You would never know that Sorry To Bother You was made on a shoe-string budget.
Writer and director Boots Riley managed to stretch his minimal funds to an extraordinary extent, creating a vidid, expansive, utterly surreal yet still totally relatable dystopia that you can’t help but get caught up in.
As is with any film set, Riley had a lot of help in achieving this vision. Even “Sorry To Bother You’s” leading duo of Tessa Thompson and Lakeith Stanfield chipped in with integral behind the scenes contributions during its development and production.
In fact, during my recent interview with Stanfield, the actor revealed that Thompson created her entire wardrobe for her “Sorry To Bother You” character.
“We all wanted to bring to life an idea that required a lot of money to do realistically that we just didn’t have. So we had to be resourceful. And we had to be imaginative and creative and come up with our own approach to things.”
“Tessa pretty much created her own wardrobe. I went to her Air BnB one time, and she just had scissors and glue and tape and jewels and she was creating this character right in front of my eyes.”
“A lot of things we had to do that way so that we could create this new dimension, which is the world of WorryFree. A world where anything can happen.”
Stanfield was just as productive, too.
“I realized this was a place that hadn’t been explored before. So that provided the opportunity for us to really dive into these characters in a really unique way.”
“So one time I was walking down the street in Oakland and I saw that this guy had a really interesting posture, he had his arms slumped down a little bit, and his back was slightly bent over. He seemed a little bit too young for that to be the case.”
“I thought, ‘Well, maybe there’s a little bit of Cassius in there.’ So I just adopted his position for Cassius. So Cassius has a little bit of a hump and a lean to him.”
“Until he becomes a power caller, when he straightens his act up, and he straightens up. So it was little things like that, I was taking in the environment, and because we had such a cool environment I was able to bring stuff like that to the forefront and play with it.”
You can see what else Thompson and Stanfield brought to Riley’s incredibly imaginative and captivating “Sorry To Bother You” when it is released on Friday.
