Making of ‘I’m a Virgo’ roundtable: Boots Riley and his creative team
For creator, writer, director and co-showrunner Boots Riley, the idea for his Amazon Prime Video series “I’m a Virgo” came from “just wanting to talk about the differences between perception of people and how they perceive themselves.” Specifically, “if you saw a 13-foot-tall Black man walking down the street, the last thing most people would think about is what he thinks about himself, so I wanted to talk about that” and explore “people connecting to each other on a personal one-to-one level, but also on a societal level.”
But how did he turn lead actor Jharrel Jerome into that gentle giant? We gathered Riley and Jerome, along with costume designer Deirdra Elizabeth Govan, production designer Maxwell Orgell and visual effects supervisor Todd Perry for a special roundtable panel to discuss the making of the unique social satire. Watch it above.
Jerome stars as 13-foot-tall Cootie, a teenager who has been kept hidden all his life by his protective aunt Lafrancine (Carmen Ejogo) and uncle Martisse (Mike Epps), but finally ventures out into the world after he turns 19. One of the biggest challenges in creating the show’s protagonist was the fact that Riley wanted to use mostly practical effects and forced perspective as opposed to CGI, which Riley felt would diminish the show’s sense of wonder. “With CGI,” he explains, “you could make a skyscraper stand up, walk over and take a shit, and it wouldn’t be amazing.”
“Getting over the initial fear of it was the first step” for Perry, who was “coming from a digital and a CG background predominantly,” having worked on projects like “Avengers: Age of Ultron” and “Black Panther.” Then it was a matter of “planning all of the shots.” Riley and company “wanted to play it a little bit loose. They wanted to be able to block things naturally,” so “we had to be a little bit flexible with that,” but there was still a process of “taking the measurements of the rooms that Max had designed and making sure that we could actually fit a camera into this position and accomplish the forced perspective shots.” Then it was time for “working with the crew, who had never done this kind of stuff before … I think everyone got on board really fast, but there was definitely a learning curve.”
Orgell has “a background where I get to play with a lot of practical effects as it is in some of these tricks, and so I knew what Boots wanted to do.” On top of “building the world,” the production designer had “to take certain considerations all the time, depending on which of these kind of visual tricks we’re deploying, on how we want to execute that.” Like Perry, Orgell points out that “every single department needs to kind of understand the process for this. And then it’s things as small as 3D-printing light switches for a house, building in half scale.” The complex process “gets pretty interesting real fast. The challenge is there, but it does do something to the overall look of the piece. It adds something that I think is kind of immeasurable.”
When it came to Govan’s costumes, “you have to be prepared to throw out the rulebook” on a Boots Riley project. “Boots was really instrumental in sharing some insight and said, think of it like a comic book. So I applied that theory, and … that concept is really the driver behind how I created Cootie’s look and also how he evolved throughout the season for his costumes.” Of course, “whatever we created for the human scale, we had to make in Cootie scale, large 13-foot scale. So we were very challenged … But I feel that we were able to service the story in that way.”
One of Jerome’s biggest challenges as an actor was that, being positioned separately from his co-stars to create the forced perspective illusion of his size, “I never got to look at anybody in the eye once. It was either an X mark or we tried the iPad out for a second.” But Riley gave him opportunities to bond with his fellow actors and develop those interpersonal relationships off-screen. “Boots curated a space for us off-set often, especially the core cast members, to just hang out and chill.” But “like Deirdra said about having to throw the rulebook out when you’re working with Boots, as an actor it’s the same thing. A lot of the tools and tricks you learn to kind of get yourself in the zone or get yourself into the character kind of go out the window when you’re in a hunched-over posture for an hour as they try to make sure that the shot is right, and doing the math right around my body.”
“We’re having you buy into many things at once,” Riley admits. So instead of going for the “slickness” that other movies and shows aim for, he wanted his production values to “have this sort of janky feel” that would have a more “emotional” effect. “Jharrel had to walk that line too because he’s playing a character that’s not only in this surreal situation or absurd situation, but playing him as a real person that we feel.”
