Interview: Boots Riley on Collecting an Eclectic Cast and How ‘I Love Boosters’ is Like Richard Scarry’s ‘Busy, Busy Town’
Few contemporary directors embody their work quite like Boots Riley. Donning one of his signature tall hats and sipping on a warm coffee during our interview, my first impression was how comfortably the musician and writer-director would fit in with the characters of his one-of-a-kind films.
Riley burst into the film scene with his eye-popping debut Sorry to Bother You (2018) about an Oakland telemarketer who finds greater success upon using his “white voice.” Honoring the Bay Area’s core communities whilst expanding the visual and aesthetic associations with the region, his body of work speaks to the many absurd and disturbing propellers of the American economy.
Riley sizes up in scope with I Love Boosters (2026), where he once again navigates the pitfalls and temptations of capitalism. The film follows a crew of female “boosters” who shoplift from upscale stores to then resell said items at a reduced price to their communities, a feat that brings chaotic consequences when fashion designer Christie Smith takes their work personally.
Joining castmates at the West Coast premiere of the film at the 69th San Francisco International Film Festival, Riley brought the film to the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland, allowing his own locale to be amongst the first to view the film. This time back in the Bay allowed Riley to open up about his philosophy on social media, casting, and on-set learning.
Damian Danemman: I was first kind of curious about the gender roles in the film, because Sorry to Bother You is a lot about Blackness and especially about how it has to be molded for the sake of white hegemonic culture, particularly for Black men. Here, there’s various pockets of femininity in I Love Boosters, with fashion being a major element of that. What drew you to this world this time around?
Boots Riley: I mean, it’s all the same world. They all exist together. And I wrote a song 20 years ago called “I Love Boosters” and it was about groups of women who I had known for certain amounts of time, and they were boosters. A lot of times I’ll find something that I find interesting, I might not even know why. And then I’ll think about what I think about it in relation to the rest of the world. And that helps fill out my ideas of it. So I start with the character and what about that makes me interested in it. Their world is the world that’s around them. So it really was the character of Corvette and what she wanted, what she felt and all of that. And so everything else is built around her. My movies, even though they’re ensembles, they’re really like a novel about a character.
DD: Yeah, I totally see that. Something that I think really stands out to me about you as a filmmaker is, you have a very big social media presence. You always repost stuff about your films. And I feel like so many filmmakers are obsessed with holding a very reserved or curated image of themselves. And I kind of saw that in Christie’s character where it’s like you want this perception of high art. And I feel like it’s really cool to see someone who kind of takes it in a very genuine way. I was curious if you want to speak a little bit on that and kind of your approach to just-
BR: Social media?
DD: Social media and just in general press and how you interact with your audiences.
BR: I don’t know. I guess I’m just not plussed by anything. I’ve been making music, making art for 30 something years and I actually don’t see the glamour in it. It’s just like, there’s me, there’s that person walking down the street, they do a thing, I do a thing.
DD: For sure.
BR: And it just so happens that because I want to make stuff that affects the world, then people know my work. And so I also like the work that I make, at least so far. And I like to engage with people around it… On a tour, you’re on stage every night to hundreds of people, if you’re lucky, to thousands, every night. And you get feedback. You can change it in the middle of the song to make people dance more. So there’s an engagement with it.
The stuff that I’m doing, part of the art, is whether I’m getting people to get involved in movements or organizations, campaigns. And so that’s part of my engagement with the crowd, like I’m on tour. And so if I wasn’t making films or music, I’d probably be on social media just as much.
DD: Exactly. Yeah.
BR: And so it’s not like I think when someone talks to me on Twitter that, “Oh, why am I talking to that person? They’re not even a filmmaker.” They’re a person with an idea and a life.
DD: For sure.
BR: And so yeah. So it’s part of what I do. And I think that comes from also… before I was doing music and film, I was doing organizing work, talking to people for a lot of the film, and organizing. We would do the base building, talking to people for a long time about things.
