Boots Riley on his Sundance Feature 'Sorry To Bother You'

Tuesday, January 23, 2018

SCREEN DAILY -- When did you get the idea? You said you went to film school at San Francisco State University, and followed your grandmother’s passion into repertory theatre, before establishing yourself as a rapper. How did you switch back into film?

“In about 2011 I realized I wasn’t feeling motivated to make an album. Sometimes I need something else to motivate me. I decided to write this script,” Riley says. “The first idea was to write something I could make with $50,000, on location with whatever cameras I could get with friends. I thought I could talk the record label to give me the promotion budget to do this, because then it could promote an album of the same name.

“As I wrote I realized that’s not how I write, because [this] would have become a workplace comedy.”

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