The Big Picture

John Boyega, Jamie Foxx, and Teyonah Parris played instrumental roles in shaping the film, They Cloned Tyrone, and bringing the characters to life with their exceptional talent. The changing landscape of the film industry presents both challenges and opportunities for new voices and commercial projects, according to director Juel Taylor and producer Charles King. The production design and performances in They Cloned Tyrone exceeded the original vision of the script, with actors elevating the material and bringing a sense of scale and authenticity to the film.

In Netflix’s upcoming sci-fi-comedy-mystery They Cloned Tyrone, John Boyega stars as Fontaine, a drug dealer who is shot and killed, but who wakes up the next morning as if nothing happened. Together with Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) and Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris), Fontaine investigates this strange occurrence, and in the process uncovers a massive government conspiracy that threatens to change his life as he knows it.

In a new interview with Collider’s Perri Nemiroff, director Juel Taylor and producer Charles King talk about how instrumental Foxx, Boyega and Parris were in shaping They Cloned Tyrone into the film audiences will soon get the chance to watch. They also talked about how teamwork revealed hidden potential in the script.

With things in Hollywood seemingly changing by the minute, the pair also talk about the changing landscape of the industry. For more from the creative team behind They Cloned Tyrone, check out Perri’s interview in the video, or check it out in the transcript form below.

PERRI NEMIROFF: I love how many characters in this movie process things via books, TV, shows and movies. For you two individually, what is the movie, the book or show that you refer to most and helps you process this crazy world?

JUEL TAYLOR: That’s kind of multiple buckets. It’s hard to pick just one. There was narrative inspiration, like when we were writing it They Live and The Truman Show had a baby, you know? [Laughs]

That’s the best combo I’ve ever heard!

TAYLOR: Then tonally, we were looking at, like, The Big Lebowski and Boogie Nights and Jackie Brown. So those are definitely movies that kind of combined to influence us when we were sitting down crafting it. In the world-building, I actually like movies like It Follows and Napoleon Dynamite in the sense of the anachronisms in the world-building and that kind of temporal dissonance where the question kind of comes up of, “Is this a period piece? No, it’s not, right? But it feels like it. Wait…” I think a lot of that we were inspired by Napoleon Dynamite and It Follows.

You are name-dropping all the right things. I love it!

TAYLOR: Shout out to all of those.

Image via Netflix

What about day-to-day? You two, walking down the street, what’s the movie or the show or the book that weighs most heavily on your mind?

CHARLES KING: Oh, day-to-day?

Mine’s Final Destination. I think everything is going to be a new Final Destination.

KING: [Laughs] Final Destination?

TAYLOR: Oh, shit!

I like horror!

KING: Alright, so there’s a book called Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? I think about that every day in the business that I’m building. In life, the themes of Braveheart, you know, that sits. Then there was a show, L.A. Law, I reference that quite a bit in terms of a character on a show that inspired me. It was a Blair Underwood character. Those are three things I touch on quite a bit.

I like those. No Final Destination fans here?

TAYLOR: I love Final Destination. I mean, [to King] I think the way you took it, I was like, “Oh.” Because I was gonna say something like Back to the Future, but I guess I don’t think about that while I’m walking around. I feel like I’m more on some, like, Dragon Ball Z.

KING: Okay, yeah!

TAYLOR: Or My Hero [Academia], or something like that. Or some Shonen [Jump]. I’d probably walk around with a Shonen mask, you know?

Image via Netflix

I like all these examples here.

So you brought up your company, and I have a little bit of a broader question with that because, yet again, this industry is going through a seismic shift in terms of how we’re making movies and how we’re distributing them. So what are some of your changing goals and approaches to make sure that you are always seeing your original mission statement with MACRO through?

