to Lee, figured that getting the director interested in it was a long shot. But “when I talked to him,” Peele says, “he was just about to go see Get Out for a second time.”

Peele’s assistant knocks on the door. Peele has to get in a car—right now. He and his wife, Brooklyn Nine-Nine actress Chelsea Peretti, recently had their first child, Beaumont, and they’ve got nanny interviews all afternoon. Which will presumably free Peele up to continue writing his next movie and building a production company intent on reimagining a genre. “I’m going to be busy at every moment,” he says, shrugging. “I know people do it. So now it’s just intensity. Forever and for the rest of my life.”

—Jada Yuan