In a post on The Script Lab, Kole Lyndon Lee shares six storytelling techniques you can steal learn from Jordan Peele’s Nope. While focused on screenwriting, these tips can help transform your prose fiction as well.
- Open with a spectacle. “The opening sets the tone of the entire movie and gives the audience the first impression, which, so much of the time, dictates how willing the audience will be to give you their full attention,” Lee writes. Nope opens with a spectacle that sets the tone for the film and reinforces its theme.
- Include Tone and Theme in Your Setup. Immediately following the opening, Peele includes some mysterious imagery of the film’s monster and Eadweard Muybridge’s “The Horse in Motion.” The audience doesn’t know what they mean yet, but a vibe has been set.
- Establish Characters with Action. Peele avoids the clichéd methods for revealing character relationships and instead allows the two main characters to show us how they connect after the death of their father. “Peele pulls this off masterfully in Nope by showing us who the characters are rather than telling us how they feel,” Lee writes. “He throws us directly into the traumatic experiences the characters face, letting us see how they react and behave.” After the death of OJ and Emerald’s father, we don’t see them at a funeral or at home looking through family photo albums. Instead, we see them dealing with the family horse ranch. We learn more about them as we follow their actions and grow to understand their priorities, which drive the rest of the movie. “In fact, every primary character in this movie is dealt with in this way,” Lee says. “They do not say how they feel or what they want in every scene. We observe them behave which shows us who they are.”
- Leave Things Up to Your Audience’s Imagination. Peele is noted for allowing his audience to bring their own interpretation to his work. Beyond the thrills, he’s often intentionally vague about the meanings of characters, actions, and imagery. “Every character represents something more meaningful,” Lee says. “Symbols show up in every scene. And layers of story are blended together that create an experience that forces us to ask questions, desperately wanting more. But he never does that at the expense of the primary story being told about the characters he creates.”
- Fewer Locations Help You Focus the Story. Most of the action in Nope takes place at the main characters’ ranch, their home, and the roadside attraction nearby. “Fewer locations can make it easier for us writers to tell a clearer story — fewer items of focus can equate to less confusion for us and the audience,” Lee writes.
- How to Blend Genre. “Nope explores many different genres, including sci-fi, western, thriller, horror, and action,” Lee notes. “This movie is beautifully balanced, shifting genres only when it absolutely has to as a way to strengthen the storytelling and impact of the themes.”
