The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Director Boots Riley on “Sorry to Bother You”

Episode Date: January 8, 2019

Boots Riley’s directorial début, “Sorry to Bother You,” blends a dark strain of comedy with a sci-fi vision of capitalism run amok. The film’s hero, Cassius Green, is a telemarketer who rises quickly in the ranks—eventually becoming a “power caller”—after he learns to use a “white voice” on the phone, mimicking the way white people are supposed to speak. As sharp as the film is on issues of race and identity, “Sorry to Bother You” ultimately takes capitalism, and the way it exploits labor, as its target. “There were a lot of things about capitalism that were forgiven by big media companies while Obama was in office,” Riley tells The New Yorker’s Doreen St. Félix in a live interview at the New Yorker Festival. “Things that we had said we were against under Bush.” “Sorry to Bother You” is, in part, a response to that loss of focus. Riley, who is forty-seven, got his start as a rapper; for many years, he led the political hip-hop band the Coup. He traces his interest in art as activism to an incident from 1989, when police officers in San Francisco beat two children and their mother in front of a housing project. Neighbors began protesting, spilling out onto the street and chanting lyrics from Public Enemy's “Fight the Power.” “It made me see what place music could have,” Riley tells St. Félix. “I knew, This is what I had to do.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Every year, we invite some of the most interesting people in America to come talk with us at the New Yorker Festival, writers, musicians, inventors, leaders in government and policy, the men and women who are shaping the world we live in. Sorry to Bother You has been described as the most original movie of the world. last year, at least by some critics. And it may not be Oscar bait. It's sort of science fiction, absurdist, and definitely very satirical. The movie is about a guy who's down on his luck and takes a telemarketing job where he learns to use a white voice, a perfect facsimile of how white people are apparently supposed to talk. And as his career takes off, he's forced to pick aside in a labor

dispute. As trenchant as the movie is about race and identity, sorry to bother you, turns out to be an extremely sharp critique of capitalism. The movie's writer and director is Boots Riley. Riley spent more than 20 years as a musician working with the hip-hop group, The Coup. He's 47 now, and sorry to bother you, is his first film project. The New Yorker's Doreen St. Felix asked Boots Riley

what inspired it in the first place. All I knew was that it was going to take place on a telemarketing floor. It was going to take place in the world of telemarketing, and there was going to be a struggle that he had to decide what side he was on. I didn't know there was going to be anything fantastical in it. I was thinking about story the whole time. I didn't start thinking about the aesthetics of it until I had the story.

Is there any autobiographical element in the Cassius Green character? Obviously, you worked as a telemarketer in the past, but started to bother you as a story that could have been told from so many perspectives. Were you making a very conscious choice to make the protagonist be this black man who starts to debase himself? Like, who is a scab as someone who, you know, you don't like scabs? That's not part of your... If you don't, the choice is to eat, you make the choices too easy. Like, what, they're just going to have a debate about it.

And he's like, yeah, you know, you're right. You know, I have to make, I have to bring. people through that thought process, right? And so that's part of it. Also, all of the characters, yeah, there's autobiographical elements in it in the sense that I didn't try to pick characters that I needed to research to figure out how they would respond in this conversation. I just wrote all of the conversations, all of the lines were me talking to myself. Millions of dollars went into these walls just to make sure that thousands of calls can go out and end at the same time without jamming the lights. You studied the script?

Yeah. Look, clock in. Don't be lazy. And I won't have to be an asshole. Make a sale? This light goes on. You do real good. Eventually, you might even be able to be a pile.

Power. Power caller. Where the callers are ballers. Where they make the read. They even have their own elevator. Oh yeah. I saw that. Stick to the script.

