Boots Riley is one of the few American filmmakers who are most visibly invested in conversations about class, capitalism, and aesthetics in their works. He pushes each subject to the point of breaking in absurdist works whose visual ambition and thematic audacity can often feel as knowingly chaotic as our contemporary world. With “Sorry to Bother You,” for instance, he rendered a call center into a pro-union narrative whose dystopian and sci-fi realities show how industries position workers as slave labor. His hit television series “I’m a Virgo,” produced by Amazon Studios, for which Riley was open about retooling their money into a political statement, imagined Jharrel Jerome as a giant turned activist superhero.
“I Love Boosters,” which premiered at SXSW in March, is as bold as his prior projects, taking aim at the fashion industry’s exploitation through the eyes of aspiring designer and booster Corvette (a spellbinding Keke Palmer). Corvette works with a team of Boosters—Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige)—who often target the popular brand Metro.
But when Metro’s coldhearted designer Christie Smith (Demi Moore) steals Corvette’s concepts, the boosters’ rivalry with Christie becomes personal. Inspired by a song of the same name by Riley, which he made with his band The Coup for their album Pick a Bigger Weapon, “I Love Boosters” is a global story intertwined with the local that also comes to include the Chinese sweatshop workers Jianhu (Poppy Liu) and surprising turns by LaKeith Stanfield and Don Cheadle.
RogerEbert.com spoke to Riley prior to the Chicago screening of his film in a space between two screening rooms that, in an apt twist, was marked “lactation room” but was really a conference room. As the sounds of explosions and car crashes bled in from other theaters, Riley spoke about capturing “magic parts,” deploying unique textures, and the role of art and the artist in a capitalist world.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
It’s been eight years since “Sorry to Bother You.” Though you had the great TV series “I’m a Virgo” at that time, I’m wondering if in those eight years you were frustrated by the fact that a second movie hadn’t happened sooner.
As you said, I was doing something else in between while writing my next two films. For some reason, I had this idea that I was going to do three films in a row without stopping and then edit them all. But that would’ve been crazy. Because of doing “I’m a Virgo”—the amount of work, the amount of crazy shots, and the length of it—that was like making three movies. I could use the same crew. So it wasn’t as frustrating, but you would think that it would’ve happened faster after the success of “Sorry to Bother You.” Still, it takes time to put schedules together and assemble the right cast while pushing for the budget you need.
Three straight would be very Soderbergh of you.
Except that he can do it because it’s him and a camera. Jarrell [Jerome] worked with him on “Full Circle,” and he said it was six hours a day. So, if you’re doing six hours a day, then you can have family time and all that kind of stuff.
For “I’m a Virgo,” you did quite a bit of storyboarding. Did you end up doing the same for “I Love Boosters”?
On “I’m a Virgo,” we shot it cross-boarded, like you’d do a movie. Although we got notes for each episode, post-production was handled on an episode-by-episode basis. We didn’t start post until we were done shooting. We did all of that because we needed to do that for the budget. And I was shooting all of the episodes. For “I Love Boosters,” we only storyboarded for the parts I had to prove.
At first, it was only the chase scene. I did that before I sold the film because I knew that people were going to look at that and be like: You know, the chase scene alone is gonna cost $3 million or whatever. I did stick figure versions of the storyboard, which also scared people. Because they’re like: This is the director?
I did that so we can say, “We can do it in this number of setups.” I had it down to about 20 setups in the early version. But originally, I was only planning to do the mall part as a miniature, and the rest was going to be done through this very economical way of shooting on the street. Well, even that was costing a bit, so it was a matter of cutting back on the approach of doing it on the street.
But then we were just losing a lot of the magic parts. Chris Warren, the guy doing the miniatures, said that since we had the buildings, we could just set them at an angle and it would look like a hill. When we moved it all to miniature, not only were we able to do everything that was planned for, but I could also make certain movements that then allowed us to take advantage of the things we wouldn’t have been able to do on the street, like make the police tank jump over the hill.
You mentioned the “magic parts.” Do you find those tactile moments, when you can use miniatures or stop motion, as moments for magic?
For me, it’s like layering texture. The idea is for it to feel visceral and almost three-dimensional. It’s like when we’re babies, we must have put our mouths on everything because I can look at this table and know what it tastes like. We can also do that with feel and texture. There are certain textures we don’t see often in film, and when we do, they can be a little off-putting because we’re not used to them. It’s like when you film someone with a checkered shirt. There’s a certain feeling like that.
