The Director Boots Riley on “Sorry to Bother You”

Summary

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The New Yorker Radio Hour

Episode: The Director Boots Riley on “Sorry to Bother You”

Date: January 8, 2019
Host: David Remnick
Guest: Boots Riley
Interviewer: Doreen St. Felix

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Episode Overview

This episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour features a lively and insightful interview with Boots Riley, the acclaimed writer-director of the 2018 satirical film “Sorry to Bother You.” The conversation, led by The New Yorker's Doreen St. Felix, delves into the inspiration behind the film, its potent critique of capitalism, Riley's upbringing in an activist household, and the intersection of his careers in music, organizing, and filmmaking.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Inspiration Behind “Sorry to Bother You”

• Setting & Story First, Style Later
  Boots Riley reveals that the genesis of the film was rooted in a telemarketing environment and a character’s ethical struggle.

  • “All I knew was that it was going to take place on a telemarketing floor...and there was going to be a struggle that he had to decide what side he was on. ...I didn't start thinking about the aesthetics of it until I had the story.”
    (Boots Riley, 01:22)

• The Protagonist’s Perspective
  Riley intentionally chose to have the protagonist, Cassius Green, be a Black man navigating the workplace, not shying away from nuance and moral conflict.

  • “If you don't, the choice is too easy. Like what? They're just gonna have a debate about it? ...I have to bring people through that thought process.”
    (Boots Riley, 02:15)

• Autobiographical Elements
  All characters are, in a way, vehicles for Riley’s voice:

  • “All of the lines were me talking to myself.”
    (Boots Riley, 02:54)

2. Critique of Capitalism & the Tech Boom

• Not Just About Tech Riley states that the film’s critique transcends the tech industry or any one era:

  • “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.”
    (Boots Riley, 04:25)

• On Workplace Culture He parodies “new capitalism” and tech workplace euphemisms:

  • “This idea of the new capitalism is no capitalism. ...It's a bean bag room. Do stuff. Here, you don't work. Do stuff. This is called do stuff. It's not called work. And I'm not your boss. I just kind of tell you what to do.”
    (Boots Riley, 04:49)

• Media Gatekeeping & Capitalism Riley touches on changing attitudes in media, speculating his film might have been received differently in previous years depending on who's in political power.

3. Art and Political Language

• Avoiding the Word 'Capitalism' in Art Riley prefers not to use 'capitalism' directly in his creative work:
  • “In my artwork. I don't use the term capitalism...My goal is to have people be against capitalism. I want my art to inform, be more personal about how we think about the world and how things work.”
    (Boots Riley, 06:22)

4. Activist Upbringing

• Roots in Activism
  Riley was born into a family with activist roots, but his parents didn’t push ideology on him:

  • “He didn't push ideas on me...As I came into certain ideas, I knew...they wouldn't be mad at me for getting involved in organizations. But I also could think of it as my own thing.”
    (Boots Riley, 08:34)

• First Steps in Organizing
  He describes being introduced to activism through youth outreach:

  • Anecdote about being lured into political action by a youth organizer—with a van full of kids going to the beach, who instead attended a labor strike.
    (08:32–09:27)

• Early Action and Result Organizing student walkouts in Oakland led to direct change:

  • “We called for a walkout and...2,000 of the 2,200 students started walking out. ...the superintendent came out and read a prepared statement saying, 'We've decided not to have year round schools. Thank you.' ...We got drunk off power.”
    (Boots Riley, 09:40–11:40)

5. The Road from Activism to Music

• Early Interest in Performing Riley was drawn to music and performance, citing an early attempt to emulate Prince but discovered the potential of music as a tool for social change.

• Integrating Art and Activism A pivotal moment: seeing music fuel community resistance after police brutality in San Francisco projects.

  • “The biggest hit on the radio was Public Enemy, Fight the Power...Somebody started chanting...and they ran back. It made me see what place music could have—a rallying cry.”
    (Boots Riley, 13:01–15:00)

• Rapping as a Discipline Early failures in rapping were not a deterrent; Riley saw the need for practice and discipline, a lesson carried over from activist organizing.

6. Transition to Filmmaking

• From Film School to Music to Film Riley admits he couldn’t balance organizing and music simultaneously. After working with Tom Morello in Street Sweeper Social Club, he craved a medium wholly his own, leading him back to his filmmaking ambition.
  • “I came out of that really wanting to create something that was all out of my brain. ...You could create a whole world with a film.”
    (Boots Riley, 16:28)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On writing dialogue:
  “All of the conversations. All of the lines were me talking to myself.”
  (Boots Riley, 02:54)

• On workplaces of the new economy:
  “It's a bean bag room. Do stuff. Here, you don't work. Do stuff. This is called do stuff. It's not called work. And I'm not your boss. I just kind of tell you what to do.”
  (Boots Riley, 04:49)

• On the power of protest:
  “We got drunk off power.”
  (Boots Riley, 11:40)

• On the necessity of getting good at rapping:
  “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.”
  (Boots Riley, 15:00)

• On filmmaking as ultimate creative control:
  “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.”
  (Boots Riley, 16:28)

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Important Timestamps

• 01:22 – Boots Riley on first imagining “Sorry to Bother You”
• 02:15 – Why the protagonist had to be conflicted, personal approach to character creation
• 04:25 – Riley on the film’s critique beyond the tech boom
• 06:22 – On not explicitly discussing capitalism in his art
• 08:34–09:27 – Riley’s early introduction to activism
• 09:40–11:40 – Story of organizing a student walkout with immediate results
• 13:01–15:00 – The moment music revealed itself as a tool for resistance
• 16:28 – The transition from organizing/music to filmmaking

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Conclusion

Boots Riley’s conversation is a compelling weave of creative process, political conviction, and personal journey. With humor and reflective candor, he explores how “Sorry to Bother You” crystallized years of activism, musical discipline, and his aspirations as a storyteller. The episode offers listeners a window into the mind of an artist whose work—whether in hip hop or on screen—remains deeply intertwined with a vision for social change.

