Bradley, Laura. “How Men in Black, Get Out, and Meryl Streep Inspired Us’s Climactic Fight”, Vanity Fair, 29, March 2019. [online] [ill.]

How Men in Black, Get Out, and Meryl Streep Inspired Us’s Climactic Fight

By Claudette Barius / Universal Pictures

Jordan Peele might be a notorious pop-culture junkie, but in Us, the director outdoes himself. The film is chock-full of Easter eggs, some of which have more meaning than might initially meet the eye. Most movies couldn’t credibly mine inspiration from both alien-centric genre comedies and Meryl Streep horror fantasies— but in a Peele film, anything’s possible.

In its most memorable sequence, Us provides a matchup for the ages as Adelaide and her “tethered” doppelgänger, Red—both played by Lupita Nyong’o—face off in an impeccably executed dance-fight sequence. The scene hurls viewers back and forth between past and present—between a teenage Adelaide dancing both parts in a reimagining of The Nutcracker’s grand pas de deux, and a fight to the death between her adult self and her shadow. The entire sequence, from beginning to end, is a feat of choreography, stunt coordination, editing, and production design—a film moment that demands to be watched and re-watched. So it should come as no surprise that both Us producer Ian Cooper and choreographer Madeline Hollander described the scene’s construction as a painstakingly detail-oriented process.

One of Red’s most distinguishing characteristics is her uncanny movement style—her posture, her gesticulation, even the pace at which she walks. Hollander and Nyong’o thought through every detail of both Adelaide and Red’s physicality, making sure that Adelaide was convincing as an ex-ballerina, and that Red came across as not quite human. Hollander set Nyong’o up with Fabrice Herrault, Hollander’s old instructor, for intensive training, where the actress learned about ballet, including which muscles give ballerinas the most trouble; the posture; the stretches; and the movements dancers tend to do out of habit. “Adelaide, she’s this very fluid, warm, elegant, has a type of gracefulness,” Hollander said. Red, on the other hand, required a different kind of presence.

For all the film’s tethered characters, Hollander focused on posture: “There’s a big difference between looking at someone who is standing with their feet too far apart or with their feet too far together,” she said. “Or if someone’s leaning forward and looks like they’re always on the tip of their toes and ready to burst into a sprint, versus someone who walks with their hips forward.”

Their movement was inspired by a host of influences—including The Red Shoes, Ivan Vsevolozhsky’s Sleeping Beauty, and experimental filmmaker Maya Deren, who examined voodoo dance and possession. Hollander also cited Meryl Streep falling down the stairs in Death Becomes Her: “She’s wearing high heels and her head’s on backwards. For me, [that was] an incredible source of inspiration because she’s doing something that’s impossible,” Hollander said. “When you try and take that feeling and map it onto a body that isn’t twisted on backwards, it becomes the baseline as a million movements that you didn’t think you could do before.”

Perhaps her most surprising spark of inspiration, however, came from Men in Black—specifically, Edgar, a farmer whose body is stolen by a cockroach-like alien. “I’ve always loved his movements so much because you can tell that he’s not in his own skin, and he’s trying to break out,” Hollander said.

Hollander also compared Red’s movements to Pac-Man—because like the video-game icon, Red only really walks in right angles. “There’s no bounce in her step at all,” Hollander noted. “She can balance a book on her head. The way that she turns is usually the way that would not be intuitive, or isn’t necessarily efficient. She’ll turn three-quarters of the way around instead of one-quarter around. . . . We were looking at cockroaches and [creatures] that would be skittering.” That characteristic, in particular, actually drew inspiration from Peele’s previous horror sensation, Get Out—specifically, groundskeeper Walter, who is frequently seen running at a constant rate. “There was no speeding up or slowing down,” Hollander said. “Every time you saw them, they were just bulldozing in a straight line. Didn’t matter who was there, where the camera was, where they started and finished—they were going full speed and there was no acceleration.”

These subtle distinctions between Adelaide and Red are apparent throughout the film—but in the final fight scene, they congeal in beautiful, horrifying fashion. Cooper said Peele wrote the entire final dance-fight while listening to the grand pas itself. “That Tchaikovsky score is something that was always really both distressing and super emotional for Jordan when he was a kid,” Cooper said. Fusing the parts of the Sugar Plum Fairy and the Cavalier, he said, gave the teenage Adelaide’s dance “this precariousness—as if you should have a partner but you don’t.” To perform the dance—both the above-ground version and its inverted underground counterpart—Hollander found ballet dancer Ashley Mckoy, who even on her first take reduced all of the producers to tears. “She was so good, and it was so emotional and intense... our mouths just dropped,” Cooper recalled. “It was unreal, so incredible.”

Once it came time to actually imagine their respective dances, Hollander said she made sure to choreograph a unique, inverted version of Adelaide’s number for the version of her tethered in the underground tunnels. The goal, she said, was to “make it feel like the dancer on the top level was almost puppeteering or manipulating the dancer below . . . As if there was a magnet on the feet of the ballet dancer up above, shifting and tossing and throwing the dancer below.”

Cooper noted that the hallway young Red was dancing in was far narrower than Adelaide’s stage in the world above—”so Ashley would be doing these tormented gestures that are sort of like misunderstandings of the dance that’s happening above, but she’d be slapping against the walls because she’d be running out of room in the lateral width of the hallway. . . . That was super emotional, and intense, and dramatic watching her do that. And we had Tchaikovsky blasting on the stage in that creepy hallway, and Madeline was sort of encouraging her off-camera, and it was just a really intense, emotional experience.”

By Claudette Barius / Universal Pictures When designing the fight scene between the dancers’ adult selves, Cooper said, Peele hoped to re-create the magnitude of the grand pas, but with a more dark, desperate air. Indeed, as the two Nyong’os fight their way down a dark, bunny-filled hallway, their bodies are eventually cast in silhouette. “He had this idea that the further they went down and around the maze of those hallways, there would be less and less light,” Cooper recalled. “By the end, it’s almost like we’re losing them down the aperture of the camera, to the point where they’re almost just like little silhouettes in the distance.” Cooper said both a photo double and a stunt double were required to execute the sequence—with a lot of hep from stunt coordinator Mark Vanselow, who worked with Hollander on the choreography as well.

“Even in that choreography there was reference to the original Nutcracker variation,” Hollander said. “Whenever there was a diagonal, we talked about how Lupita would go in a diagonal doing the Pac-Man through the desks. Even in those fight scenes, the blocking was referencing the choreography of this simultaneous flashback choreography.”

And then came the final touch: editing. The two dances—the literal ballet and the dance-like brawl—had to be chopped up and re-assembled, creating the final back-and-forth sequence seen on-screen. Cooper said editor Nick Monsour “babied that cut. He made so many versions of that, until it got to what you see on-screen.” Hollander recalled going through all of the footage, helping Monsour make selections based on which were “good” and “not good” takes in terms of the dancing. But the editing itself, she said, “was very much up to Nick and Jordan, so it was definitely a surprise the first time I saw how much it exploded and the shards of it got re-put together. I felt that it was very effective, and you could still feel that it was coming from a source that had a beginning, a middle, and end . . . It wasn’t random at all.”