“Its deeply complex, and theres no tidy answer,” says filmmaker Morgan Neville.
With the blessing of his estate and literary agent we used A.I.
Here are excerpts from that conversation.
Anthony Bourdain in ‘Roadrunner’.CNN / Focus Features
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You were announced as the director back in October 2019.
How soon after Bourdain’s death did you join the project?
And was this something that you had pitched, or that came to you?
‘Roadrunner’ director Morgan Neville and Anthony Bourdain.Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images; CNN / Focus Features
And they did that, and it worked.
And everybody went away.
I think initially there was no real intent to make one.
Anthony Bourdain in ‘Roadrunner’.CNN/Focus Features
It was something I was interested in because I was a fan and we had mutual friends.
I liked him like a lot of people liked him.
I’d read a couple of his books and liked his show.
But also, I think I felt like he was a compatriot of mine.
These things he was doing were the things I believed in.
He’s a deeply complex and fascinating human being, flawed and smart and messy.
But Mr. Rogers was such a consistent person, and Tony was the opposite.
Tony was a protean figure.
Depending on whoever he was talking to, he would show a different part of himself.
The things that made him complex and flawed were the things that made him great.
Where did all the archival footage come from?
That’s pretty wild luck, to have all that.
And there were 60 hours of footage of it we found that were like a godsend.
He was deeply curious about the world but had never been anywhere.
He was not particularly successful at anything.
And even if you go back and rereadKitchen Confidential, it was like, “My story’s over.
I’ve done it all, and I’m just going to go off into the sunset.
Maybe I’ll open my own little restaurant somewhere, someday.”
You really don’t linger on his childhood, so it’s not a cradle-to-grave Wikipedia-style biography at all.
I give a shot to avoid that as much as I can.
Even in the midst of the Mr. Rogers documentary, I didn’t talk much about childhood.
There’s a couple of bits and pieces, but you don’t need to know that much more.
The things that made him Tony were not particularly driven from his childhood.
Those things shaped him.
Because his family was a pretty straight suburban New Jersey family.
He was just like the wiseass in school.
And the Keith Richards doc!
Keith was another one of his heroes.
I was like, “Those are good bona fides for Tony.”
What about access to his family and friends?
How was that for you to navigate since you didn’t know most of them going in?
How’d you get them to trust you and open up to you?
They were by far the longest and hardest interviews of any film I’ve ever made.
Though there were a number of people who did it for Tony.
They didn’t do it for me.
They felt like they owed it to him.
And several of them said that to me one of them is even in the film.
It’s obvious they’re not going to talk about it again.
It was a one-time thing.
I had a lot of conversations with people not on camera, getting to know them and building trust.
And I interviewed a lot of people who aren’t in the film.
You have to make impossible decisions.
But the vulnerability of that was hard for everybody.
The reality is, it was therapy for people.
I was giving people permission to now open up about these things, and it was intense.
In a weird way, I feel like it’s part of the purpose of the film.
One line really struck me, and I hope I’m not misquoting it.
One of his producers asks, “How does a storyteller check out without leaving a note?”
He’s my audience, in a way.
And I watched all the movies he loved.
I felt like I understood that from the get-go.
I totally got his taste.
I’ll tell you a story his manager, Kim Witherspoon, told me.
And she said, “No, Tony would have hated that.”
And I feel that way about the film.
And Tony, were he to watch this film, would be [made] deeply uncomfortable by it.
As he should be.
But in a way that’s punk rock also.
That’s the path he chose.
That was important to me.
So it was not easy.
How did you go about handling the Asia Argento stuff?
Literally, I called it narrative quicksand.
The thing I was always asking myself was: What was in Tony’s mind?
He was aware of that.
And that to me is the important thing.
Not, “Well then, she did this.
And then what happened about this?”
Like I said, it gets very tabloid-y very quickly.
So that’s why I tried to just empower showing, not telling.
That’s Storytelling 101: Let the audience decide what they think.
But what you gotta know is what Tony was thinking.
That was always my North Star.
I think definitely, in the last year of his life, he was drinking more.
And we allude to it.
He was never diagnosed with anything, but he went back into therapy.
But I certainly feel there was a manic mood swing happening.
Again, maybe it’s related to his relationship, but I think it was related to everything.
I think he was just more generally unmoored near the end of the life.
His creed for a long time was, “I’m a seeker.
I want to learn.”
If you’re certain of nothing, who are you?
Are you certain of the people who show you love in your life?
You start doubting things you shouldn’t be doubting.
It’s deeply complex, and there’s no tidy answer.
I’m trying to let people just feel what they can out of it and make their own answers.
What do you think may surprise people most about him?
Because he seemed like such an open book, until suddenly he was gone.
I think there’s a lot of truth to that.
But there’s part of Tony that was deeply insecure and immature, frankly.
And I felt like, as I said in the beginning, it was his blessing and his curse.
Even when being a little more jaded would have helped him.
