Boots Riley’s Creative Process: “You Have to Kind of Be Irresponsible”

In the middle of my conversation with Boots Riley about his new film, the Keke Palmer-led I Love Boosters, we delved into Boots’ time with The Coup, the Oakland-based hip-hop collective that were radical staples on BET’s Rap City video show, where I personally first heard their music. (The film’s title comes from a song from The Coup’s 2006 album, Pick a Bigger Weapon.) I remembered their videos standing out, and always assumed it was the inventiveness of their visuals that made them no-brainers for the weekday rap show (which eventually led to Boots becoming a director), but according to Boots Riley, that wasn’t the case.

“We got signed to Wild Pitch/EMI,” Boots begins. “This was before SoundScan. They didn't know where stores were. Mom-and-Pop stores went to what they called a one-stop shop and bought their stuff. So there wasn't the data on where the stores were, who was all that kind of stuff.” Boots explains that in 1993, when The Coup went on a cross-country tour in a minivan, they saved the $ 5-a-day per diem they received, and when they arrived in DC, they had one place they were checking out. “Rap City was in DC back then. We knocked on the door and told [Rap City host] Joe Claire, ‘we need to take you to lunch.’ We took him to lunch, wined him and dined him without the wine, and then said, ‘Now we want to show you our video.’ And then we took him back and popped in the big fat tape, and then he was like, ‘Cool. I'm putting you on Memorial Day weekend.’ And that's how that happened. We were BET favorites for a while.”

Why share that story in the space where you’d normally be reacquainted with Boots’s work as a director, captivating critics with the twisted genius of 2018’s Sorry to Bother You before doing it again with the Prime Video series I’m a Virgo? Because it speaks more to Boots’s M.O. as a creator and his practicality as an individual. Boots Riley understands that he’s dope, and knows that he can get the job done; it’s really about recognizing how one best operates.

During our conversation about I Love Boosters, Boots explains the creative process behind one of 2026’s most captivating films.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I recently saw you mention that one of the things that bothered you about the press for I’m a Virgo is that you didn't get to see the people, hit the screenings, hit the panels and whatnot. This time around, you've been busy.
I've been going since pretty much after South By. I've probably seen the movie with crowds maybe 35 times since then, and sometimes we were doing multiple cities per day. When we were in Ohio, there was one day I was in Columbus, Bowling Green, Cleveland, and Athens.

I can't complain. It's what I asked for because I needed to be out there. And I enjoy watching it with people. This has been something much more than Sorry to Bother You. People are laughing through the whole thing. Sometimes I'm like, "Damn, you're laughing so much you're not hearing the other line that happens afterwards. So you're going to have to see it again."

I think that kind of speaks to the film, though. There's so much in there. I saw you've described it as a live-action cartoon, and hearing you describe the film like that, I mean, I don't know if, is that a Looney Tunes?
Yeah, Looney Tunes is definitely an influence. Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Jerry Lewis. To that extent, I'm a Virgo had a little like Scooby-Doo.

Let's take it back. The movie's title has a reference to your work in The Coup, but I also saw you talking about how you have a notebook of just ideas-
I do have a cupboard full of notebooks, just like a rapper does, maybe. I used to be early on, "if it's a good lyric, I'm going to remember it." And I've had so many times of being like, "You know what? I just thought of the best lyric that has ever been made. I'm definitely going to remember this." Then I sit down and write it later, and I'm like, "What was that? " So I carry a notebook and write all these things, but sometimes it's not a literal notebook, but it's just a bunch of ideas.

We're in a world where you’ve also said that LaKeith knew about his character before he knew-
Sometimes I'll have in my notebooks, I might have a lyric, I might have a concept for a song, a concept for an album. Sometimes, the thing that I think is the concept for an album is really just a lyric in a song.

In general, my passion guides me in one way. So a lot of my ideas are going toward a certain direction. So I might have an idea for a character I want to be around in the story and things like that. And I'll wait to see, “does it help out our main character to have this, to run into this person?” You know what I'm saying? Lakeith's character could have been something I put in I'm a Virgo, but it was better in here because it helped us to understand the main character [in I Love Boosters] and her motivations and where she got to a little bit better.

But yeah, I told him about the character, and he was like down, but he did not read it. [laughs] I know he didn't read the script, because I always like, "Hey, did you read it? " And he’d be like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." And I'm like, "OK." I could tell by his comments that he didn't read it.

He wasn't asking the follow-up questions.
And then we were in prep, and I get a text [from LaKeith] that said, "Man, you crazy." And I was like, "Oh, you just read the script, right?" [laughs]

When I write a character, I think about the world around them, and then I think about how that world immediately around them connects to the larger world. So I'm doing the same thing, and my idea of what that larger world is doesn't change story to story because that larger world is the world we live in.

So when do you sit down, like, “I'm writing the film I Love Boosters”? When does that actually start for you?
So what I do, I wake up 5:30 in the morning, I do some exercise, drink my coffee from 6:00 to 10:00 AM. I have a laptop that I've taken the WiFi out of. I leave any other devices somewhere else in the house, and I sit in a room, and I'm writing. And here's the thing, if I have it at the end of those four hours, if I haven't gotten anything, boom, I'm done. I'm out. If I have gotten something, boom, I'm done. I'm out. Only if right when the four hours hits, I really got a flurry going on, then I'll stay a little longer until that flurry goes. However, it takes the pressure off of me. I'm sitting here no matter what. It's easier for your brain to handle emails and, "oh, I got to fix this in the house," or something like that. It's easier for that than the creative thing. And sometimes you can put all this pressure on yourself to where you're not getting anything. I might've gotten 10 lines, I might've gotten half a page, a full page, 10 pages, whatever, but that four hours is going to come and go.

