[Published at Film Inquiry] Boots Riley is, perhaps, most well-known for his music. He is the frontman of the popular Oakland-based hip-hop band The Coup. Famous for writing overtly political music, the group has critiqued police brutality, the criminal justice system, capitalism, the patriarchy, and more. It’s fair to say that Riley isn’t the least bit afraid to say what’s on his mind.

Though, the world of politics is nothing new to Riley, a self-identified communist, who joined the Progressive Labor Party at the age of 15, and was active in the Occupy Oakland and Occupy Wall Street movements earlier this decade. As such, he is no stranger to the concept labor strikes, and, well, his first foray into the world of cinema centers around one giant labor strike. The film, which he wrote and directed, is called Sorry To Bother You, and it features many of the diverse ideas, themes, and inspirations that Riley has drawn upon throughout his career.

Sorry To Bother You is about a man named Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield) who becomes employed at a telemarketing company to impress his artist girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson) and pay his Uncle Sergio (Terry Crews) a debt he owes. However, the company’s upper-management has a sinister agenda, and the workforce forms a strike with the intention of unionizing. When Cassius gets promoted, it puts a rift in his relationship with Detroit between causes him to lose sight of his moral compass.

On the cusp of Sorry To Bother You‘s much-anticipated theatrical release, I had the privilege of speaking with Riley about the inception of the film’s story, his artistic influences, the “2018 Rat Pack,” as he calls his cast, and how rounded up the group of talented actors, his seven-year journey of getting Sorry To Bother You made, that toe-tapping, head-banging soundtrack by The Coup, and much, much more!

Alex Arabian for Film Inquiry: Hey Boots. Congrats on your first feature film.

Boots Riley: Thanks. Thanks so much.

Yeah, absolutely.

Boots Riley: Yeah. I’m happy that people are starting to be able to see it now after all this time.

Boots Riley: Little by little. I originally knew that I wanted to tell a story that happened in a telemarketing place. And I knew that there was going to be a labor struggle that the lead character had to figure out what side he was on. And I knew that opening scene because [laughter] it was what a friend of mine did all the time [laughter]. I also knew that the argument thing between Sal and Cassius that happens inside of the office – I knew somehow what they do there was going to make it into the script because that happened to my brother one time. I was like, “Okay.” But after that first scene, I just took the ride with Cassius.

And as I wanted to put in bigger ideas, that’s when it can get heavy-handed because I want to put my ideas about the world in there. But when you do that through dialogue, that’s terrible sometimes, a lot of times, most times. And then, when you do that through setting up the situation so some realistic thing points out, the problem that people go through because of this, I don’t know, that gets heavy-handed as well. So then I started having to rely on the way that I always have done things with my work with The Coup. And it’s always been heightening the contradiction to the point of ridiculousness.

And so, for instance, we have a song – The Coup has a song called Ass-Breath Killers [laughter], which is – the song is a commercial for these pills called Ass-Breath Killers, and the pills are magical pills that you take that stop you from kissing the boss’s ass [laughter]. And I could have easily made a song that talked about how soul crushing being agreeable to the boss can be. But that doesn’t engage people. That doesn’t engage me. That doesn’t make me excited. So, in the movie, I realized, as I went on, that my ways of pointing out reality were going to have to do that same thing which is bending reality, but bending the reality that’s in the movie so that we think about our reality outside of the movie.

Your screenplay had a unique way of circulating in the industry. Can you talk a little bit about how your story reached the masses back in 2012?

Boots Riley: Well, I finished writing it the first time in 2012 and decided maybe if I put out an album inspired by it, that I could drum up some excitement about the movie. That didn’t work. But I had to tour the album because enough time had passed working on all of that stuff that I needed to make some money. So, I had to tour the album, and doing indie music, you got to tour for a while, so pretty soon it was 2014 and I was deciding that I probably was going to just put it out on the internet.

And I ran into Dave Eggers, who happened to be walking down the street in San Francisco with my boy J. Otto Seibold, who’s the person that did the Sorry To Bother You graphics and did the graphics on the earrings and on the signs and on the cola and all that kind of stuff. And I said to Dave Eggers, “Hey, I’m going to put this out on the internet. Maybe you could read it and give me some notes so I can make sure it’s as tight as possible.”

