The most important scene in Morgan Neville’s multilayered new documentary, Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, may be an early outtake from A Cook’s Tour, the TV travelogue that birthed No Reservations, that birthed an icon. In it, Bourdain, still getting his sea legs (one of the film’s revelations is how inexperienced a traveler its subject was, almost up to the moment he was the most famous traveler in the world), walks along an empty road in what appears to be Vietnam. First, he directs the cameraman on exactly how to frame the shot. Then he begins to walk and address the viewer: “I mean, to be honest, I’m not totally alone. Because clearly somebody is shooting this. I always love those, like, desert scenes, ‘I’m alone in the desert.’ Yeah, but who else’s footprints are those?”
The moment serves as a kind of key to a film that brings home the fact that, while Bourdain may have famously spent 250 days a year on the road, he spent the same, and more, in front of a camera. It is telling and poignant that in Neville’s film the most intimate and insightful accounts of Bourdain’s life, which ended in suicide three years ago, come from the producers and crews of his various shows, with whom he spent the majority of his time. And once those other footprints are pointed out, you can’t help but be aware of them. Cameras (and, of course, by extension, viewers) dog Bourdain down streets from Houston to Lagos. They press in his rugged, vampiric face so relentlessly that when you close your eyes a few hours later you might still see its negative image. They hover nearby in ostensibly private moments of contemplation, of family life, even into a therapy session—all of which scenes you now can’t help but notice are beautifully lit and shot from multiple angles.
A fact well-covered while Bourdain was alive—and only amplified since his death—was that he was a pioneer of the zeitgeist. Kitchen Confidential, the book that catapulted him to fame in his forties, helped kick off the American restaurant revolution and the era of the celebrity chef; his TV shows introduced a style of humanist world exploration that influenced a generation of travelers, on-screen and off. Roadrunner may leave you with the impression that, in addition to all that, the man’s inextricable melding of private and constructed selves made him just as much an avatar and trailblazer of Selfie Culture.
“It's not like he was a private person after shooting, either” says Neville, whose previous films include the Oscar-winning Twenty Feet from Stardom and portraits of Fred Rogers, Keith Richards, Orson Welles, and Iggy Pop. “He would shoot all day and then he’d go to his room and tweet all night. He actually had fake characters that he made up to troll himself on Twitter. He would tell the crew, ‘I’m going back to the room to Google myself to sleep.’”
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 didn’t 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 saturation—an oral history will be published in the fall and at least two podcasts about the man are reportedly in the works—Neville 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. What are you hiding in Roadrunner’s belly?
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. That’s 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. And so, on the one hand, this was a film about a smart, funny, successful guy, but really it was about trying to amplify his message, which was, How can we keep our curiosity going? I feel like there’s 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 Tony’s production partners for 20 years [and consulting producers on Roadrunner]. And they said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he could also be such an asshole.”
They wanted to make sure you were willing to go there?
Yeah. Somebody else said he was the “nicest asshole you’ve 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 boy—which is both kind of endearing and also kind of exhausting. Like, you can’t live your life as a 14-year-old boy when you’re 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, it’s 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 Bourdain’s 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 you’re making a film about a subject the instructions are on the box. Listen to the subject and they’ll tell you how to make the film. So, when Tony says that “most of the world’s biggest problems are because of somebody trying to find a simple answer,” it means he was all about the gray areas. And that’s like the best permission you can have from a subject.
At the same time, there are certain parts of what he did and stood for that have become deeply unfashionable in recent years. He himself spent a lot of time grappling with his contributions to a kind of toxic male kitchen culture.
Kitchen Confidential became a kind of bible for that but, you know, I went back and re-read it and didn’t see a whole lot of it. I think it was more the book’s impact, the way people watched Wall Street or Scarface thinking they were how-to guides instead of cautionary tales. I’d say Kitchen Confidential was one of those. And he beat himself up about it.
There’s also the essential structure of this white man going into these countries to introduce them to the world.
I think he was definitely aware of a kind of sell-by date for the white “colonial” voice telling people what’s interesting. I really think, as somebody says in the film, that Tony would have been thrilled if he could not be in his show. He didn’t want it to be about him, but that became kind of the price the public demanded of him in order to do it. He definitely worried about who was benefitting from what he was doing. In the very last voiceover he ever did, for an episode in Kenya, he says, “Who gets to tell the stories? This is a question asked often. The answer, in this case, for better or for worse, is I do. At least this time out. I do my best. I look. I listen. But in the end, I know it’s my story.”
