Announcer: Listener-supported WNYC Studios.

[MUSIC]

Arun Venugopal: This is All Of It. I'm Arun Venugopal filling in for Alison Stewart. According to its director and writer, the new movie They Cloned Tyrone is The Truman Show and They Live smashed together with a little bit of The Manchurian Candidate and some bootleg Scooby Doo thrown in as well. Excuse me. The film follows a drug dealer named Fontaine, played by John Boyega in a fictional southern town called the Glen.

Early in the film, Fontaine is shot by a rival drug dealer repeatedly and apparently fatally, but somehow he wakes up the next morning in his bed and goes about his business just like any other day, until a pimp named Slick Charles, played by Jamie Foxx alerts him to the fact that something's not right. Let's listen to a clip.

Fontaine: Open the damn door. You know why I'm here?

Slick Charles: I think we got more pressing issues to talk about.

Fontaine: And what's that?

Slick Charles: They shot your ass.

Fontaine: Where the money at?

Slick Charles: Do you not remember getting lit the fuck up? You should be breathing through some tubes right now.

Fontaine: Look, I don't have time for all this.

Slick Charles: You took it. Fontaine, you took it. You took it. You came in here, you went through my haberdasheries, you passed up on my beige bitch, and you went outside and you pulled a 50 Cent.

Arun Venugopal: Soon Fontaine and Slick Charles team up with a sex worker named Yo-Yo, played by Teyonah Parris to uncover an underground scheme that, yes, involves clones and touches everything from the fried chicken to the grape drink in their eerily stereotype laden town called the Glen. Director and co-writer Juel Taylor joins me now to discuss the film, which is available to stream on Netflix. Juel, welcome to All Of It.

Juel Taylor: I appreciate you. Thank you for having me.

Arun Venugopal: All right, Juel, so a casual viewer who kind of just chances upon your movie might think this is a light satire with some spectacular afros and stock characters straight from the 1970s before realizing that there's actually some pretty heavy racial commentary going on as well. Was that what you set out to do when you were writing this and directing?

Juel Taylor: No, I think it's always going to be part and parcel of the subject matter that you're touching on, but I think really, we just set out to make something that we would enjoy watching ourselves. Like if I saw a trailer for it, would I be interested in seeing it like-- seeing something that's hopefully a little bit weird and idiosyncratic and on the wrong side of the movie train track, so to speak?

I think those social undertones are inescapable. They're kind of baked into the plot, so to speak, but I think first and most, I would just hope someone will watch it as a mystery movie, a weird mystery movie, and hopefully enjoy the mystery first and foremost.

Arun Venugopal: You told The New York Times that this story didn't really come together until you figured out the lead character, Fontaine, played by John Boyega. What was it that you had to figure out about this character? Just to remind people, John Boyega is a drug dealer who is shot and then comes back to life in the movie.

Juel Taylor: I think unpacking that a little bit, it's this thematic question of blame versus responsibility and in unpacking what that means for our protagonist, really, it wasn't until I knew that thematic question that the story started to come together. Of course, I don't know if this is a spoiler-laden interview or trying to keep the spoiler to a somewhat minimum but--

Arun Venugopal: People will have to cover their ears for this next 40 seconds.

Juel Taylor: I'll try to say it in as a non-spoilery way as possible. Our character starts his journey in a place of minimum culpability in an existential sense to put it simply. He has maximum culpability. On the surface, he's a drug dealer so the state of things around him is in many ways, his doing, but it's a little deeper than that in terms of on an existential level, like who he is, why he does the things he does, certain things are a bit outside of his control.

It wasn't until we really started to examine that thematic question and those ideas of who's really in control and whose responsibility is it to fix your situation that you find yourself in that we started to reverse engineer Fontaine from a character who may have some Manchurian Candidate-esque qualities about himself, to someone who exhibits complete agency over his future by the time you get to a certain level of movie.

Really, I think just working backwards from that, the conspiracies flow out of it. A lot of just the weird details off-shot from just starting with Fontaine, starting with this character, where does he go, what does he learn about himself?

Arun Venugopal: You said also that this movie came out of a joke that you had with your co-writer, Tony Rettenmaier, which had a set up something like a pimp, a sex worker and a drug dealer walk into a bar. Where did this joke originally come from?

Juel Taylor: I think it's just wanting to make a movie about detectives who are the least equipped detectives. Then to add on top of that, the extra element of if society as a whole is looking at these people as part of the problem so to speak, what happens when "part of the problem" has to become part of the solution? I think when you're thinking about ne'er-do-wells as it were, those professions pop up.