And he read it and he was like, “Wow. This is one of the best unproduced screenplays I’ve ever read. You got to let me put it out on McSweeney’s.” So, he published it as its own paperback because he was like, “Everybody in the industry reads McSweeney’s. You’ll get it made.” So he published it as its own paperback book and bound it with McSweeney’s Quarterly which went out to, like, 10 or 20,000 people.

So, because of that, that inspired me to think that, maybe, I could get it made. And then I joined the San Francisco Film Society’s Filmmaker and Residents program, I took a bunch of books to the actual Sundance Film Festival, handing them out on the bus and at parties, and ended up getting to have a meeting with Anne Lai from Feature Film program. And she invited me to apply to the Screenwriters Lab.

I took a bunch of books to the actual Sundance Film Festival, handing them out on the bus and at parties, and ended up getting to have a meeting with Anne Lai from Feature Film program. And she invited me to apply to the Screenwriters Lab.

And then, once I got into that, that obviously made people take it more seriously because, before that, you’re a musician with a script. People don’t want to read screenwriters’ scripts. So, they really don’t want to read musicians’ scripts [laughter]. So yeah. Sundance gave it some notoriety – the Screenwriters Labs and the next year I went to the Directors Lab – and then we started to have enough buzz to have people listening to us and just started getting it to people who wanted to be part of it, so, yeah.

This film obviously heavily features magical realism. I’m curious, what are some of your cinematic influences?

Boots Riley: Oh, man. So many. And I think the reason why the film works is that I wear them on my sleeve. However, I’ve got hundreds of them, so they’re all very contradictory influences. And you kind of end up making your own new thing. Because it’s kind of like – a lot of people love Prince, including me. But sometimes there’s some artist that is so influenced by Prince, and they’re doing so well at sounding like them, you don’t really want to hear that person. But you might want to hear that person whose influence is Prince, Jello Biafra, Marvin Gaye, Johnny Cash, and, I don’t know, Kronos Quartet all mixed into one.

Definitely.

Boots Riley: They [laughter] might make something amazing because what they’re doing is what we all do, what all art does is synthesize experiences and influences. So, my influences are like Emir Kusturica, Black Cat, White Cat, and Underground. The chaos that happens in those movies. The way the camera moves and Thierry Arbogast‘s way of moving through a scene.

Michael Cimino on Heaven’s Gate and Deer Hunter, how he deals with crowds and how everybody in the crowd – nobody in those crowds seems like extras. I don’t think I got there yet because it costs a lot of money, but I was able to use a lot of family and friends so that I could legally tell them what to do without, them not being extras anymore. I mean, they got paid as extras, but if you, as a director, direct an extra, they’re not an extra anymore. But if that extra is your cousin, [laughter] you can talk to them.

Movies that may not be good [laughter], but have some really good things about them. And I specifically, really get into that sort of thing, like, “Why did this one thing work and what did they do that made it not work.” That’s part of the studying for me, like One From The Heart by Francis Ford Coppola – just the things that he did with the light and reflections and stuff like that in that movie.

There’s a movie called Mishima by Paul Schrader, and when Cassius is looking at the elevator, I really wanted to get that same feeling from the Temple of the Golden Pavilion part of that movie when the guy’s looking at the temple and it’s almost like it’s drawing him in in a dangerous way. There’s stuff like Milos Forman, The Loves of a Blonde. There’s this group of films by Lindsay Anderson, one is called If…., the other’s called O Lucky Man, and another one is called Britannia Hospital. They’re all with Malcolm McDowell playing the same character.

There’s a movie called American Ruling Class, where Peter O’Toole plays this very rich, crazy dude who thinks he’s Jesus and [it] has a crazy twist in it. There’s a movie called La Moustache. That’s one of my favorite movies in the world that’s a thriller. A hardcore thriller. A nail bitter which the premise is a guy shaves his mustache and nobody notices [laughter]. And it’s able to work, and in that way that bringing details to the front makes you realize their importance. Things that you might have not have noticed. And I think that had an influence on this movie, in that way.

I think novels had an influence on this. Like, trying to recreate something that – some great novelists that I like [are] Gabriel Garcia Marquez with a Hundred Years of Solitude and Toni Morrison with Song of Solomon and Salman Rushdie with Midnight’s Children – they might have a sentence that the whole point of the sentence is to describe that two people are in a room talking to each other.

