Jordan Peele wanted to pay tribute to Akira in Nope

Jordan Peele wanted to pay tribute to 'Akira' with a scene in 'Nope.'

The 43-year-old director was at the helm of the 2022 neo-Western science fiction horror film - which stars Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as a brother and sister attempting to capture evidence of a UFO - and explained that he was inspired to replicate the famous downwards slow-motion slide shot from the 1988 Japanese anime and that the movie introduced him to a world of animation he had not seen as a fan of the Walt Disney classics.

He said: "It was an expensive VHS. Straight up, like, $25 or $30. Coming from being raised to think that Disney is synonymous with animation, I was suddenly introduced to this entire world, where animation is also adult. There are so many things that you're experiencing throughout that film like cyberpunk dystopia, with the inventiveness of the biker culture that is enough to populate whole seasons of television, and then this huge, horrific take on superpower."

He told Empire magazine's Review Of The Year issue: "I was flirting with the ambition of trying to do 'Akira'. Ultimately, I felt like if I was going to put that much energy into trying to honour one of the best works of all time, why not put that energy into something of my own. It wasn't like I wrote a script and said, 'Oh, I want to do the Akira slide here. The scene is a pivotal scene for Keke Palmer, for Emerald's character, where she decides to take a stand. So when we got to planning that moment, there are so many ways you can stop a motorcycle, and it was just like, 'You know what? I could do it a different way, or we could build this rig and do a practical f******Akira slide."