The making of I Love Boosters

With his new film I Love Boosters, writer-director Boots Riley says he set out “to make an amusement park ride,” one bathed in color and adorned with details that reward audiences who see the movie on the big screen. A sharp comedic satire seasoned with surreal hijinks, the story follows the Velvet Gang, a team of philanthropically minded shoplifters led by Corvette (Keke Palmer), as they target notorious fashion maven Christie Smith (Demi Moore).

“What I wanted to create was something that made me feel like I felt when I was a kid,” Riley says, “when I used to go to theaters where there were hilarious movies playing, and the crowd was rowdy and rambunctious and just happy, enjoying life. I wanted to make a movie like that, that made people want to be in one of those kind of theaters.”

In this exclusive video, Riley retraces the creative journey that brought I Love Boosters to the screen, starting with writing the script and sketching storyboards. Along the way, Riley introduces production designer Christopher Glass and sits down with cinematographer Natasha Braier ASC ADF. Braier and Riley then meet with Dan Sasaki, Panavision’s Senior Vice President of Optical Engineering and Lens Strategy, to discuss the key attributes they wanted to see in the movie’s custom anamorphic lenses.

In his early conversations with Braier, Glass and costume designer Shirley Kurata, Riley emphasized the need for “big, bold color” and his desire to realize the movie’s distinctive visuals in camera, an approach that would require practical effects, including the use of miniatures. Hearing what Riley envisioned, Braier immediately knew she wanted to work with anamorphic lenses to get as much of Boosters’ world onto the screen as possible. “I always thought, since the first time we talked, that we had to shoot anamorphic,” Braier says. And so, she brought Riley to Panavision, where they worked closely with Sasaki and the Special Optics team to devise a custom set of lenses.

Their starting point was the aesthetic appeal of vintage glass. “The nostalgia of the old lenses is that they’re not mathematically perfect,” Sasaki shares. “When you have a lens that’s not mathematically perfect, you get flaws, and in those flaws, it simulates more how we see the world.”

Ultimately, the custom lens set combined inspiration from Panavision’s vintage B Series anamorphics with the modern mechanics of the T Series, enabling closer focus and greater consistency and control between focal lengths. On top of this, the Special Optics team layered key attributes that Braier and Riley wanted to embrace, beginning with spherical aberration, which lends a visually pleasing softness to the image. Spherical aberration is reduced as a lens is stopped down, but for I Love Boosters, Sasaki explains, “what we had to do was find a way to bend the law of physics to give the illusion of spherical aberration through the entire aperture range.”

The filmmakers were also drawn to the warmth of vintage glass made with thoriated lead, which was long ago retired from the manufacturing process. To achieve a similar warmth with the custom lenses, Sasaki says that the Special Optics team used “a modern glass which simulates the look of the isotope thorium.”

The Special Optics team also manipulated the lenses’ field curvature to accentuate the sense of volume and depth within the image. And, Sasaki notes, “by inducing a little bit of lateral color, we’re enhancing the color component of the lenses to be a high performer in the theatrical experience.”

During principal photography, Braier further embellished the look through a variety of in-camera techniques, including flaring the lens and subtly “painting” with different materials on an optical flat. Combined, these techniques added color to the shadows and lent even more texture and depth to the image.

This attention to detail and commitment to craft was shared across departments, resulting in a fully realized world rich in details that are best appreciated on the big screen. In other words, as Riley says, “That’s why you gotta go see I Love Boosters in movie theaters.”

Visit https://www.iloveboosters.film to find showtimes and purchase tickets.