I think it wasn't so much that the joke materialized out of thin air, per se, but it was more of wanting to make a detective movie, a mystery movie where the detectives just weren't really detectives and it didn't take long to start making that joke.

Arun Venugopal: Speaking of detectives, you have one of your characters, Yo-Yo, who happens to be a big Nancy Drew fan, I guess. How did you and Tony talk about that balance between caricature, Yo-Yo is a sex worker and sort of meaningful and more, I guess, offbeat character development?

Juel Taylor: Yes, I think that you're walking a tightrope and trying to deconstruct these stereotypes and these caricatures, you could say. I think it's an evolving task, really, because you're always trying to strike that balance between when you're leaning into the stereotypes and when you're trying to break them down. A lot of that really relied on the talent of the actors to understand material and to ground it.

With Teyonah, she brings so much humanity to the role. She brings so much pathos that in the hands of a less talented actor, it may not be interpreted. It may simply be caricature in the hands of a less talented actor, if that makes sense. I think you really need your performers to metabolize the material in a way that they can bring that humanity to the character and you realize that there's a little bit more to this character than meets the eye in the beginning.

I think it starts from, obviously, script all the way to screen, all the way to post. I think at every step you're trying to negotiate that because there is something in the satire where you want to lean into those stereotypes so that you do think you're watching a certain type of movie in the beginning. You want to feel like you got it all figured out in the beginning before you get deeper into the mystery.

Arun Venugopal: Did you yourself read books like Nancy Drew when you were growing up?

Juel Taylor: I read Goosebumps. My sister read Nancy Drew books and Fear Street. I was big on Goosebumps, actually. I had every Goosebumps growing up. That was my serialized book of choice as a youth, R. L. Stine.

Arun Venugopal: We're talking about a story here, your movie, which is conspiracy theories and who's really controlling us and what are they using to control us, but these are clearly touching on some very seriously banded about theories about real life social control and the crack epidemic and all that kind of stuff, which- -it's hard not to hear echoes of. I'm just wondering how much you were drawing upon "real life" concerns about what happens in communities across the country and what is thought to happen when you were writing this script.

Juel Taylor: Definitely. I'm from Tuskegee. There was obviously, very famous experiments going on in Tuskegee once upon a time that there’s obviously some parallels if you see the movie. I definitely think that we drew from the major player conspiracies but we also tried to have fun with some of the more far-out conspiracies, The Berenstain Bears and--

Arun Venugopal: Was there a Berenstain reference I missed?

Juel Taylor: There's some excised content, some deleted scenes that speak to a couple more-- We had references to reptilians in the White House and lizard people. There were references to even more fringe conspiracies. I think we tried to balance. I think mathematically, some conspiracies got to be true. If you’ve got 1,000 conspiracies out there, one of them is probably true. We tried to balance some of the more plausible conspiracies with some of the more implausible ones. Again, going back to grounding it, I think there is something very sobering about-- The Syphilis Experiments isn't a conspiracy, it's just history, right?

Arun Venugopal: Right.

Juel Taylor: I think there's something sobering about the reality of it that I think you have to chase with a little humor.

Arun Venugopal: Sure. I'm talking to Juel Taylor, the director and co-writer of They Cloned Tyrone on Netflix. Let's listen to a clip here. I'll set it up. It's John Boyega's character, Fontaine. He's trying to put together the pieces of what exactly happened to him the night before. He goes to Teyonah Parris' character, Yo-Yo to corroborate Jamie Foxx's, Slick’s version of events. Listen to that now.

Fontaine: You seen me last night?

Yo-Yo: Not like that.

Fontaine: No. Like literally. You seen me?

Yo-Yo: Are you Kevin Bacon?

Fontaine: Wait. What?

Teyonah: Hollow Man. That was a good one.

Slick Charles: Good movie. Good Movie.

Yo-Yo: You liked it. You said you liked it. I picked that one. Okay. Yes, [bleep] I saw you.

Fontaine: You heard them shots after?

Teyonah: I mean I got ears, don't I? Somebody was letting them bitches loose. To be honest, I thought it was you doing me a favor.

Slick Charles: Yo-yo.

Fontaine: So what you trying to say, you ain’t seen nothing?

Yo-Yo: I mean, I ain't say all of that. You know your girl got to know what's going on in these streets, so yes. I doubled back after a cool little minute. I think I saw the perpetrators leaving.

Slick Charles: See I told you. [unintelligible 00:13:14]

Yo-Yo: Yes, I recognized the whip because I do house calls over 2nd.

[crosstalk]

Slick Charles: [unintelligible 00:13:22] this ain’t your nasty [bleep].

Yo-Yo: I started my own little business and sometimes I see the car parked a few driveways down, so yes, it looked mad familiar.