So obviously movies take a very long time to get made. And I kept thinking, if sorry to bother you had come out in 2013, it would have seemed completely prophetic. Because at that point, I think there was still the belief that a lot of these tech guys were just hard. harmless boy geniuses in a way. And then the election happens and Facebook happens. And we all realize that they're going to kill us. Did you feel like you were in a race against time, a race against the public conception of what was happening with the tech boom

and it's, you know, radiating effects in Oakland? No, this movie wasn't about the tech boom. I mean, it could have been made in any year that we've had capitalism pretty much. I mean, the ideas that it talks about are ideas that happen, you know, in different industrial eras as well. And so, yeah, I wasn't thinking, I maybe thought of the personality of Steve. Of the Army. Yeah, yeah.

In terms of tech boom, because, you know, it's like this idea of the new capitalism is no capitalism. There is no capitalism here. What are you talking about? This is like, I know it's called capital. But it's not really that. It's, you know, like, it's not a place to work. It's a beanbag room.

You do stuff here. You don't work. Do stuff. This is called do stuff. It's not called work. And, you know, I'm not your boss. I just kind of tell you what to do. So there's that aspect.

And so I wasn't, you know, I wasn't worried about any of that. It's possible that it may have been taken different. by certain gatekeepers that liked talking about it. I mean, because there were a lot of things about capitalism that were forgiven by big media companies while Obama was in office. Things that we had said we were against under Bush, that all of a sudden we could turn a blind eye to, or not we, but publications could.

And anyone saying something otherwise kind of seemed like just this hair, this hairbrain nut as far as publications were concerned. So maybe it wouldn't have gotten as much print or articles about it. I don't know. That's just speculation. So I've read that you don't like using the term capitalism. In my artwork, I don't use the term capitalism. Besides telling people that they should nominally be a given.

capitalism, that's not my goal at all. My goal is to have people be against capitalism. I want my art to inform, you know, be more personal about how we think about the world and how things work. I was reading an interview with you and the journalist says that there is a photograph that exists of you as an infant holding a copy of Fennell's Ratchet of the Earth. Is that true? Yeah, I learned to read as an infant and really got into that part of psychology. Right. But the point is that you do come from a long line of activists. Your parents met at the 1968 student strike at San Francisco University. Did you feel predestined to be an activist and an organizer? Well, I knew that my parents were involved with things, but it was not clear exactly what they were involved in. By the time I was eight, they were burnt out and kind of went on to other things.

And since then, my father, you know, got back into being an activist and an organizer. But there was a period between like eight and 15 or something. where he was just being a public defender, which he thought was actually social justice work. He thought of that. And he's also known as a civil rights attorney, but his organizing earlier, I didn't know so much about what was happening.

I just knew he came home one time with his ribs bandaged up and said that they had just been fighting the clan in Chicago, and somebody got him. You know, somebody got him with a sucker, you know, hit with a two by four. And so I knew like, okay, the clan is bad.

You're supposed to fight against him. But I, you know, so he didn't push ideas on me. Right. And the good thing about that is as I came into certain ideas, I knew, one, that he wouldn't be, I knew enough to know that they wouldn't be mad at me for getting involved in organizations. But I also could think of it as my own thing.

So later, that's kind of, how I got involved in the sense that he still had friends that were in these organizations and some youth organizer that was connected to Progressive Labor Party was like, hey, do you want to go to the beach? I was like, yeah. And he showed up at my house with a van full of 14-year-old girls. I was 14 and saying, you know, yeah, we're going to go to the beach, but first we're going to go support the Watsonville Canary Workers Stripe. Do you still want to go? So that's a lot of it. how they got me in the van.

That's a much better turnout than most stories of young children entering vance. What was the first action that you led or participated in? Well, first actions that I participated in was that same summer after I went in that van ride, I decided to become part of the summer project, which was pretty, you were Progressive Labor Party and N-CAR's support of a farm workers union that was being organized in Delano and McFarland in Central California. And I think I wouldn't have done, you know, I was as a teenager very concerned with being cool and definitely not, you know, standing on the corner with a bunch of older white dudes passing out flyers about revolution. and it just was not considered cool. So I wouldn't have gotten involved in that way

without those summer projects, but getting involved with that and seeing these folks actually do something. That made me look at my own world back in Oakland differently. And I came back and the first thing, like when we got back, was that Oakland Public Schools was going to have a year-round school. So that's an easy issue to get students on the other. side of. And we built up a campaign and called for a walkout. And it was the easiest. I haven't

had an easier campaign that I've been involved with since then. But we called for a walkout like a few days to happen a few days later. And 2,000 of the 2,200 students started walking out. We marched about a mile and a half down to the school district offices, and we marched down, and other schools started coming out. As soon as we got to the school district office, the superintendent came out and read a prepared statement saying, we've decided not to have you around schools. Thank you.

