Production: I Love Boosters

Writer-director Boots Riley’s second film is even more vibrant and visually absurd than his first – but the ideas are just as important as the execution. We chat with DOP Natasha Braier, ASC, ADF, who helped bring crime-comedy I Love Boosters to life

Words Katie Kasperson

Whether through his music or movies, Boots Riley doesn’t shy away from strong opinions. His latest project, I Love Boosters, shares his usual anti-capitalist agenda, following a group of ‘fashion-forward philanthropists’ – otherwise known as shoplifters – called the Velvet Gang, who steal clothes from designers and then sell them at a steep discount.

Like Riley’s directorial debut Sorry to Bother You, I Love Boosters is equally absurd, featuring something called a ‘skin suit’, a teleportation device, LaKeith Stanfield as a daemon and a minutes-long car chase that blends stop-motion animation with live action. All of this was captured in camera by DOP Natasha Braier, ASC, ADF, who jumped at the chance to work with Riley after being unavailable for Sorry to Bother You.

“I’m always attracted to directors who are bold, brave and have a strong visual identity,” begins Braier. “I’m already kind of edgy and experimental, but I like people who push me even further out of my comfort zone. It’s also important that the content of what we’re telling aligns with my values, so finding somebody like Boots I was jumping up and down with happiness when I read the script.”

Keeping it real

Braier has shot her fair share of music videos, and she’s no stranger to visual maximalism. “Music videos allow you to experiment with new techniques without being tied to a story,” she says, seeing them ‘more like poetry’ than films, which might be beholden to a plot. With I Love Boosters, “even though it’s a visual feast, everything is rooted and grounded in the emotions, characters and ideas in each scene. If you don’t engage emotionally, then you don’t engage with the ideas.”

The film takes a stab at late-stage capitalism and overconsumption, as well as surveillance, propaganda and labour strikes. The Velvet Gang – Corvette, Mariah and Sade – team up with Metro Designers factory worker Jianhu and retail employee Violeta to take down the unethical fashion empire. “For me, the big challenge was to materialise this through cinematography that is visually stunning but rooted in emotion,” shares Braier.

The film is simply bursting with colour, from hair and makeup to the costumes and production design. Sometimes they coordinate and sometimes they contrast, but vibrant hues are always at the fore.

Braier says ‘everything had to be heightened’ to reflect Corvette’s internal state, while maintaining a sense of reality. “In some scenes, the set or costume design defies reality. My job was to keep it all grounded. I didn’t want to lose the audience; it still has to be real for them.”

Braier used LED lighting for its flexibility, as they often shot multiple scenes in one day and hardly had time to prepare. “I had to adapt,” she admits, which is often the case with indie films. “I had to work with what was in front of the camera.”

As they couldn’t afford to shoot on film (instead opting for an ARRI ALEXA 35), Riley and Braier worked to find a look that would mimic analogue stock as closely as possible. “I usually go to anamorphic lenses as the first layer of treatment because they’re softer and have the fall-off,” she says. “But a lot of what we wanted is hard to find on anamorphic lenses, like very close focus. This is tricky, especially on old glass.”

Braier tapped Panavision’s resident lens guru, senior vice president of optical engineering Dan Sasaki, who created a special set of anamorphic lenses specifically for I Love Boosters. “I started to build, along with Dan, all the qualities I wanted to have. I wanted softness in the skin, the close focus. I wanted to be able to shoot wide open because we had exterior night shoots. He took different pieces from different lenses – old lenses from the forties and fifties that were on the shelves, accumulating dust. We created an amazing set.”

Cheap tricks

The stop-motion scene, which lasts for several minutes, was shot in a day and a half. “For ten pages, that was nothing,” insists Braier. “It’s a big scene in a big space, with a lot of people. It was quite challenging for me because I normally like to light for the space so that I don’t have to relight, which allows the director to have more time with the actors.”

In this particular scene, however, it starts out dark and indistinguishable and gets brighter about 30 seconds later. “I had to figure out how to play on the edge of seeing and not seeing,” she reflects. Braier filmed the scene – where several characters are revealed to be wearing skin suits over their skeletons – chronologically, as this helped her block each camera movement. “We were shooting towards our girls, who were delivering their lines,” says Braier. “Then, we would shoot the reverse, towards the skinless people. We would shoot it with stand-ins, just to frame it, and then take them out and shoot it empty.”

The stop motion was added months after the principal photography. “The people that did it were on-set, taking measurements so they could reproduce the lighting, the lenses, the angles,” Braier explains. “They did an amazing job.”

Lower budgets often force creativity and necessitate the use of practical tricks. So, when the characters jump through the teleportation device, which transports them between the San Francisco Bay Area and urban China, “Boots wanted to do a simple split screen,” says Braier. “We had a hula hoop, so the actors could actually jump through something. We wanted to do as much in camera as possible.”

The LaKeith Stanfield scenes – his character is referred to as the Pinky Ring Guy – were all handled in camera too. Whenever he’s on screen, he stares into the lens, and the picture pulsates while the background blurs and falls away. “We called it the ‘love lens’,” Braier says – whenever Corvette sees him, the world warps. “We had to find a way to do something that didn’t mean bringing in a whole rig. We needed something versatile, so that we could have it in five minutes instead of spending half an hour setting up an effect.”

The solution combined someone physically moving the lens, to mimic a beating heart, with a beauty light rigged onto the camera. “As LaKeith drags Corvette into this state, we’re upping the light and at the same time closing the iris. The lighting stays constant, but the quality changes, and the background gets darker,” Braier says. This balancing act required three people – someone moving the lens, someone adjusting the light and someone closing the iris – to sync perfectly. “It was a lot of coordination to get it right,” she admits. “It was very stressful – but it was fun.”

I Love Boosters is scheduled to premiere on 30 October in the UK

This article appears in the August/September 2026 issue of Definition