And yeah. You do end up having a way out like, “Okay, I have this work to do here or I have this social media work.” It all starts kind of getting blended together because in order to promote my work, I also need to be on there getting people to get engaged with it and having conversations about it. I get obsessive… I think a lot of people do, and I’m one of them. I get obsessed with stuff. And I think that’s how I complete my projects. I’m a really obsessive person. I got to do this. I’ve got to finish this. I’m going to be up. The sun is coming up, I’m getting this thing finished. Which is very dangerous for me with social media because then that becomes a project and I got to do this. But I don’t think that project has no value. It’s just to much less people. So maybe for my own sanity, I got to… For instance, I have this phone right here. It’s called a Wisephone and it doesn’t get internet.
DD: Oh, wow. Okay.
BR: It’s not a flip phone because then I got to do texting and so this actually does… It has texting and I can do WhatsApp and it gets my calendar and all that kind of stuff. And then I have a separate device for the internet so that I can leave the internet alone and do stuff. But yeah, I don’t know. I talk to people. I talk to people if I’m on the street. Yeah. It’s all one thing to me.
DD: For sure. No, and I think that’s something that always stands out about, I think your work is the way in which it’s, like I said, very community based.
Boots Riley: I think that also what you’re talking about for people that are curating their image, a lot of what people do in the industry is, sometimes you have to sell yourself as the expert. Like, “I know this. I know that.” I’ll be on set, all the time like, “I don’t know this. What is that? What’s that called? Why is that a duvetyne instead of a black blanket?” It doesn’t matter because I know what matters is the creation and the story and the idea about the aesthetic that you want to create. I don’t have to know every film and director and all that kind of stuff that happened in the ’60s. I need to know what I’m making. And I don’t need to be the expert at these other things because it’s clear that I’m the expert at the thing that I make.
And so that gives me a lot of freedom where I don’t have to protect myself from not knowing… Because a lot of times I’ll be like, “Okay, let’s do this. We’ll put the camera here. Let’s do this. I’ll come do it.” And then I’ll be like, “Oh, that was a bad idea. Sorry, let’s do this.” And people are like, “Wow, usually the director will go and stop whispers and blah, blah, blah.” And I was like, “Really? Why?” Because I didn’t know. And they were like, “Yeah, they don’t want people to know what their process is because they don’t want people to know when they mess up.”
DD: Because we’re all learning, yeah.
BR: Yeah. And for me, that’s what I think keeps me young, is to feel like I don’t know it all. Because you can get to a place where you traveled around the world for years, but where you are like, “Okay, I’ve seen this before. I know what this is.” But to me, things are exciting when I’m in unknown territory and when I’m trying to figure it out as we go.
DD: Sure. I think it’s interesting that you said that because I love how specific the films are particularly in terms of Bay Area references. I was cackling when I saw that [Grayson] was live from the Hayward store. I was like, “Of course.” Things like that, where it’s like, if you get it, you get it.
BR: Yeah.
DD: Are there any elements of that, that you think maybe you want people to particularly come away with or that you feel like people maybe haven’t even highlighted about the movie? Just little bits and pieces that come from your own experience or your own-
BR: No, I wouldn’t want to point people to it. They’ll get it on multiple watches.
DD: For sure.
BR: Do you know Richard Scarry’s “[Busy,] Busy Town”?
DD: I don’t think so.
BR: Yeah. It’s kids’ books, but from before your time, but it’s these books where it’s Richard Scarry, but S-C-A-R-R-Y. And there would be just all these little… There’d be the main story, but then there’d be all these other little stories in there and then you go and you see all these things. So they would be kind of like “Where’s Waldo,” but maybe a little less jumbled than that and there’d be a main story. And so yeah, those sorts of things. I kind of try to give people more for their money and I want to make something that’s going to reward multiple watchers.
DD: Nice. Kind of in relation to your philosophy with art, but also your philosophy in life. I want to hear more about your general approach because I feel like they’re very interconnected and I feel like it’s very clear how you live your life based on how you make your films and what they say and what they speak. How do you think you’ve been able to develop that and better transmit that in your films?
BR: I mean, a lot of it is trial and error. Sorry to Bother You, it was my first film, but it wasn’t my first thing. I’ve been making songs for 20-something years up to that and you learn that you try shit and you’re not going to be like, “I don’t want to try that. It might not work.” No, you try it and if it doesn’t work, you make a different thing later. I got plenty of songs out there where I’m like, “Damn, I should have said this other thing instead of that thing,” or whatever, but it’s just what it is and you move on.