KING: Look, with the chaos of what’s happening through our industry, I think they’re finding opportunity. There’s always gonna be an opportunity for really uniquely positioned, great new voices and we just want to be a part of that and continue to find the right platforms for great voices to be out in the marketplace. I would say the other thing is commercial projects as well for us in terms of we’ve been involved with a lot of critically acclaimed projects. I think a film like this, I believe, is widely commercial, but also the quality of the filmmaking and storytelling definitely hopefully could garner conversations as well.

TAYLOR: Hopefully.

Oh, without a doubt. Garner conversations with themes and also with the details.

KING: Absolutely.

I have a feeling those details are going to keep people coming back for multiple viewings. It’s making me think of something I read in our production notes. You had said this all started with “a tone and a vibe,” and what I see in the end is this wild genre-bending mash-up with so many world-building details. So what would you say is the biggest difference between how you originally envisioned this all playing out day one when you first came up with the concept and what we now see in the finished feature?

TAYOR: Oh man. Honestly, I gotta bring it back to cast, you know? Nothing ever comes out the way you imagined it in your head, and you just hope that if it’s different—and it is gonna be different—hopefully… When I was in film school I felt like, “Oh, that ain’t quite what I thought.” I would make something in film school and be like, “Hm, it’s not exactly what I saw,” you know what I mean? It’s always like, “Hmm.” But because they brought the characters to life, the biggest difference is really, it’s just so hard to imagine truly what it would look like when you’re in a room and Jamie Foxx is inhabiting the character, and Teyonah [Parris] and John [Boyega] is inhabiting the character. Even the supporting cast of, like, Kiefer Sutherland and David Alan Grier, it’s like impossible to imagine what that’s gonna feel like tonally seeing those characters come to life with such a crazy amount of talent. You know what I mean?

It’s like you write a character on the page, and he’s stoic, and then John is warm, and he’s got this dry humor, and it’s like, “Huh!” There was a template of this character that you had years and years and years ago that you’ve lived with for years before the idea, before they were cast, it was a movie. It was just an idea and it was on the page and it spent many years gestating before an actor inhabited it. It’s become concrete in your mind and baked into your mind what they look like, what they sound like, how they move, their personality. Then the actors completely bring them to life, and it’s always better than what you imagined it would be, of course, with talent like that.

It’s not always better than what you imagined it would be. Going back to film school, often your like, “Huh,” and that ain’t the actor’s fault. That’s usually my fault, you know? I’m like, “Oh, I could have did a better job with that,” but in this case, when you have talent at that level, I would imagine it’s always better than you saw it being. So I would say that’s the biggest difference.

Image via Netflix

To get a little specific with that idea, can you tell me one thing in the movie, whether it’s something in the production design, something an actor delivers, that had more potential than you ever realized when you finished the script, where it just leapt off the screen in a way you never thought it was capable of?

TAYLOR: All kinds of stuff, especially when we go to production design. Shout out to Franco[-Giacomo Carbone].

KING: Yeah.

TAYLOR: Just seeing how the world was brought to the screen. Again, when we first set out to make it we imagined a much smaller scale. We had no idea that these actors would say yes, you know what I’m saying? And these actors brought scale, right? So you’re seeing the world build in a way that, like, you see goddamn fried chicken. It’s like when you walk on the set, you’re like, “Oh wow!” [Laughs] You know what I’m saying? Like, “Oh okay, what’s up Franco?”

I mean, from a performance thing, you see the elevator scene and it’s a couple of lines of prose, maybe two-eighths of a page, just a song, but then they turn it into a performance. You’re like, “Ah!” Just seeing how the three of them played off of each other, again, it turned out way better. It could have been cut easily, you know, but then all of a sudden the actors bring it to life, and I was like, “Okay, well I guess this isn’t as stupid as I thought it was on the page!” [Laughs] It’s the actors, man. They make it way better than it has any right to be.

Give yourself some credit too. There’s a lot going on here, and unless you have that conductor who’s able to bring all that exceptional work together, this idea does not work and you crush it.

TAYLOR: Oh, thank you so much!