A lot of times what gets asked is, “Do you need this scene?” And the answer’s always no, you don’t. But you don’t need much in a movie [laughter]. The point is: you want it.

But when they describe the coffee cup that someone picks up, it might harken back to a memory – they’re picking up the coffee cup that someone else once used to kill someone else with. And things that they do in literature that I wanted to see if I could do. Those juicy details that maybe aren’t necessary. Because a lot of times what gets asked is, “Do you need this scene?” And the answer’s always no, you don’t. But you don’t need much in a movie [laughter]. The point is: you want it.

And you have a dream cast for this movie. An all-star cast –

Boots Riley: Yeah. I think we have the 2018 Rat Pack [laughter].

Yeah, totally. I mean, you’ve got Jermaine Fowler, Terry Crews, Tessa Thompson, Lakeith Stanfield, Armie Hammer, the list goes on. And then the cameos are incredible, too. So, how did you go about casting this film, and were these your first choices for the main characters?

Boots Riley: Well, I mean, there’s no way it could be my first choices because when I finished writing this in 2012, Lakeith Stanfield had never been in a movie.

Right. Of course [laughter].

Boots Riley: So, I got him hired on several things from behind the scenes I, like, whispered to make sure that his career developed [laughter] so that he could be in this movie [laughter]. But, yeah, all these people are the folks that, after figuring out the – because it took getting the main character cast to figure out who would be the right people to bounce off of them – but I would say that once I got the lead character cast, then everything started being able to make sense.

We did this Skype chemistry read with Tessa in one city and Lakeith in another city and me in a third city, and I didn’t think it was going to work. I was like, “I can’t cast anybody, I don’t care how famous they are, If I can’t really see that it’s going to be fire between Cassius and Detroit. It’s just not going to work.” And so, I thought it wasn’t going to work because we were doing this on Skype. I didn’t think it would really impress me because of the Skype situation, but there was just fire on that screen between the two of them and I was like, “Okay, shit. If this is on Skype, it’s going to be amazing in person.”

“Okay, shit. If this is on Skype, it’s going to be amazing in person.”

Then, at that point, Nina [Yang Bongiovi], one of the producers, knew Steven Yuen‘s management. So, I went and talked to them, and I went out to dinner with Steven Yuen, and he got me drunk and high and I was like, “You are the right person for this role [laughter],” and that’s where that goes. Yeah, no, just me and him and, picturing him as Squeeze – that really worked in picturing him in different situations – that definitely worked.

And I knew that Sal was written as someone that was funny and that was the only person I was down to have like a comedian work with. And so, Jermaine had done some TV, so he wasn’t just a stand-up guy, but it was funny. He did a taped audition, which was one of the worst auditions, actually, of the whole thing in the sense that he had his wife reading and his wife was doing a terrible job that did not believe in periods or commas, but he was still showing through in it and his personality and he really felt like somebody from Oakland. So, I Skyped with him and just had a long conversation with him and then realized that he was the one for Sal.

And, yeah. From then, we had this good core of people that caused a lot of interest, whereas before, I had to jump through a whole bunch of hoops to get in touch with people. Now, we had the interesting script, the crazy Lookbook, and a cast that people were interested in, so we could do that. Now, now the person that I knew longer than anybody was Danny Glover, and the reason that I know him is he’s a family friend because him and my father were at San Francisco State together. They were part of the San Francisco State strike, which created the first ethnic studies program in the United States, and so they been knowing each other since the late ’60s. But he’s probably the last one to jump on board because, you know, your friend’s son has a script that he wants you to be part of, so that’s that’s not the thing you probably wanna do if you’re Danny Glover. But once it seemed like it was real and people were getting on board, then he took it a little bit more seriously and came on board.

For Terry Crews, it’s funny, I went to have a meeting with him at a café, and said hello and everything, sat down. He started talking, and two hours went by without me getting a word in edgewise because he gave me this two-hour life story slash inspirational, motivational speech that had me walking away from the café ready to build a house, work out, and start a pyramid scheme. So, it really felt like that scene on a heist movie where they’re putting together the team, [laughter] that was the casting for this movie [laughter]. It was the montage on a heist movie, I would say, rather, yeah.

