BR

Actually, I didn’t go into it like that. I have a big critique of a lot of science fiction films — I think that’s where leftist writers go to hide.

Sometimes you can have science fiction where you create a whole other world, like Star Wars. The genesis was Apocalypse Now. It was supposed to be George Lucas’s movie at first. George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, they came up from LA to the Bay Area because it was the hotbed of radicalism. They wanted to make a radical film collective. And they didn’t. But after Lucas did American Graffiti, he was like, “Cool, I have a hit. Now I’m doing my Apocalypse Now,” which was his movie based on Heart of Darkness.

The protagonists were [supposed to be] the Vietcong — we were following them, going into enemy territory, into the US’s conquered territory, and finding their Kurtz, which was someone who had come from the Vietcong, joined up with the US, risen in the ranks because of everything he knew and how murderous he was against his own people, and they were going to go get him.

He couldn’t get it funded. He was like, “What? I just made all this money? What’s going on?” They were like, “It’s too radical. You’re not going to get this funded. Leave it alone.” He was like, “Okay, I’ll take the same story and I’ll put it in space.” The Rebels were the Vietcong, the Empire was the US, and Darth Vader was their Kurtz.

But here’s my point. It’s the biggest piece of culture maybe in the last century. Does it matter even that it had some radical idea? That story’s so far removed from anything, we have to think that it made no difference. Even if 1 percent of the people had seen something in that and been inspired, it would be a whole country worth of people. But because science fiction is so allegorical it pushes to where that’s all you have —allegory that can be interpreted in all sorts of ways. I didn’t want to make worlds that were so far out there.

I needed the world [of Sorry to Bother You]. When I started writing it, there was no fantastical element in it. I only did that because it was necessary to the characters’ development. It was necessary to contextualize things without having somebody say it in the dialog.

How do I get these larger philosophical ideas and context in there without having one of the people say, “Well, you know, this is how it goes.” My way of doing it was to bend reality. So I started doing that. The first time I actually stated doing that was with the Danny Glover speech.

Everything in that movie, for all the weirdness that everybody says is in there, every single weird crazy thing is something that we ended up needing, that we couldn’t do without.