Guillermo del Toro is showing major love to Boots Riley’s recent project. It arrives at a strange moment for Hollywood filmmaking. As the VFX and CGI industry continues facing growing pressure — from overworked artists to shrinking timelines and the looming rise of AI-generated visuals — handcrafted cinema has increasingly become the harder path to take. And yet, even in an industry racing toward automation and digital shortcuts, there remains a small group of filmmakers who continue to choose the harder route: building worlds physically, relying on practical craftsmanship, miniatures, camera tricks, and the messy unpredictability of real textures.

Filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro have spent years defending that tactile approach. Judging by his latest reaction, Boots Riley may have just earned a place in that conversation too.

Few modern filmmakers have championed tactile, handmade cinema as passionately as Guillermo del Toro, making his latest praise for I Love Boosters especially meaningful. After Riley shared behind-the-scenes footage from one of the film’s ambitious chase sequences, the Oscar-winning filmmaker publicly praised the movie’s reliance on handmade practical effects over digital filmmaking.

“Not enough is said about how much Boots uses hand-made things instead of digital things!” del Toro wrote on X while praising Riley’s approach to practical filmmaking.

Riley later reshared the post and made it clear just how intentional that creative decision had been.

“The maestro noticing this is a great feeling. I Love Boosters is in camera. There is VFX (comping, cleanup, etc), but no CGI,” Riley wrote on X while responding to del Toro’s praise. The filmmaker also jokingly credited del Toro as an inspiration, encouraging audiences to see the movie in theaters “to see what Maestro Del Toro is talking about.”

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But beyond the praise itself, Riley’s behind-the-scenes breakdown revealed just how much practical craftsmanship actually went into the film.

Boot Riley’s behind-the-scenes breakdown suggests I Love Boosters achieved some of its strangest visuals using surprisingly analog methods. Rather than leaning heavily on CGI, the filmmaker used miniature Bay Area sets for chase scenes, practical illusions, and physical set manipulation to create the movie’s surreal world.

Riley also credited Oakland-based stop-motion team Mystery Meat Media for creating the “people in $100,000 suits” featured toward the end of the film. For scenes set inside fashion mogul Christie Smith’s office, played by Demi Moore, Riley even revealed he tilted the set by 17 degrees to give the location an intentionally surreal sharp angle. Meanwhile, a futuristic electromagnetic beam effect was reportedly created using little more than a water hose against black, later composited into the shot.

Guillermo Del Toro’s admiration for that kind of filmmaking especially comes from the countless hours he himself has put behind his own films. While making his Oscar-winning Pinocchio, the filmmaker spent nearly 940 days bringing the stop-motion feature to life, working across more than 60 production units simultaneously and insisting on hand-crafted artistry rather than CGI shortcuts.

Speaking on Netflix’s Skip Intro podcast, del Toro stressed that Pinocchio was “all done by artisans” and repeatedly rejected studio suggestions to make the movie digitally resemble stop-motion instead of physically crafting it — a philosophy he also appears to be carrying into his upcoming stop-motion fantasy project.

With I Love Boosters now in theaters, Riley appears to be doubling down on the tactile, surreal filmmaking style that first made Riley break through into mainstream film conversation with Sorry to Bother You. And coming from someone like del Toro, a filmmaker who spent years obsessively handcrafting Pinocchio, the praise feels less like casual admiration and more like a serious endorsement of cinema that still values the human touch.

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What do you think of Guillermo Del Toro praising Boots Riley's I Love Boosters? Let us know in the comments.