Yesterday’s Deadline statement from Get Out director Jordan Peele was apparently a backpedal of some kind. It was apparently released because of what Peele actually said to Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn on the fly when Peele and Kohn spoke earlier this week.
An educated guess would be that Peele got into trouble for what he said to Kohn, and so the statement given to Deadline reads like a mea culpa to the Golden Globes. Peele clearly didn’t realize that Get Out was submitted in the comedy category. It would appear that Universal did that without telling him.
From Kohn’s piece: “At a lunch event for [Get Out] at New York’s Lincoln Ristorante, Peele elaborated on his reservations. ‘The problem is, it’s not a movie that can really be put into a genre box,’ he said in an interview prior to the lunch. ‘Originally, I set out to make a horror movie. I ended up showing it to people and hearing, you know, it doesn’t even feel like horror. It’s in this thriller world. So it was a social thriller.’
“While Universal submitted Get Out as a comedy to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, Peele clearly had no input into that decision. ‘I don’t think it worked like that,’ he said. ‘I think it was just submitted.’ In fact, submissions are made to individual categories, but the HFPA makes the final decision about which categories each film falls into.
“A rep for Peele did not respond to a request to clarify whether the movie had been submitted as a comedy without his input.”
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