Director Boots Riley hasn’t played the classic video game Katamari Damacy, but he has thrown a giant rolling ball’s worth of color, formal inventiveness, and calls for a General Strike into his new film “I Love Boosters.”
It is only partially true to say that Riley’s follow-up to “Sorry to Bother You” and “I’m a Virgo” is a story about a young woman named Corvette (Keke Palmer) who boosts clothes from department stores to sell back into her Oakland community while having big designer dreams of her own. Riley himself acknowledges that the amount of stuff that happens in the film he made for $20 million could well fit into a $70 million movie.
The true heist of “I Love Boosters” is that it ends up being about everything from teleportation that adheres to dialectical materialism, gentrification in the Bay Area, the demonic power of going down on your partner, how to overcome the exploitation of Globalism, and a chase sequence between Keke Palmer and stop-motion animated villains. So the challenge for Riley isn’t what to fit in, but how to fit it all in.
“A lot of times, especially in indie film, if you need to cut 30 percent of the budget, you cut 30 percent of the script, right? That’s the easy, top-down way to do things,” Riley told IndieWire on a recent episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast. “Except for the writer, it doesn’t take a lot of ingenuity to do that. There’s a lot more certainty. And what’s often said, when that’s happening, people are like, ‘It’s still got the essence of it.’ And I’m like, ‘That’s the problem. The essence of a good idea is all we got.’”
In order to build a properly good idea with less money than you have, Riley says that you have to get very, very intentional about how you shoot: Only building one wall, only shooting one way, not giving yourself access to the smooth (but expensive) transitions that CGI can provide. It’s not for everyone, and certainly not for the faint of heart, but Riley has now proved, with both his features, that he’s willing to embrace something that doesn’t look as slickly made in order to tell the stories he wants to tell. In fact, slickness might be the enemy of Riley’s fiercely humanistic approach to fiction.
“Some of those things make the movie seem janky. It makes you see the seams,” Riley said.
But the seams can be part of the film’s style. For the boosting montage, wherein the whole crew of Palmer, Taylour Paige, Naomi Ackie, and Poppy Liu go clear out stores owned by a blowhard designer played by Demi Moore, Riley was determined not to lose the chaos and the comedy and the ambition of it, using just one wall in the department store sets and having the group change in the van, seen from just one angle.
“We’re gonna do this Peter Greenaway style. It always helps me to mention someone else who’s done it, so, I was told Peter Greenaway’s ‘The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, Her Lover’ was just one wall set. So that’s what we’re doing,” Riley said. “Because of [those limitations], what ends up happening was the best version of that [sequence] that could be because it made us be way more graphic with everything. We’re being way more compositionally intentional.”
Riley’s also not hunting up a bunch of options, but trusting his cast. “I’ve got amazing actors. When I see the thing I like, that’s it. I’m not gonna do extra safeties. I’m not gonna try it from this way or try it from that way. What we got is what we got. I’ve learned that with music, too, to do that. Because you could keep trying all sorts of stuff,” Riley said.
The willingness to find a thing that works and make it work saves money, too. For one shot in a chase sequence, Corvette finds a way to break through from one place into another, and that single shot could’ve cost $30,000 if done with a traditional CG approach. Riley took a much more lo-fi approach, using string, one shot of Palmer jumping, and some compositing.
“Sometimes you lose some — whatever — professional sort of sheen on things. But in the aggregate, you feel this sort of roughness to everything, and it adds to [the visual style]. It comes from that we’re saving time and we’re saving money. And you’re causing other inventiveness to happen because of that,” Riley said.
The inventiveness is important to Riley, not just on “I Love Boosters” but on every project. “Making a movie takes a lot of your life, so I’m always weighing it out,” Riley said. “I hate the feeling when you’re like, ‘I’m doing this thing that I don’t like because at some point in the future, I’ll be able to do something I actually do like.’ A lot of the time in filmmaking, people [think a person has] failed because they’re trying to do the thing they wanted and they weren’t able to get it off the ground. But you can also fail by spending your life doing episodes of a show that you just mildly tolerate, and not doing your life. You can fail by doing the movie that is not the one you want to do. So I look at all those things.”
A Neon release, “I Love Boosters” is now in theaters.
To hear the entire conversation with Boots Riley and make sure you don’t miss a single episode of Filmmaker Toolkit, subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
