The Director Boots Riley on “Sorry to Bother You”

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 8 January 2019

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.
0:09.7	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
0:21.6	policy, the men and women who are shaping the world we live in. Sorry to Bother You has been
0:28.4	described as the most original movie of last year, at least by some critics. And it may not be
0:33.4	Oscar bait. It's sort of science fiction, absurdist, and definitely very satirical. The movie is about a guy
0:40.6	who's down on his luck and takes a telemarketing job where he learns to use a white voice,
0:46.5	a perfect facsimile of how white people are apparently supposed to talk. And as his career takes
0:52.3	off, he's forced to pick aside in a labor dispute. As trenchant
0:56.4	as the movie is about race and identity, sorry to bother you turns out to be an extremely
1:01.1	sharp critique of capitalism. The movie's writer and director is Boots Riley. Riley spent more than
1:07.5	20 years as a musician working with the hip-hop group, The Coup.
1:11.3	He's 47 now, and Sorry to Bother You, is his first film project.
1:16.4	The New Yorker's Doreen-St. Felix asked Boots Riley what inspired it in the first place.
1:22.0	All I knew was that it was going to take place on a telemarketing floor.
1:26.5	It was going to take place in the world of telemarketing.
1:29.3	And there was going to be a struggle that he had to decide what side he was on.
1:33.5	I didn't know there was going to be anything fantastical in it.
1:36.6	I was thinking about story the whole time.
1:39.7	I didn't start thinking about the aesthetics of it until I had the story.
1:46.0	Is there any autobiographical element in the Cassius Green character?
1:51.0	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.
1:59.0	Were you making a very conscious choice
	...

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