And so everybody, I mean, we got drunk off power. So I'm going to shift gears a little bit to talk about. about when does a young Boots Riley know that he wants to be a rapper, who wants to be a musician? Yeah. I should just quote him, get offline, plug into this model.

No, you can't outvote them. The rules are still golden on the Jews. We homes if you are all right. So we have that refrain. Don't talk about it, be about it. And that's, I think, central to Boots Riley's politics and also his work. And so...

Well, the other aspect of the story is, I think before I got in that van, I wanted to be Prince. And so, and I was taking guitar and piano and trumpet. And, but I didn't want to practice as much as Prince did. I just wanted to be able to do that. But I then started seeing how much music really helped with things. I had written a play for the, for school.

What was it called? So the teacher asked for an Oakland version of West Side Story, so East Oakland, we did East Side Story. And I wrote raps. And I had never written raps before. And nobody laughed or booed. So I was like, oh, maybe I could do that. And later, when we were, you know, a few years later, we were organizing in these projects called Double Rock in San Francisco. going door to door, selling newspapers,

kind of organizing around this vague notion of fight racism. I don't know what that means, and I don't think we did then. But it was like, join an organization to fight racism. That was our basic pitch. One Sunday that we went, the day before something had happened that everybody told us about. What it happened was these two twins that were eight years old were stopped by the police.

The police claimed they were selling drugs. And police felt like they didn't cooperate with them, started trying to take them into the car, and people saw them beating the kids. Rossi Hawkins, their mother, ran down to stop them. And she started getting beaten too. and the whole project saw this and they all ran out

and the cops got scared shot up in the air and if you've ever been around a gun going off the only logic you usually will know is get the hell away from here you know let me get away

how do I and so everybody ran but at some point everybody ran back and by the end of the night there was turned over police cars and the police ran out of there without their guns and they got Rossi Hawkins and her kids to the hospital. This was the summer of 1989

and the biggest hit on the radio was public enemy fight the power and somebody started chanting as they were running away. Fight the power. Fight the power. Then they all started chanting it and they ran back. It made me see that, you know, what place music could have. You know, a rallying cry, as it said. And so right then I knew, okay, this is what I have to do.

Problem was I wasn't, I had written those raps, but I wasn't a rapper. I wasn't good. And just being involved in a discipline organization up to there made me realize that that was just an obstacle, that that didn't make it impossible. It just made me realize that I had to figure out how to get good so that I could do this. I'm interested in knowing you'd gone to film school for a couple of years, right? And then you decided to be a musician while also organizing.

When did the dream that you'd had of making film, when did that reawaken for you? And when did you start pursuing script writing? and thinking about projects. Well, I think I had it in my, and to be clear, by the time I started doing music, I had pretty much stopped organizing. I had a period where I did quit music again and start organizing. I'd never really be able to do them both at the same time.

I did this project with Tom Arello called Street Sweeper Social Club. And it was half a clap. And we made songs, but it wasn't satisfying. And I came out of that really wanting to create something that was all out of my brain. And, you know, you could create a whole world with a film. I had the idea that I was going to make films in my head the whole time. Bruce Riley, thank you. Thanks for having me.

Thank you. That's Doreen St. Felix talking with the activist, musician, and now filmmaker, Boots Riley. And that's it for the New Yorker Radio Hour this week. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for listening to the show. Until next time, please follow us on Twitter at New Yorker Radio. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Lexus Quadrato.

This episode was produced with help from Rhonda Sherman, David Ohana, Emily Mann, and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Trina Endowment Fund.