Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro at the One Night Only premiere on Monday.
Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for Universal Pictures
Entertainment
‘I Love Boosters’ Director Boots Riley — Making Of Interview
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.
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Ever since the official trailer dropped for the Callum Turner–Monica Barbaro rom-com One Night Only, quickly racking up millions of views on its way to its nearly 40 million total, internet commentators have had a lot of questions about the film’s central premise in which premarital sex is illegal apart from one 12-hour period a year.
How is this law enforced? Are people breaking the law? How did this legislation pass? What counts as “sex” under this new mandate? Are marriage (and divorce) rates skyrocketing? What about affairs?
Rest assured: Some of those questions are answered in the movie, and explanations are starting to trickle out online for those unconcerned about spoilers. Beyond that, One Night Only writer, Travis Braun, who saw his screenplay top the 2024 Black List, has answers, but they’re not all in the Will Gluck-directed Universal movie now in theaters.
“I set out to write a movie about the circus that is modern dating, and I thought how fun if we could set that all in one night, and I have answers to those questions, and some of them are in the movie,” Braun told The Hollywood Reporter at the One Night Only premiere earlier this week in New York.
Braun said he definitely thought about the specific rules of the film’s alternate reality, framed as three years on from the no-sex act being passed, but didn’t want to get too deep into the politics of the world of the movie.
“There’s a big mythology that I’ve built out and then as you develop a movie you start to pare down and you go: What does an audience really care about, and what are they showing up to see? For me the answer is always a love story, romance,” he told THR. “I hope they can come in and we’ll show them how this world functions, and then they can just enjoy the movie and have fun. The whole focus of this was love story and romance first, and the world-building obviously has to make sense and has to be there, but ultimately we weren’t interested in getting into the politics of it. We wanted to tell a story about these two incredible people trying to find love on this crazy night.”
Producer Jacqueline Monetta, who brought Braun’s script to Gluck, said they didn’t want moviegoers to have all of the answers.
“I had a million questions. I was like, ‘What does this mean? What does this world look like? How do people communicate? What’s different?’ And that’s I think what’s so smart about it,” she said of One Night Only‘s “big idea, high-concept” premise. “We don’t answer every question in the movie, purposefully, because we want those questions to be had on the car ride home. We want people to keep talking about it and really think about what would this mean for our world, what does it mean for our world now. But I think Will and I were really specific on what questions we wanted to answer.”
In a recent Reddit AMA, Gluck also detailed how he and his team approached the world building of the movie while not wanting it to be all about the mandate and offered prospective moviegoers hints for where to find the answers to their questions.
“We spent a lot of time talking about the rules of the world, and if you’ve seen the movie, or when you see the movie, you’ll see that the rules of the world and the world building are all in the background,” he said. “It’s on TVs, signage, in thrown-away lines, because we didn’t want to give the world short shrift, but we didn’t want the movie to be about that. It’s another way I want people to see this. If they see it more than once, they’ll pick up so many more rules of the world in the background. A lot of the questions that I’ve been getting after people have seen the movie are actually answered in the movie, which is by design because I want people maybe not to know them. So, yes, it was a tricky tightrope to have them there, but not for the movie to be about it.”
Turner meanwhile echoes Braun’s advice for curious prospective moviegoers: “Go see the film!”
“You’ll realize pretty quickly what the realm is that you’re working within and it’s a comedy,” Turner says of what inquisitive filmgoers will find. “There are no great political undertones, I don’t think. This is just a place where you can escape for an hour and a half, two hours and enjoy and laugh your head off.”
One Night Only is now in theaters.
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Although the live-action remake of Moana hasn’t quite been able to catch a wave at the box office, Dwayne Johnson is proud of what they made.
The Golden Globe nominee said the Disney movie’s negative reviews, which currently sit at 32% on Rotten Tomatoes, are “just the way it goes” in the entertainment industry, and what “really mattered” was that “the culture really stood up” in the Polynesian-inspired tale.
“Our first two reviews came out. I’ll never forget it… They were amazing. I was like, wow,” he told People, noting the reviews then “went another way, as sometimes happens.”
“That’s just the way it goes because we’re in this business,” added Johnson.
A decade after he voiced the demigod Maui in Disney’s animated film Moana, Johnson reprised the role in the Thomas Kail-helmed live-action adaptation.
“The challenge was, okay, let’s remember, though, what’s going to be beyond this opening weekend. Let’s remember what’s happening right now and the noise that’s happening right now,” said Johnson. “If you love it, great. If you don’t, no problem.”
Following Moana‘s July 10 premiere, the movie has gone on to make $266M at the global box office. Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro addressed the low turnout in a letter to shareholders.
“Even when our franchise films don’t meet our box office expectations, as with The Mandalorian and Grogu and the live-action Moana, our investments in these core properties fuel other parts of our company,” said D’Amaro, noting that Moana is “expected to be a strong title on Disney+, building on the success of the original film, which is one of the most streamed movies of all time.”
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Hunter Biden doesn’t have plans of running for office himself, but he still has some strong opinions when it comes to the presidency. In fact, President Joe Biden’s son just called President Donald Trump “the singular existential threat” to planet Earth.
During his wide-ranging interview with BBC Newsnight’s Paddy O’Connell on Friday, the 56-year-old artist opened up about receiving a pardon from his father during his last weeks in office back in December 2024 — and how Trump’s behavior may have impacted the decision.
“I am the most privileged person, as it relates to that, that there could possibly be. I was one of one, and I am eternally grateful for it,” Hunter shared. “I am eternally grateful for it because I think that Donald Trump has proven to be exactly who my dad thought he was going to be, as it relates to the revenge and retribution that he would seek on his political enemies.”
“Was it good for our Constitution? Was it good for the American people? Was it good for my dad’s legacy? No, on all counts,” he further admitted.
President Biden pardoned his son just weeks ahead of his sentencing on tax evasion and federal gun charges. At the time, Trump called the act “an abuse and miscarriage of justice.” A year and half later, Hunter remains equally unimpressed by his father’s successor (who was also, notably, his predecessor).
“I’m not going to stop talking about Donald Trump,” he concluded. “Donald Trump is the singular existential threat to this globe. Donald Trump is, literally, a greater threat than we have faced in any of our lifetimes.”
Elsewhere in his interview, Hunter fought tears while sharing a painful update on his father’s prostate cancer metastasizing to his bones: “My dad is, to this day, remains the center of our family. Not just because of who he is as the the public person, but completely because of who he is to each one of us. It’s really, really hard and it’s really sad to watch.”
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