Jordan Peele On Kanye West's "Sunken Place" Comments: "He's Trying To Tell His Truth"

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In a new interview Jordan Peele discusses his new film Us, the genre-confusion of Get Out and Kanye West.

The Sunken Place, the brainwashing technique used in Jordan Peele's social thriller Get Out, became a metaphor following the film's release, being interpreted as a commentary on slavery, cultural appropriation and other subjects in relation to the black American experience. But it also became a term to call out problematic black public figures like Ben Carson and Kanye West. The latter was the most notable, especially after he started wearing a MAGA hat and meeting Donald Trump at the White House last year.

READ: Jordan Peele Explains How 'Us' And 'Get Out' Are Different And Why Horror Movies Are Important

Speaking to Rolling Stone, Peele talked about the Sunken Place and getting "a chuckle out of" seeing West be associated with the phrase, as well as the rapper referencing it himself.

"The Sunken Place is a new term we have to aid us in the discussion of what appears, to me, to be black people choosing an ideology that is racist against black people," Peele said. He then went on to say:

"However frustrated I am with what he’s doing, the artist in me is like, 'He saw my movie!' The thing about Kanye is, it feels to me that, whatever he’s going through, he’s trying to tell his truth. And there's something magnetic about people who are trying to tell the truth. I might be wrong, but my feeling is that even when he's saying something I disagree with, he's trying to tell his truth, and that's more than you can say about 90 percent of people."

Most of the interview though is centered around Peele's upcoming new film Us, which will premiere at South by Southwest before hitting theaters on March 22. Throughout the chat, he reveals how the Twilight Episode "Mirror Image" inspired the forthcoming film and how it differs from Get Out.

"I realized I had never seen a horror movie of this kind, where there's an African-American family at the center that just is. After you get over the initial realization that you're watching a black family in a horror film, you're just watching a movie," Peele said of Us. "You're just watching people. I feel like it proves a very valid and different point than Get Out, which is, not everything is about race. Get Out proved the point that everything is about race. I've proved both points!"

He also spoke of the challenge of trying to succeed a movie as successful as Get Out and how fellow director M. Night Shyamalan gave him advice.

"Tell the story you want to tell. Don’t listen to everything around you. Go back to what drove you to write the first one," Peele said Shyamalan told him.

The interview in its entirety can be read here.

Source: Rolling Stone