So I think with my art, I’m wanting people to feel that exploration. I’m wanting them to feel like they’re exploring things and finding something else and thinking they know a thing and then it turns out to be this other thing. That’s why we have things in there where our characters are also finding out things are different as we’re finding it out and gaining understanding as we’re gaining understanding. And so I think that is what makes life exciting. I think that’s connected to, when you fall in love, all of a sudden the color blue looks different, like, “Oh, I want to drive past this street with so-and-so and see what they think about it.” It all becomes new. Same thing that happens when people start getting involved in a movement that has the possibility of changing the world. All of a sudden their analysis of what’s around them changes and things look and feel differently.
And so I’m trying to kind of simulate that and use cinematic techniques that have a visceral feeling to them that’s connected to the feeling that the character is feeling so that they feel like-
DD: They have action. Yeah.
BR: Yeah.
DD: The cast all said great things about you when I talked to them. They spoke about how they admired your vision and how you allowed them to really try new elements. I feel like you were very intentional with the casting, so I would love to hear a little bit about that.
BR: Oh, yeah. I mean, of course, LaKeith was going to be in there already. Keke, I just reached out to her on Instagram and said, “You want to read a script?” And she was like, “Yeah.” We met up. Poppy, I’d heard about her and I’d seen her on Hacks and Dead Ringers and she brought a different dimension that I wasn’t… Even though the lines are the same that she said that, but just a personality, a way of being that was very specific and funny, and just because she’s that person. And it brought all sorts of things. There’s all sorts of things. It was LaKeith’s idea to do an accent. I was like, “No.” And then he did it and I was like, “Okay, yeah, let’s do that.”
DD: “Let’s do that.”
BR: Yeah, yeah. And then for instance, I was just talking to… One hilarious thing that happens in the movie is Poppy’s character is saying, “Oh yeah, then they were shooting at us like pop, pop.” And she says, “Oh no, like [louder, quicker] pop, pop, pop.”
DD: Oh, yeah.
BR: And when she did it, I was like, “Let’s do it again. I don’t want to make your character too… It might be too clownish or something.” And then of course, then looking at it, I was like, “That was an amazing choice.” And so there’s always this back and forth. The same thing with musicians, you’re doing this, you’re like, “Oh, how about that?” You try it. And that’s just how you make the thing. And often they’ll say a thing and I’ll be like, “Oh, is that the line? Oh, that’s terrible writing.” Okay. Okay, how about this? Try this.
DD: It’s a conversation.
BR: Yeah. And you come up with something and that’s all part of it. It’s all choices. Just like for an actor, them not saying anything is them acting, the choice of being still, the choice of moving. It’s a choice and sometimes people will look at that actor and be like, “They weren’t doing anything there in that scene.” They are doing something. The fact-
DD: The fact that you don’t notice also means something.
BR: Yeah. And so same thing with directing, I will let actors do something and if I don’t like it, it doesn’t stay in. The stuff that’s happening is all the choice, the shape that I’m trying to put in there. So we experiment and work it out as we go. I mean, that also makes it more fun. To me, a lot of this movie is about fighting loneliness and I think that art is a way to fight loneliness. I think that movements that attempt to change the world are a way to fight loneliness because you end up realizing there’s all these other people that are here with you. And so in the sense that art is a way to fight loneliness, the way that I want to do stuff is work with people. I don’t want to be alone in my like, “No, this is the thing, blah, blah, blah.” We’re creating something together and it makes it more fun. It makes me more proud of the time that I spent on it.
I don’t know how proud I’d be if it was something where I’d spent two or three years, or actually since I started writing in 2019, just all by myself working on this away from family, this and that. And then I made this thing and I was like, “No, this is with… Do your mark, go there….” And I’m like, “Yes, it’s everything that I just said.” I wouldn’t feel proud of it. It doesn’t matter how good it was.
NEON will release I Love Boosters only in theaters on May 22.
- Interview: Boots Riley on Collecting an Eclectic Cast and How ‘I Love Boosters’ is Like Richard Scarry’s ‘Busy, Busy Town’ - May 7, 2026
- LaKeith Stanfield on ‘I Love Boosters,’ Collaborating with Boots Riley, and His New Musical Endeavor - May 5, 2026
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