The stop motion, the way that looks and feels, was obviously a different layer than the miniatures and the colors that we were using. With miniatures, these folks are used to doing miniatures, so that you don’t know that they’re miniatures, but I wanted things to be off. For those in the know, they know they’re miniatures. But some folks look at it and know it’s not “real,” yet they don’t know what it is. I want to repel you enough that you know this is made by someone, while still keeping the challenge of keeping you locked in and still caring about it.
I think about music in the 1970s, for instance, there was this push to be clean. I mean, even since the 1960s, like the Beatles were trying to do that, and it continued with Stevie Wonder. Clean, clean, clean. And then, finally, they got to digital, which is, like, the cleanest. Usually, the people who pushed for clean were happy they were doing clean stuff, but everybody else was like, “I don’t know what it is, but it’s missing something.” Maybe we liked that distortion that used to happen? So, I’m trying to create visceral things.
I think CGI made things more technical, not amazing. I often say that you can have a sky with CGI, you could have a CGI skyscraper, stand up, walk over, and take a shit on it, and it wouldn’t be amazing. But that should be amazing. There are a lot of things we don’t know about how light works. No matter what they do, they can’t figure it out. It’s not interesting. So, I want everything to be interesting. I want to have visceral rhythms, whether it’s in the cutting or whether it’s in something happening that you don’t expect, and I’m looking to have something a little bit off, something that makes you have to pay attention.
The most obvious moment of something being off is, of course, Demi Moore’s 45-degree slanted office. How did you achieve that?
I can’t claim too much credit for that, because there is a building in San Francisco that is leaning by maybe 0.5 degrees or something, and it keeps leaning, and people paid millions of dollars for each condo in the Millennium Towers. Ours is the Decadian Towers. So, I just turned it up.
That, to me, symbolized the arbitrary value that’s put on stuff. In the Bay Area, it really is connected to the housing stuff that’s going on there, how much homeless we have versus what the rent is, because there’s a value put on there that has nothing to do with anything real, except what real estate agents want to make. We’ve got 80,000 empty units in the Bay Area and the highest rent there could be. Whereas YIMBY folks would be like: If you have empty units, the price is going to go down. No. This has just been decided. People would rather keep those units empty and keep the price up. But anyway, my point is that it’s all real. There’s nothing fake in my movies.
In your projects, you sometimes emphasize different kinds of labor. With “I’m a Virgo,” you have the labor of the body. “Sorry to Bother You” is the friction between labor and art. Here, with Keke Palmer’s character, it’s her intellectual labor.
There’s also the labor of the people working in factories and retail. I think also, “Sorry to Bother You,” obviously, there are both the folks who are producing things and folks who are selling them. So yes, this is another aspect of it. Although I think it’s a small aspect of the movie. It’s a starting point. It’s a motivation. It’s not everything the movie’s about.
I think this is about art in general. In the real world, the analogous thing, I’m not even talking about one designer getting their stuff stolen. I’m talking about how the fashion industry, depending on the place, uses the styles of people of color and working-class folks in general to create ways of wearing and combining things that can then be marketed. So in this film, it’s just a simpler way to talk about it. And to me, it’s more about what that relationship is to the communities that have nothing and the folks who are making millions off of fashion, taking it from communities that then wish they could get that stuff because it’s been remarketed to them. So, I’m talking about something that I don’t even think people would call IP; they might call it appropriation. That’s how all things happen fashion-wise.
As a matter of fact, KRS-One had an album called Ghetto Music: The Blueprint of Hip Hop. He talked about—now, I’m not going to claim it was research because since then I’ve seen that he says all kinds of stuff—how music was always inspired by the poorer classes of any area or era, because that’s where the passion was. But then that music got turned into something that was, in some cases. just more acceptable.
In that sense, I’m often saying that artists have to have something they’re more passionate about than the art itself, which goes against the critique that some people have about art that is supposedly hyper capitalist. Why do you like this art where these dope dealers are talking about making money? Well, they might not only be rapping about surviving, they often are not, but there’s a passion there that has to do with the idea of using this art to get to this other thing. It’s the same passion you feel when Barry White is trying to sleep with somebody, and he makes a whole song to do it. But when you hear people who just love making songs, but who don’t have a passion to do it, it can get tedious to hear.
So, when people are making their styles and wearing their styles, there’s sometimes a bit of aspiration, which, because of the culture we’re in, has to do with some climbing of some sort. But when you break it down, what it means is wanting to express yourself, wanting to be part of a community, wanting to feel some agency in the world, wanting to have control over the world around you. It’s all connected.
