Boots Riley: ​‘Cre­at­ing racist tropes about black folks is how those in pow­er lie’

Who would have thought a film about the pow­er of union­i­sa­tion would be the toast of Sun­dance? Cer­tain­ly not Boots Riley, who’s been try­ing to make his debut film, Sor­ry to Both­er You, since he first wrote the script in 2012. A sur­re­al­ist com­e­dy about race and cap­i­tal­ism, it’s equal parts fun and fury. We caught up with the musi­cian-cum-film­mak­er to find out how his jour­ney to the director’s chair began.

LWLies: Sor­ry to Both­er You is in part based on your own expe­ri­ence in tele­mar­ket­ing. What were you selling?

Riley: I did it a cou­ple of times: first in col­lege, when I was doing just news­pa­pers, and then after my sec­ond album. I quit doing music because all my heroes were lead­ing rev­o­lu­tions when they were 19 or 20 and I was wast­ing my life being an artist. I quit and me and some friends start­ed an organ­i­sa­tion called The Young Com­rades. I was good at sales so I could do tele­mar­ket­ing one day every cou­ple of weeks and pay my bills that way.

I did tele­fundrais­ing, which is osten­si­bly more eth­i­cal, rais­ing mon­ey for PBS [the Amer­i­can Pub­lic Broad­cast­ing Ser­vice], home­less shel­ters, what­ev­er. But for PBS I’d be call­ing up old ladies like, ​‘We want to know how you liked the Coca-Cola com­mer­cial in the mid­dle of The MacNeil/​Lehrer Report last night?’ And they were like, ​‘What?’ So I’d say, ​‘Yeah, we’re test­ing out what we’re going to have to do once we’re not get­ting enough dona­tions from our lis­ten­ers. And they’re going to make this deci­sion based on what mon­ey we get in this week.’

So you had to sneak­i­ly be like, ​‘Well, if you don’t donate to us…’

Yeah. It was even worse when I was rais­ing mon­ey for the home­less shel­ters. We were call­ing Orange Coun­ty which was a real­ly right-wing area. So I’d be like, ​‘Hey, just call­ing with the sur­vey about your win­dows and your car. Oh, have you not been a part of this rash of break-ins? Okay, cool, then our efforts are work­ing, because we realise the police aren’t going to stop all these break – ins in your neigh­bour­hood. To make sure that your house doesn’t get bro­ken into, we’ve decid­ed to move all the home­less peo­ple from your neigh­bour­hood to down­town Los Ange­les and get them into the shel­ter there.’ And then I’d always get the money.

What kind of impact does that have on you?

It kills your soul! That’s where the movie comes from.

After you wrote the screen­play you turned it into a con­cept album with your band The Coup. How did that work?

Well, I was hop­ing through doing that that I could get the record label to just fund the movie. But they weren’t feel­ing it. Then I hoped that the talk about the album would gen­er­ate inter­est for the movie from the film indus­try – that also didn’t hap­pen. But I had to tour it, because I need­ed mon­ey, so we toured it around, and then I ran into Dave Eggers, who pub­lished it in McSweeney’s Quarterly.

Did being pub­lished in McSweeney’s final­ly help get the film made?

It did – not in a direct way, but it made peo­ple respect it more. Before, you’re a musi­cian with a script, so peo­ple don’t take it as seri­ous­ly. But if you have Dave Eggers pub­licly say­ing, ​‘This is one of the best unpro­duced scripts I’ve ever read,’ then peo­ple are like, ​‘Oh, maybe I should click on the PDF’. Before that, I didn’t think I was going to get it made, but that got me reinvigorated.

In the film, Cas­sius doesn’t real­ly care about what his employ­ers are doing or the notion of union­is­ing until it affects him direct­ly. Do you think that’s true about a lot of people?

Yeah, it’s not that peo­ple don’t care, but it’s what is going to moti­vate them to do the right thing. When you realise that being part of a strug­gle that ben­e­fits the col­lec­tive also ben­e­fits you. It’s not like it’s some sort of philo­soph­i­cal thing that you could get by with­out. That’s the lie we’re told. Most peo­ple, their best bet is work­ing with every­one else.

Besides union­i­sa­tion, the film talks a lot about the idea of a ​‘white voice’ and the notion of ​‘racial pass­ing’. How did that become such a big part of the story?

It’s just a reg­u­lar fact of life. As I start­ed writ­ing it, it was just going to be some­thing men­tioned. I didn’t know it was going to be a big part of it until I got to the end. The idea of how peo­ple nego­ti­ate, the idea of race and how that affects their lives – when you’re doing that, espe­cial­ly like when I’m call­ing peo­ple in Orange Coun­ty, actu­al­ly using their racism to get them to pay mon­ey for a home­less shel­ter – there’s so many things going on there. You can’t talk about one of these issues – race and class – with­out talk­ing about the oth­er. Cre­at­ing racist tropes about black folks is how those in pow­er lie to every­one. Here’s an exam­ple: tropes about peo­ple of colour are that they have a cul­ture that’s insuf­fi­cient for sur­viv­ing in this sys­tem: they’re lazy, their fam­i­ly struc­tures are bro­ken, they’re sav­age, hos­tile, they don’t have a cul­ture that’s bent towards education.

That’s to put for­ward this idea that pover­ty is the fault of the impov­er­ished, in order to hide the fact that cap­i­tal­ism must have pover­ty in order to work. Pover­ty is built into cap­i­tal­ism. But in the US, the major­i­ty of the work­ing class is white. So then you point a fin­ger at the oth­er – in this case, peo­ple of colour – and use them as the exam­ple of what not to be. So the per­for­mance of white­ness is often a reac­tion to those tropes. It’s inex­tri­ca­bly linked.

Sor­ry to Both­er You is released 7 Decem­ber. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.