I definitely saw many writers get radicalized and call for things that you wouldn’t think people would call for — and they were not just calling for them, not just saying they should happen, but organizing them. A lot of the solidarity that was being pushed between WGA and DGA was from writers who may not have expressed radical politics in public before but just thought, “Okay, what helps us win this fight?” You saw a lot more people demanding things of their union that hadn’t been demanded before.

There were a couple of situations where there were meetings of hyphenates — meaning dual members of the WGA and the DGA — and people from DGA in which it was assumed I’d be the most militant person in the room. Certain forces directed things toward me thinking that, but it was everybody else who was quicker to call for more militant stances.

On a national level, it’s a very visible strike. Other people who went on strike have said that the WGA was part of forming what they thought could be done right then, part of the conversation in which the working class is becoming at least slightly more militant with all of these strikes and becoming more radical.

Things have changed in the sense that it’s become okay and commonplace to have a class consciousness and be outward with that, and even to have socialist politics. Now I’m saying “become,” but I’m kind of new to the industry. It’s at least more common to be vocal about those politics now.

The strikes changed the idea of what can be done and what can be demanded. Even with some folks feeling worn out because they wished the strike hadn’t lasted so long, people understand that these are things that couldn’t have been won without a strike. That knowledge has changed a lot of things for people.

Writers are storytellers, and because of how the idea of Hollywood has been sold to people — that story of someone going to Hollywood and being able to express themselves and become rich or whatever — we are part of a story as well. In that way it becomes similar to the art. I hope that there will be more stories about this now, because a lot of writers have gone through this process. There will definitely be more stories pitched that have to do with class struggle, but there’s a strong filter that ensures it doesn’t matter what writers want to write about on the whole.

The way Hollywood works, for the most part, is that there’s a producer with an idea, but they’re not passionate enough about it to write it. So they hire a writer who would rather be writing something else — and who has a passion project of their own — but who will do this for money. They try to connect to it as much as they can, but it’s not the thing they would have chosen to do. Then they get a director who has some other thing they would rather do — they probably wrote something too that they would rather direct, but this is what they have to do for money. And then you have executives whose job is to shape it into something else entirely. So when you try to get radical politics through that pipeline, it’s pretty hard. It takes a certain kind of impetus to try to get through.

I think that if your main thing is trying to make a living from writing, then you’re not going to get those politics through, because at every step, there’s going to be a roadblock with somebody nicely saying, “Here’s why this doesn’t work. Here’s why you can’t do this.” Do you want to be the person who people think is difficult? If your main thing is trying to make a living, you don’t. Obviously there are exceptions to this, but if the impetus is wanting to make radical work with your life, wanting to be part of a radical movement, and you see writing as a way to do that, maybe you’ll have a different experience. Certainly, to get my show done, I had to be willing to quit. All throughout my career, I had to quit. Sometimes I took huge losses, and in ways that people would feel were irresponsible.

I hope that more class struggle gets into film and TV because of this, though I think TV is a total other monster. I do think there will be more independent productions with class struggle in them. The truth is that you can sell it to people in the industry by saying, “Look how radical the working class is getting. We need to make movies that reflect that.”

To get Sorry to Bother You done, I went through a long period of being pretty destitute with the idea that if I get this made, it will be the talk of Sundance, and I’ll get the money to pay people back. I’ll be able to pay rent. And we were the talk of Sundance, so I did pay everybody back. But I was at the festival wanting to cry with a sold movie because I was broke.

I had more ideas, and Media Res, which was a production company that became a studio when they sold this TV show, was interested. They paid me money to write the show, we pitched it around, and there were two companies that could pay enough for it. It wasn’t my choice of where to go, but it was between FX and Amazon. The studio was going to make a lot more profit selling it to Amazon, and that’s just how it goes. That ended up being their choice.

The connected question is going to be about Amazon. Here’s the thing: all of my work is about fighting capitalism, and I’ve never thought, “Let’s uplift the companies that are doing slightly better capitalism than the other capitalism.” They all want to be Amazon. My thing isn’t to have the illusion that you can hide yourself from that but to put forward work that says, “We have to organize in these places.” That was my question at the time. I was like, “Look, I’m going to be vocally talking about organizing labor, not only in hypothetical places but in real places, some of those places being Amazon.” I asked if they still wanted to do this, and the answer was yes.

The owners of Amazon, who own more than Bezos, are the likes of Vanguard and BlackRock. They are also the top owners of Netflix and Disney. So although there are different personalities behind different companies, the same group of investors and funds are just using different avatars to conduct business in different ways.