That’s incredible. For a first-time feature, in my opinion, this will go down in history books as one of the greatest and most unique. What kind of preparation did you do and what kind of education did you receive to become so skilled behind the camera?

Boots Riley: Well, let’s see. I did go to film school, but I didn’t finish. We [The Coup] got a record deal and I left there, and honestly, at the time, San Francisco State seemed to be more focused on documentary and experimental film, although I wanted to do narrative, I don’t think I got a lot from that. And I definitely didn’t really do screenwriting there, but throughout the years, because I had done film school, I was very involved in all of our videos. Even the ones that I didn’t direct, I would write the treatment, sometimes storyboard it, and always be camped out with the director in the editing room being part of those choices. And then, I did co-direct one of our videos which is called Me and Jesus the Pimp in a ’79 Granada Last Night, and got to work with a great actor when doing that, Roger Guenveur Smith, whose this great [actor] with some crazy method acting process that maybe scared me away from doing film for a little while.

But then, I also did a short documentary called Eating Forever. But separately, I’ve been an artist for 20-something years, so, although a lot of times people are like, “Oh, that person’s a rapper,” it’s an art that makes you – I’m a student of art and artists. So, all this time kind of thinking of myself as an artist and watching film and dissecting it in the sense of how it was done and what different scenes did and also with the sense of power that I could make something all this time, it makes you watch those things a lot. So, I watched a lot of films. I went and read a lot of scripts, as well, once I decided I was gonna write it as – I’ve watched a lot of films just in general in my life, but also, once I decided I was going to do this film, I read a lot of scripts and just pumped movies into my head and watched a lot of stuff and took a lot of notes. [I] read every article I could read that could come up.

Certain websites helped a lot like mentorless.com and No Film School, Every Frame a Painting. Things like that. Then going to seminars and lectures, like this guy Bruce Block who does this visual storytelling lecture and has a book [The Visual Story]. And a book called Acting for Directors, by Judith Weston. I actually went and paid for her class as well. And, similarly, a similar thing with Joan Darling, who also is part of the Sundance Labs. So, Joan Darling’s thing is where you and other filmmakers will do each other’s scenes and you’ll practice directing them, and Joan Darling will talk about your relationship with those other people that are doing your scene. Like, what are you saying to them and how it might cause certain reactions and how that works.

Also, what was really helpful to me is watching behind-the-scenes documentaries, if they’re really good. For me, just wondering – there are certain things that you don’t know from working on smaller things like videos and stuff. Like, okay, when you have a bunch of extras going up and down the street, how do they figure that out? Little things like that. My favorite behind-the-scenes one is the making of Two Faces of January. It’s a two-hour movie. The making of runs just as long as the movie, and there’s no narration or interviews or anything like that. And it’s the movie from behind the scenes, and so it inter-splices in scenes of the actual movie that you see if you went to see the movie with that same scene happening from the background so you see different things happening.

I also cornered filmmakers and made them help me. So, like, Guillermo del Toro was at a luncheon at San Francisco Film Society, and I went and cornered him and pitched him my movie, and then he was like, “Wow. That’s amazing,” and then we sat down and talked for hours. And then, by the end of the talk, he was like, “So, wait, you haven’t done a movie yet?” And I was like, “Nope,” and he was like, “Oh. no. You need to go do something. You need to figure this out because you need time on the floor.” But then I was like, “I need a mentor.” He’s like, “I don’t have time for it,” but then he answered every single email I ever sent him asking questions and answered sent questions at length and then helped look for effects houses and things like that.

I also cornered filmmakers and made them help me. So, like, Guillermo del Torowas at a luncheon at San Francisco Film Society, and I went and cornered him and pitched him my movie, and then he was like, “Wow. That’s amazing,” and then we sat down and talked for hours.

I went and shadowed David Gordon Green while he shot Red Oaks. One of the other SF filmmakers in residence, Jennifer Phang, I went and sat in with her while she edited and did sound design. Any time I could get some information or some experience, I did it, but with the knowledge that I’m going to make this movie, and that sort of learning helps out a lot more. But yeah, I think a lot of the early hip-hop production that we used to do involved a lot of digging in the crates and finding little pieces of things that nobody thought was good because they didn’t listen to it. It didn’t get on the radio and you find this thing and then you find out, “Wow. That’s amazing. Let me see that. Who was the bass player on that?” Then you look for other records with that bass player and then you go and do that.

