Finding a new voice
Surrealism, satire, and telemarketing: is Sorry To Bother You is most exciting debut film of the year?
“I’VE ALWAYS BEEN figuring out how to break rules,” says rapper/ producer-turned-director Boots Riley. “In order to make people engage in a different way.” Sorry To Bother You, his first film, breaks plenty of them.
It is simultaneously one of the most politically urgent, hilariously whimsical and ingeniously surrealist movies of the decade. It’s the arrival of a stunning new filmmaking voice, from a man making his debut at 47 years old.
To give just the starting point, Sorry To Bother You is the story of Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield), a black telemarketer. He’s rubbish at it, until a colleague tells him to try using a “white voice” (provided by David Cross). With his Caucasian phone manner, Cassius becomes a master salesman and gets promoted to a higher team. At this point we veer down story paths you could not possibly anticipate, involving WMDS, slavery and Armie Hammer as an insane billionaire.
As bizarre as his film gets, it’s not oddness for oddness’ sake. “It all has a logic to it,” Riley maintains. With a style that has the clean chill of Kubrick, the hand-made messiness of Michel Gondry and the dream logic of Charlie Kaufman, he’s making serious points about corporate corruption and the obstacles to success for people of colour, but in a mad, highly entertaining way. “All the strange things that happen are in there because they
helped me do what I needed to do.”
The film has existed in script form since 2012, but Riley’s name “was not enough to get it made. You’re just a musician with a script.” He went about putting it in front of everybody he could. He emailed Cross, despite barely knowing him. He harangued Richard Ayoade via Twitter to suggest he direct (Ayaode insisted only Riley could make it). He showed it to Oliver Stone during an entirely unrelated meeting. Eventually, it was taking it to the Sundance Film Festival’s Directors’ Lab, where filmmakers shoot key scenes of their project, that finally got investors to take him seriously.
Riley’s determination to never dim his own weird voice has paid off, with both great reviews and $17.5 million in the US on a $3.2 million budget. His only issue now is following it. “Messing with the rules makes my next film harder,” he laughs, “because now people expect me not to stick to them.” There are always more rules to break.
Sorry To Bother you is in cinemas from 7 december