Separately, before this show, I’ve gotten into arguments with well-meaning friends who want to start collective businesses because the logic is that it’s a business that doesn’t exploit labor. But that doesn’t really answer it, because that business still has to compete with other businesses. If you’re not collectivizing the whole labor market, then that doesn’t solve the problem. You’re not going to be able to do it one business at a time. To me, the only answer to short-term and long-term movement goals is organizing on the job. There’s no other nice way to do it.

The weird thing about that email was that most of the people on the list, including me, weren’t running for leadership positions in the DGA. She told people not to vote for us, but we weren’t running. Plus, some of the people she listed aren’t radical; they’d say so themselves. The only thing the article about that situation did was spread fear. The writer of that article, in putting that out, made people afraid to speak out.

There’s a Billy Bragg lyric that I’ve stolen before: “If you’ve got a blacklist, I want to be on it.” I don’t want to live my life afraid of that. People — the general public wherever you are, even many of the people in Hollywood — are way more radical than anyone would like to believe. And one of the ways they instill fear is by making people think that they are the most radical people in the room. They make it seem like what you’re saying is something that very few people will believe, and so you think that sort of a blacklist could work rather than backfire.

For their part, DGA leadership reached out and tried to make it work with us. It’s not like there wasn’t friction; there was, because you had a few hundred WGA writers who were also in the DGA and wanted to make AI [artificial intelligence] an issue. At first DGA said, “We’ve got that language covered, it’s all good.” A bunch of us said, “No, we don’t think that language covers it.” And there were folks who felt they were being pressured in ways that they shouldn’t have been. But that’s just the regular politics of any grouping.

I’m not going to completely dispel people’s fears about speaking up, but these are things I’ve faced and might face again, and yet you should still sign those statements and speak up, because what is happening is more important than your fear. I don’t ever want to say that you should give in to the fear.

There’s a rhetorical lie in which opposition to Israel gets called antisemitism. In my case, I’m a Jew, and I have a connection in my family and in my life to radical Jews who all didn’t agree with the concept or practices of Israel, to the idea of colonizing a place. We understand that it’s wrong to set up a society that way. It’s fine for folks to have a homeland, but you don’t deny other people citizenship in that and then put them in confined spaces and refuse to allow them to vote on who’s ruling them.

We’re in Hollywood. People are afraid to say, “I want a wide shot,” because they know that an executive doesn’t want it, and they think they might get blacklisted because of that. Fear is how so many people make their decisions in Hollywood: creatively, career-wise. You have people stuck for ten years making a TV show that they hate because they’re afraid they won’t get another job. Fear is how we’ve been taught to think through our choices.

Yes, definitely. I made a lot of phone calls before I signed that cease-fire statement, and someone said to me, “Why doesn’t Palestine have a Nelson Mandela?” I said, “You mean somebody that they locked up for thirty years? They have that.” The reason Nelson Mandela was able to become president had to do with boycott, divestment, and sanctions, which was about getting pretty close to crippling South Africa’s economy. If you want the Nelson Mandela of Palestine, that comes from boycott, divestment, and sanctions. That’s the nonviolent route.

I’ve sold three movies, and if the actors’ strike is over in time, we’ll be shooting one in the early part of next year. That one draws inspiration from one of my songs on Pick a Bigger Weapon.

For the scores, I have been working with Tune-Yards, which is a group that lives here in Oakland. They did the score for Sorry to Bother You and for I’m a Virgo. The Coup did the soundtrack for Sorry to Bother You.

For I’m a Virgo, I was supposed to make a song per episode. We shot the interiors in New Orleans, and I moved my whole studio out there. I thought I’d get two hours a day in the studio and that over that six-month period, I’d have some songs. But I ended up spending four hours in the studio that entire time. That said, I have music I’m working on, and I’m going to do a couple songs at a time. The thing is: I can get to so many more people with my movies and TV than I ever did with music. But it hits people in a different way: with music, people can listen to it over and over, and it becomes part of their life. With a movie, you have people trapped there in the theater.

Well, what gives me hope is that we’re having a prolonged strike wave and there are groups of radicals trying to figure out how to strategize around them. You could have a big labor movement that is only run by the liberals, and you don’t get much out of that. But I don’t think that’s what we’re seeing now.

It’s an opportunity. When you see major upheavals toward socialism, militant labor movements with radicals involved are a huge part of it and almost a prerequisite. In most of the revolutions that people look up to, there were huge, organized strikes. We often think of the revolutionary period as the period after that, but there wouldn’t have been that period after without that organizing coming beforehand. So that gives me hope, and it’s based on what I’m seeing.