Interview (Written): Boots Riley

Conversation with the writer-director of the lauded independent film Sorry to Bother You.

The movie Sorry to Bother You currently has a 94% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The film, which stars LaKeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson, is generating a lot of buzz in large part due to its originality.

In this Film Inquiry interview, writer-director Boots Riley provides insights into his creative vision for the movie.

As as a Bay Area native, it was so cool to see your dystopian vision of Oakland. What was the inception of this idea? How did it originate?

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.

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.

Here is a red band trailer for the movie Sorry to Bother You:

For the rest of the interview, go here.

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Movie Website

Twitter: @BootsRiley.