In that context, I was little surprised by how much you decided to lean into drawing a parallel between his trip to the Congo and Apocalypse Now.
That story, to me, was about, Is he Willard or is he Kurtz? Is he the rational journalist? Or is he the one who has become the protagonist and gone insane? I feel like that’s the dialectic he wrestled with whether the story took place in the Congo or anywhere. I actually think that episode is one of the best depictions of life in central Africa that’s ever been on American television, but that’s the part I was leaning into and, yeah, it’s dancing up against some pretty racist tropes.
How did you manage to have him essentially narrate his own story?
In the beginning, I went and gathered everything he ever said about his life. I went through every book and podcast and voiceover session, and put together a binder of, like, 500 pages of him talking about his life. There was a moment when I was even like, ‘Gee, I could make the whole film in his voice,’ though I stopped myself instantly. But then I came across a few things he wrote but that he never said. And so, I had this idea to create an AI model of his voice, which we did.
How does that work?
We fed more than ten hours of Tony’s voice into an AI model. The bigger the quantity, the better the result. We worked with four companies before settling on the best. We also had to figure out the best tone of Tony’s voice: His speaking voice versus his “narrator” voice, which itself changed dramatically of over the years. The narrator voice got very performative and sing-songy in the No Reservation years. I checked, you know, with his widow and his literary executor, just to make sure people were cool with that. And they were like, Tony would have been cool with that. I wasn’t putting words into his mouth. I was just trying to make them come alive.
Back in the Kitchen Confidential days it became sort of a cliche to say that ‘chefs are the new rock stars.’ You don’t hear that much any more, but given all the musicians you’ve made documentaries about, I wonder if you have any thoughts about it.
One thing I thought about as we were making this film, thinking about Tony’s love of people like Iggy Pop and Keith Richards, is that he wasn’t like that. There was this sort of insightful-slash-pretentious line somebody wrote in The New Yorker once, to the effect that he was “Apollo in drag as Dionysius,” and I actually think that’s very true. The thing about Keith Richards and Iggy Pop is that they don’t give a shit about anything. They don’t care what people say about them, how they look, how much anything costs. They float on top of life. And Tony gave a shit about everything. Every tweet, every review, every episode. He was in no way constitutionally a rock star.
At some point, watching all this footage, some of which feels so private, I began to wonder if this was actually another parable—like, say, Elvis, or Michael Jackson—about how American fame kills.
Fame is certainly a toxin, and it certainly did not help Tony. I think for somebody who is fundamentally shy and curious…. I’m sure it contributed to him becoming somewhat agoraphobic later in life. He had crazy imposter syndrome all through his career. The feeling that he didn’t deserve it, or it wasn’t going to last. But I don’t think fame was the real culprit, because his depression and addiction and OCD and manic behavior all existed before he became famous.
A large part of the last act of this story was Bourdain’s relationship with Asia Argento, who he had been dating just before his suicide. Did you try to interview Argento for this movie?
I didn’t. Just because I feel like the complication and weight of her part of the story could capsize the film in a heartbeat. It’s so complicated. And I felt like it wasn’t actually going to teach me any more about Tony. Whenever I started to bring in more of the story, it just made people ask ten more questions, which weren't interesting questions. They were just, like, What about this? How did that happen? Somebody else can make that movie.
This may sound strange, but do you feel you know Anthony Bourdain better or less well after making this movie?
He was one of those figures, and many people said this to me, that would be slightly different with everybody. If a hundred people had a camera pointed at him, they would all get a slightly different picture of who he was. My mental image, that I kept coming to again and again, was the hall of mirrors from Lady From Shanghai. Tony was a seeker, who was always looking for the next thing that was going to be interesting but also maybe going to fix something in his life. You know, there was this sense of momentum everybody talks about. And seeking is such a good thing in general. But if you’re really seeking, you’re lost. I feel like Tony was somebody who took something that was worthy, like seeking, and took it to such an extent that… I don’t know. I just have this image of Tony and this hall of mirrors: Not knowing where he’s going or where he’s coming from.
Brett Martin is a GQ correspondent.