So, that was the same thing for me with cinema, and that’s how I found certain filmmakers and certain movies that weren’t the ones that you have on Netflix, or whatever, things like that, and really got into those things and found the parts of those movies that really stood out for me. Also, having 20 years of experience of working with many people to get a vision across, you already have the skill of working with people who are masters at their craft and getting them to follow your vision. And having an opinion and realizing that the people that have more technical knowledge aren’t necessarily more creative than you, all of that just builds.

And also, I guess, what I’m leaving out here, I was in the Sundance Labs. And I was in the Sundance Labs with – our advisors were Rodrigo Prieto, and Bradford Young, and Chiwetel Ejiofor. Joshua Marston. I mean, the guy that wrote The Big Short, and obviously, Robert Redford, and things like that. So, one, you get this combination of information, but combined with the knowledge that you have the power to make it happen, makes you learn those things in a different way. And the fact that I wasn’t just fresh out of film school where, normally, I might be like, you know, “Oh. The cinematographer says we should do it that way. They probably know right,” and the truth is, Doug Emmett is amazing, but because have enough confidence in myself, I can be like, “No, Doug. We wanna do it this way,” whereas if I came straight out of film school, I might question myself more. And I will say this. With my art, in general, before, if you listened to The Coup’s catalog, I’ve never done the thing that maybe people think I should have at the time, right? Because the music that we made, it’s always off in some sort of way, and purposely so.

I’m used to not doing things the way that they’re supposed to be done. But at the same time, I’m also good at realizing when somebody has a great idea that’s better than what I had and being like, my allegiance and my ego is tied to that final thing that we’re making, not to the steps along the way. So, it allows you to work with people much better. Like, you have that bass line that you have that’s way better than the bass line that I had there, and I want this to be the best song it can be. So, you’re not just saying, “No. We’re not gonna do that,” just because you wanna be the one that made the decision. You’re really trying to make it the best way it could be. Also, when I’m working with musicians, I have to get them to really feel what’s happening. I can’t just be like, “It’s this kind of rhythm and you’re not playing it.”

So, when I’m talking to actors, I really have to get them to feel what’s happening and get them to find their way into the thing and figure out what to say that allows them to use their tools in the right way. And so, I think knowing how to work with actors and with everyone else on set and having a vision that, yes, it’s clear and it’s strong, but it’s also – there’s something malleable about it because you know that you have to be able to play with stuff. One thing that I did learn in the labs is – when I went into the labs, I’d already been working on this for years, so I had all these storyboards for different scenes.

And so, for instance, for that first interview scene, and I was doing that at the labs, I had this whole storyboard with a diagram of how the camera was gonna move which had it going around in a figure eight that first started on the manager, and went behind his head, and then revealed Cassius, and went behind him and did all this crazy stuff and was moving the whole thing. And I was so proud of myself, so the week that Rodrigo Prieto got there, I was like, “Oh. He’s gonna love me.” And I went and showed him the storyboard and the diagram for this thing and like, “Look how the camera is moving, this and that,” and he’s like, “Oh, yeah. That’s great. That’s cool,” you know? And then, through the whole week, before we were gonna film that scene, I’m talking to him about it more and why I think it’s exciting and, obviously, I wanted to do it because I was like, “I wanna make a statement that I’m a bold new director on the scene.”

But then, we went to rehearse the scene, and I realized if I did that, we weren’t gonna see people’s faces for a lot of the time. We were gonna miss certain lines, and I was like, “Wow. We will miss the great things about this if we do something like that.” And so, I went and told Rodrigo, “Hey. I’m actually not gonna do that. I’m gonna do shot, reverse shot and a two-shot, and all that kind of stuff,” and he was like, “Well, here’s the thing. I’m gonna have to demand that you try that idea because if you don’t try it here, you might make the mistake of trying it on your first day of actually shooting the movie. So I need you to try it and prove to yourself that it’s not good.” And I tried it, spent time doing that and then we shot it the other way in the labs. But what I realized from that is that you have to come to all your scenes over-prepared with everything.

