Boots Riley

“Black Girl. My mother took me to see this maybe when I was ten. I know I thought it was boring a little bit at the time. You know, you're ten and there's no action happening right away. But by the middle of the film, even as a ten-year-old, I was totally engrossed.”

“True Stories. As I mentioned, I come out of music, and a lot of what I do is just an expansion of what my creative process in music was. This was something that early on, for me, showed me that there weren't boundaries that I had to be stuck to.”

“Election. This has influenced me maybe more than I've ever talked about. The way the music is used to cut on shocking or explosive things. The... You know. The twists and turns. The characters that are slightly larger than life, mixed with people that he cast in here that were non-actors.”

“I'ma get this, The Hero. I don't know much about this movie. People keep dropping the name, saying I should check it out. And I like the cover. Nothing wrong with liking the cover. If you're a filmmaker, make your cover and your font really good.”

“Come on now, we got to do The Princess Bride. Let me say this. It's got two of the most stand-up actors you could have in a film: Wallace Shawn and Mandy Patinkin. You gotta check out the shit that they say, in Wally Shawn's case, the stuff that he writes. I don't want to put labels on them, but they're comrades of mine, whether I've only met them a couple times or not. And they're in this movie, which is one of the greatest movies on Earth.”

“Almodóvar. I love all of his movies. I love All About My Mother. There's a purposeful artificiality to things that feels really true. It feels the way you wish you express yourself.”

“Do you have Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown? Yeah, we do. You can see by the cover what I'm talking about. This pops out at you. It pops out of your life, it... Says something, it magnifies things. Hopefully, your life is as fun, but not as terrible, as the things that happen in Almodóvar movies.”

“Mishima. So this is a movie about a super right-wing artist told in a few ways. One in which this artist decided to take over a military base. The other is happening in his childhood. The other part that's really interesting takes these sequences from his writing and re-enacts them and does them in these fantastical stage play-like things. And Paul Schrader is a persnickety, grumpy dude sometimes. And I've been on... You can find stuff with me and him bickering on panels. And I love this movie. It's one of my favorite movies ever.”

“Ousmane Sembène. And I haven’t seen any of these films, but what I have seen, it’s…”

“Melvin Van Peebles. I also do music, and he's somebody that started coming to Coup shows. Obviously, I also already was a fan. Anyway, so he came and one day he sent me a CD. He was like, "These are some songs of mine, could you remix them?" And I listened to it. It was perfect. It sounded old school, sounded like something he would have done in the '70s. And I was like, "Why would I want to remix...? Nobody should touch this." Hung up the phone with him. About eight or nine months later, he calls me up and says, "Can you send me back that CD-ROM?" I was like, "What?" He's like, "Yeah, I accidentally sent you the master and there's no other copies." He was like, "Man, you got to find that!" I hope that he found another copy of it because I didn't find it and I didn't talk to him since then, and he was a good guy.”

“The Qatsi Trilogy. Let me tell you a little secret. Pitch a movie to a studio, play a Koyaanisqatsi score behind you while you're pitching them your movie. Sold. Little trick I'm giving to you. I'm doing it so I don't do it again.”

“I need to watch more Fellini. I don't know a lot about Fellini. I don't know a lot about movies. I just kind of bumble along and find stuff that I like, and I try not to make rules about it. And I just watch what I like, and steal what I like, too. But somebody said that my stuff is Fellini-esque, and so now I gotta watch this stuff to see what I'm doing.”