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Transcript

[Narrator/Host]

From one World Trade center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.

[David Remnick]

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 your has been described as the most original movie of 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 a side 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. Reilly spent more than 20 years as a musician working with the hip hop group the coup. He's 47 now, and sorry To Bother your is his first film project. The New Yorker's Doreen St. Felix asked Boots Riley what inspired it in the first place.

[Boots Riley]

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.

[Doreen St. Felix]

Is there any autobiographical element in the Cassius Green character? Obviously, you worked as a telemarketer in the past, but Sorry to Bother you is 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 don't like scabs? That's not part of your.

[Boots Riley]

If you don't, the choice is too. You make the choices too easy. Like what? They're just gonna have a debate about it? And he's like, yeah, you know, you're right. You know, I have to 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.

[Telemarketer/Character Voice]

Millions of dollars went into these walls just to make sure that thousands of calls can go out and in at the same time without jamming the lines. 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 power caller. A power caller where the callers are ballers, where they make the real call. They even have their own elevator.

[Boots Riley]

Oh, yeah, I saw that.

[Telemarketer/Character Voice]

Stick to the script.

[Doreen St. Felix]

So, obviously, movies take a very long time to get made. And I kept thinking, if Sorry to Bother your 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 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, reading Radiating Effects in Oakland?

[Boots Riley]

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 the army.

[Doreen St. Felix]

The Army.

[Boots Riley]

Hamlet. Yeah.

[Telemarketer/Character Voice]

Yeah.

[Doreen St. Felix]

Right.

[Boots Riley]

In terms of tech boom, because 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 capitalism, but it's not really that. It's like, there's not a place to work. It's a bean bag room. Do stuff. Here, you don't work. Do stuff. This is called do stuff. It's not called work. And I'm not your boss. I just kind of tell you what to do. So there's that aspect. And so I wasn't worried about any of that. It's possible that it may have been taken differently 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 hare brained 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.

[Doreen St. Felix]

So I've read that you don't like using the term capitalism.

[Boots Riley]

In my artwork. I don't use the term capitalism. Besides telling people that they should nominally be against capitalism, that's not my goal I. At all my goal is to have people be against capitalism. I want my art to inform.

[Telemarketer/Character Voice]

You.

[Boots Riley]

Know, be more personal about how we think about the world and how things work.

[Doreen St. Felix]

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 Fanon's Wretched of the Earth. Is. Is that true?

[Boots Riley]

Yeah, I learned to read as an infant and really got into that part of psychology.

[Doreen St. Felix]

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?

[Boots Riley]

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 8 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 Klan in Chicago and. And somebody got him, you know, somebody got him with the sucker, you know, hit with a two by four. And so I knew, like, okay, the Klan is bad, you're supposed to fight against them. But I. And you know, so he didn't push ideas on me.

[Doreen St. Felix]

Right.

[Boots Riley]

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 gonna go to the beach, but first we're gonna go support the Watsonville cannery workers stripe. Do you still wanna go? So that's how they got me in the van.

[Doreen St. Felix]

That's a much better turnout than most stories of young children entering vans. What was the first action that you led or participated in?

[Boots Riley]

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 Progressive Labor Party and NCAR'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. I was as a teenager very concerned with being cool and definitely not standing on the corner with a bunch of older white dudes passing out flyers about revolution. 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 when differently and I came back and the first thing like when we got back was that Oakland Public Schools was going to have 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, 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, 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. 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.

[Doreen St. Felix]

So I'm going to shift gears a little bit to talk about when does a young Boots Riley know that he wants to be a rapper, he wants to be a musician.

[Boots Riley]

I just spit the dope lines. I don't snort them. Tell the boss to call police to escort them. You don't ride all them lies. You just quote em, get offline, plug into this modem. No, you can't outquote them. The rules are still quoting on the jewels we holdin Zipart.

[Doreen St. Felix]

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.

[Boots Riley]

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, 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 school.

[Doreen St. Felix]

What was it called?

[Boots Riley]

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 had happened was these two twins that were 8 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 ended up. 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 Rossy 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. Fight. 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.

[Doreen St. Felix]

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. And 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?

[Boots Riley]

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 we. Where I did quit music again and start organizing. I never really been able to do them both at the same time. I did this project with Tom Morello 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.

[Doreen St. Felix]

Boots Riley, thank you.

[Boots Riley]

Thanks for having me. Thank you.

[David Remnick]

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 ewyorkerradio.

[Narrator/Host]

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. 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 Cherina Endowment Fund.