Rodriego Pieto to Riley: “Well, here’s the thing. I’m gonna have to demand that you try that idea because if you don’t try it here, you might make the mistake of trying it on your first day of actually shooting the movie. So I need you to try it and prove to yourself that it’s not good.”

But you also have to know that you might have to scrap all of that because your location changes or because you let the actors work out how they’re doing the thing, and their blocking may end up giving you this way better idea. And that happens all the time, and you wanna be able to take advantage of that rather than being like, “Here is the scene. It’s storyboarded. Here’s the blocking, this and that,” and it becomes rigid and you don’t really, one, wanna let the actors be able to do what they need to do to be that character, and then you also can’t respond to it with your camera. So, so much of what we did was that, was being over-prepared, with all sorts of ideas of what could happen, and then letting ourselves improvise over that preparedness.

Well, it sure as hell beats being under-prepared, that’s for sure.

Boots Riley: Yeah. But also, sometimes you can get over-prepared and you’re stuck with that because I spent all this time drawing this out and all this sort of stuff and you’re like, “That’s the better idea.” But I think having so much experience with letting those ideas go in other ways from music allowed me to be okay with being able to do that. Because you could get scared. You could be like, “Wow. This is a whole different thing. Is this gonna work? I haven’t had days to think about this,” you know, “Do this right now.” But, yeah. So, I think all of that, in combination with having an amazing cast, like, I didn’t have to deal with any bad performances. “Oh, shit. We gotta cut around this and we gotta cut around that.” And having sat in other people’s editing rooms, I know that that happens all the time, on big films as well. We didn’t have to do that.

And speaking of your music, I’ve been listening to and a fan of The Coup since I was 14 years old. How much of the soundtrack is was written before the film, and were there any songs written after production specifically for the final product?

Boots Riley: All of the actual soundtrack was written after because “Sorry to Bother You” album is not the soundtrack to the movie because that happened so long ago. So, there’s a whole new soundtrack, which is The Coup’s new album, which will come out on Interscope Records this summer, and it is called “The Sun Exploding”. It has some subtitle that shows that it’s the soundtrack to Sorry To Bother You. Maybe it’ll have to say the real, actual soundtrack to Sorry To Bother You.

From what I gather, you like to work, not singularly or by yourself so much, but you really like to have a lot of control of your music.

Boots Riley: Mm-hmm.

What is your process as a musician in writing and producing music?

Boots Riley: Yeah. Well, so, up until and including “Pick a Bigger Weapon”, a lot of times I’d be producing skeletons of things myself and then bring in this musician on this day, and we’d work on a bunch of these little tracks of these kind of skeleton sketches I made. And then, I’d bring in that other musician a couple days later and we’d do that, and that’s kind of how the shape of the song would change, because I don’t necessarily know what I’m doing on the keyboard, and they’ll help fix this thing and do all that sort of stuff. And that’s kind of how it would go. But, for “Sorry to Bother You” and “The Sun Exploding”, I co-produced it and co-wrote a lot of songs with a friend of mine, Damian Gallegos, whose studio it was.

And so, for this, a lot of times it would be me on the omnichord playing chords and then us with a four-on-the-floor click track, and then him on bass. And then we’d go and bring in other musicians and do that, so a lot of it was me on omnichord at the beginning just coming up with the chord progressions. And then, going from there, there are other people that collaborated and co-wrote on it as well, some being folks like Mike Ahlberg, who’s been working with us since “Steal this Album”, or this guy LJ who’s been playing on stuff for a while. So, yeah, that’s kind of how it is. And I always make a lot of music, like, there might be 100 pieces of music per album, and then I sit with the music and kind of figure out what the emotion is that it’s bringing me and figure out what ideas or images come from that emotion, and then I write lyrics to it.

That’s fantastic. And now that you have finally produced this masterpiece, are there any projects that you’re working on for the future?

Boots Riley: I’m working on a feature script and a TV pilot.

Well, good stuff. Best of luck with those. Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me.

Boots Riley: Alright, cool. Thank you. Thank you, man, for you taking the time and writing this up for us.

Film Inquiry would like to thank Boots Riley for his generous time and insight. Check out our Sorry To Bother You review here.

Sorry To Bother You opens in the U.S. to a limited theatrical release on July 6, 2018, and a wider release on July 13, 2018. For more information on its release, click here.