And so I get a lot done that way. Actually, that's not how I wrote the first movie because I was stealing time with the first movie. I was on tour. I was two hours here, this and that there, but I actually heard Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote Empire Strikes Back, talking about that being part of it. And it seems like when you talk about writer's process, the bedrock of getting something done is setting aside that time, because life will just get in the way of it. They want us to just be producing the things that they want to produce—by they, whatever. I know I'm being vague, but it's whoever that is. And I'm not saying it's a conspiracy or someone, but it's just the way the system works, is everything else comes into your life first. So you have to kind of be irresponsible.

I read that you use a Wisephone. I have a tech homie who, we've been talking about having a device for the internet or whatever and then a specific device for work-
Yeah, because I got to promote it. I got these two devices right now. [Holds up two devices.] This is the one that doesn't get internet, and this is the one that does. So it's like I do have a phone with internet now, but I can throw this away after May 22nd.

I didn't think this would happen during this conversation, but I think that may be what I need to incorporate into my own structure at this point. The four hours in the morning makes a lot of sense, but being irresponsible, cutting out that noise is probably what I need more of.
Well, I don't know your life, but yeah, that's definitely a thing that has happened for me, and it could be detrimental. In my case, I was lucky I've made it happen, but while I was doing Sorry to Bother You, I was squatting a house because I was dedicating my time to making the film happen. And on the one hand, like I say, I call it irresponsible as it is, you are leaving certain things behind. It's a big swing, and the thing about big swings is you can miss, but hey, you could also miss by doing exactly what you're supposed to be doing. It's funny because there's a thing I think we need in film that music has, and I think it's encapsulated in a joke. What do you call a bass player without a girlfriend?

I don't know. What do you call a bass player with a girlfriend?
Homeless.

[Laughs]
And it is funny because it's a truism that people doing music will be so impassioned about making their music, getting it out there that we accept, or at least more accept that that is something that musicians do or rappers or whatever they're driven in that way. But often with film and especially writing, people have gone to school, and school has taught them something else. Not only has school taught them something else, but they had to tell their parents that, "Hey, I'm focusing on this in school that you're paying for. " Even if it's a state school, it costs some money. I'm focusing on this, and I promise you I'm going to get a job, I promise you it's going to make money. And so you're already in that mindset separately with what you might get taught in school, which is just how to have a career, which is important, but some people also want to create the thing that they want to create.

And so I think we need a little bit more passion. And I think that also goes into how things are created. There's so many people that are looking for formulas in how to do it, that they don't feel it anymore, that they're like, "I think I did this right. I think I did that." And they don't have a feeling for what they like and what it feels right. There's this video I saw recently by a drummer on Instagram where somebody is, they're answering somebody's question that's saying like, "You drummers, what do you do? You have the left hand, and you have the right hand, and you're doing this. Are you thinking about [what] you're doing?" And the person does a stitch where he's drumming, he's like, "no brain, no brain, no brain." He's going off of feeling, just feeling the rhythm and feeling. That's what I try to do with my stuff. I try to bring a viscerality that I have from music. “This feels like where the chorus needs to come in. It feels like we need a 808 boom right here.” And it's a sense of rhythm that I'm OK with it being my sense of rhythm, not someone else's sense of rhythm. It's a sense of excitement and even a danger that you're trying to get across sometimes in your music, like this being on an edge and that is just all from trusting my feeling about it, trusting my...

It better be me. Dare I say the people who climb on board, though, they're ready to ride with you. Hearing Keke talk about seeing Sorry to Bother You and then wanting to see what she could do in one of your films…did Corvette morph when you started working with Keke?
Well, any character I write, that's the purpose. When I'm writing the character, I put myself in as all the characters. “This is what I would say in this moment,” blah, blah. That's why even [thoe] who might be called the villain often [have] a good argument. They're often saying shit I might say, but then I'm expecting the actor to come along and I'm going to tweak things so that it fits them. And some of that comes from discussions of them, me knowing what they do and what they don't do. I've definitely seen some cases where I know somebody is a good actor, but I see them in a movie where the director had this one vision of what the performance was supposed to be and tried to make them adhere to that instead of making the character different for that person. Because for me, I want the actor to have stuff that they draw from, so that they can be experiencing the emotion as opposed to trying to look like what they think that emotion looks like. So yeah, definitely the characters morph with the actors

Indeed. In speaking with Kara Young and seeing what she can do, how do you approach that, where what she's doing is it's more a representation of what is being said or being done in the space?
The layers of “there's a character,” that's acting; that comes down to the actor's skill. Kara, people may know, was one of the leads in my TV show, I'm a Virgo, and she has since won two Tony Awards and all of that. She's a friend, and she was visiting the set. There was somebody that I wanted to play this one character who absolutely faked on me, and I don't think it was a good reason. Anyway, my point is, that was happening. I'm getting a phone call, and Kara just happened to be visiting a set, just as a friend, and I looked over and said, "You want to play a role?" She was like, "Let me change my flight."

Oh, wow.
And it was amazing. Matter of fact, a lot of the people on set hadn't been familiar with her. And as she was doing her parts, people were like, "Who is that? Where'd you get her?" And, matter of fact, one of those people was Don Cheadle. And the idea to do Proof together came right then, while we were filming that second time we see her.

It's interesting to see. I don't want to say that's because of your background in music, but I do think that you being an artist is a big part of that.
Oh, definitely. And I think that's how it should be. People can use their knowledge and their processes that they use from whatever their life is in their filmmaking, as opposed to learning this new thing. You've made stuff before, you've done stuff before, you've organized a birthday party before, take all those things, and you put that in there.