Arun Venugopal: Juel, one thing about this film that's clear very early on is it's not just these good individual performances, but there's clearly this real chemistry. I'm just wondering, did you know right off that this would work, or is it just something you had to take a leap of faith with?

Juel Taylor: Oh, we definitely had to take a leap of faith. I think part of what was appealing about the idea in general is that I had no idea if it would work or not. While we were writing it, I think there's always in the back of your mind of like, "Man, this is going to either go pretty okay, or this is going to go hilariously askew." I think that's exciting though creatively, feeling like there's a high degree of difficulty in the execution just I think is appealing, I think in a creative process.

All throughout, you have a sense of what you want to do, but until the actors bring it to life, you really don't know what that chemistry is going to be like. The first day of shooting I knew, but before that, I was cautiously optimistic just seeing their general rapport before we shot, but they didn't really have any time to rehearse beforehand. I never saw the three of them together ever until we were already shooting.

Arun Venugopal: Oh, wow.

Juel Taylor: I saw the three of them together, but not actually rehearsing. We had a table read the night before. It was the first time I ever saw them in a room together saying the lines. It was the night before the first day and you're like, "Okay, I think that sounded pretty good," but you don't know because they've never rehearsed a scene or anything like that. The first scene we shot was actually Jamie and Teyonah in the motel room when we introduced them. That was the first scene we shot.

Teyonah's got this wordy monologue she's got to say. Obviously, the tempo is fast and you're like, "Man, I hope this--" and probably five minutes in, it was like, "Okay. They got a pretty good rapport together on screen too."

Arun Venugopal: How much are they holding back? Especially with a really experienced actor like Jamie Foxx, can you tell that they're like, "All right, this is just a table read,” and then you just see how different it is when they're actually--

Juel Taylor: Oh, yes. Oh, for sure. Yes, that goes into like, "I think it's going to work." In a table read, you’re like, they're performing it, but you got Cheetos on the table, you got a Coke on the table, some chips, you know what I mean? They are-- I'd imagine this is what it's like when you watch NBA players warm up before a game. They're going half-speed, so to speak. They're doing it, but they're also clearly still in off-camera mode, if that makes sense. Once those costumes go on, I feel like it’s a-- There's a switch that happens when the costumes go on that's like, "Oh."

When Jamie came out and he was actually Slick Charles, his hair's done, he's got the cut. It was like, oh, now his voice changing. Now he's putting on the voice, now he's got the effect. It's just like a light switch goes on and then like the second you-- There's no time. When we shot it during COVID, there was no time to even rehearse before the scene. Your blocking rehearsals are your rehearsals. You're marking it. That's when they're rehearsing. You're about to shoot it in like five minutes. There is no like, "Go to the trailer. Let's talk about the scene." No, you're rehearsing it as you block it, as you mark it.

Fortunately, they're world-class actors. They fortunately understood the tone just from my individual conversations with them. They came into it understanding the tone and they came into it understanding the style of humor. I didn't know for sure until I saw. I didn't know they understood it truly until we said, “Action,” and they went and start doing their thing, and like, “Okay, I can leave it alone and try to do no harm."

Arun Venugopal: With Jamie Foxx is a legendary character here. Here he is playing a pimp, getting back to the idea of walking the line between stereotypes and mixing it up. Were there certain things that he brought to that conversation with you when you were shaping this character?

Juel Taylor: Oh yes, I think Jamie was reluctant to play a pimp, obviously because on the surface, it's like the character, I mean, he’s a pimp. But in the movie, I think what he brings to it-- I think once they internalize you're not a pimp, you're not a drug dealer, you're a detective in this movie. No pimping happens in the movie, you know what I mean, no dealing. They're detectives in the movie. I think when they internalize that that's not your profession as it pertains to this movie's plot.

I think with that, Jamie, of course, he brings the humor, he brings the dramatic chops, he brings the comedic chops. He also had so much just experience. He really is like Forrest Gump. He's been everywhere, he's met everybody, he's seen everything. He's bringing anecdotal stuff that, “I was in Vegas one time in 1999, and I was hanging,” you know what I mean? There's a lot of anecdotal things like that that he brought to the role that really just fill in the blanks.

Of course, his improv is amazing. You know what I'm saying? He'll take a line and he'll just make it better, of course. Or he'll add an improv line between lines just to give it that specificity and really make him feel like he's been around the block a few times.

Arun Venugopal: We've been talking to director Juel Taylor about his new film, They Cloned Tyrone, starring John Boyega, Jamie Foxx among others. It's now on Netflix. Thank you so much Juel for joining us here on All Of It.

Juel Taylor: Thank you so much for having me.

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.