What Was Anthony Bourdain Searching For?
One outcome for Neville, who never met Bourdain in life, was the ability to get to know his subject through a mind-boggling 100,000 hours of footage. (Even that didnt prove quite enough: the director had an AI voice created that allows Bourdain to say several things in the film that he had, in life, only committed to the page.) As we enter a period of Bourdain saturationan oral history will be published in the fall and at least two podcasts about the man are reportedly in the worksNeville talked, from his office in Los Angeles, about the process of assembling a narrative from that embarrassment of riches, and about the challenges of telling a complicated story about a man who has become something of a secular saint in the years since his death. GQ: You have said that a documentary is like a Trojan horse. Morgan Neville: I said that about a lot of my music films, which were Trojan Horses to talk about things like race, or celebrity. All kinds of different issues. But I feel in a way that this time I just filmed a Trojan Horse about a Trojan Horse. Thats how Tony used his shows. People would think, Oh, you have a food show, but, my God, the depths he talked about! He stretched the idea of what you could do with a food show as far as it could possibly go. I feel like theres a curiosity divide in our world and Tony was like the ambassador for curiosity. Anyway, when I started I gave a version of that speech to Chris Collins and Lydia Tenaglia, who were Tonys production partners for 20 years [and consulting producers on Roadrunner]. And they said, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Somebody else said he was the nicest asshole youve ever met. His crew, who he used to be very tough on, adored him, because he was being even tougher on himself. But I think what they also meant is that Tony, for all his insight and trenchant thinking, could be incredibly immature about things. They said he was like a 14-year-old boywhich is both kind of endearing and also kind of exhausting. Like, you cant live your life as a 14-year-old boy when youre 60. What I came to understand was that his flaws were also his super powers. I mean, one word is immaturity; another is a kind of hyper-romantic way of looking at the world. So, to go back to your earlier question: I think in the beginning I got excited about making a film about a cultural hero. And at the end of the day, its much more about how we manage our emotions and how we look for happiness in things. It must be interesting to do this when the urge to sanctify Bourdains memory is at an absolute peak. I mean there are actually Mexican prayer candles you can buy with St. Tony on them. I often say that when youre making a film about a subject the instructions are on the box. Listen to the subject and theyll tell you how to make the film. So, when Tony says that most of the worlds biggest problems are because of somebody trying to find a simple answer, it means he was all about the gray areas. And thats like the best permission you can have from a subject.