Juel Taylor and Tony Rettenmaier didn’t just make a sci-fi Blaxploitation conspiracy comedy with They Cloned Tyrone—they built a funhouse mirror of modern paranoia, and then somehow got Erykah Badu to remake her own classic to score it. And not just Tyrone, but an alternate-universe live version of Tyrone. Which, let’s be honest, is probably what finally pushed the film into cult-movie status the moment it dropped.
“We always dreamed she would do it,” Taylor says, remembering how Tyrone was locked in as a joke title until it wasn’t. “The second we really decided to call it They Cloned Tyrone, the next decision was: ‘Obviously, Erykah Badu remakes the song.’”
As he tells it, Badu agreed to the pitch two minutes into a Zoom. “She said, ‘You want me to Bernstein Bears it?’ And I was like—YES.” She got it instantly. Then she rebuilt the whole damn thing—recreated the crowd, the call and response, the EQ. “You really have to listen to them side by side to hear the difference.”
But as wild as the soundtrack is, the world-building behind Tyrone is just as obsessive. Down to the underground clone pods, the inconsistent hairstyles, and the debate over how long a character spends under the surface. “We argued forever about that,” Rettenmaier laughs. “Like, when do they come up? Is it night? Is that weird?”
The answer: Yes. But weird is the point.
“The weirdest compliment is always the best one,” Taylor says. “We wanted it to feel out of time, like Napoleon Dynamite or It Follows. That feeling of seeing a Pizza Hut that’s now a vape store. You know what it is… but it’s also not.”
It’s a feeling rooted in the conspiratorial energy that permeates the film—Tuskegee, simulation theory, clone drift—all baked into the vibe without ever turning into a lecture. “We’re not sociologists,” Rettenmaier deadpans. “We’re not qualified to answer anything super deep. We might be talking about people. But we’re not answering anything.”
Instead, they let viewers do the decoding. “The movie’s not a lesson plan,” Taylor adds. “We just wanted it to feel like a bootleg Scooby-Doo. The rest is up to the audience.”
And they’ve been watching that audience respond in exactly the way they hoped—through Reddit threads, fan art, YouTube theories, and chopped-and-screwed remixes of the soundtrack. “People are already appropriating it, which is wild,” Taylor beams. “You put your work out there and it mutates. That’s the fun part.”
Fun, yes, but also precise. For a movie about clones, it’s funny how few shortcuts they actually took. “We talked forever about when in the decanting process the clones get their hair done,” Rettenmaier admits. “But then you get to set, and real-world stuff takes over. Some clones are coming out of pods with braids. Just go with it.”
The collaborative shorthand between Taylor and Rettenmaier—built over years of arguing about time of day, script minutiae, and whether X equals 76 or 95—worked. Because when your movie ends with a remade 1997 neo-soul hit about a man named Tyrone, sung by Badu herself, playing over a scene where another man named Tyrone realizes he’s a clone… you’ve either lost the plot or cracked the code.
They cracked the code.
“I haven’t had that experience in a long time,” I told them. “You made something that makes people think. About race. About power. About simulation theory. About who does your hair in the clone factory.”
“Exactly,” Taylor nods. “That’s the stuff that makes it fun.”
Watch the interview above and then check out the trailer below.
