{"id":300032,"date":"2021-07-15T21:45:11","date_gmt":"2021-07-15T18:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/roadrunner-features-some-bourdain-voiceovers-created-with-a-i-film\/"},"modified":"2021-07-15T21:45:11","modified_gmt":"2021-07-15T18:45:11","slug":"roadrunner-features-some-bourdain-voiceovers-created-with-a-i-film","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/roadrunner-features-some-bourdain-voiceovers-created-with-a-i-film\/","title":{"rendered":"#Roadrunner Features Some Bourdain Voiceovers Created with A.I. \u2013 \/Film"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Roadrunner Features Some Bourdain Voiceovers Created with A.I. \u2013 \/Film<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n

\"Bourdain<\/p>\n

Anthony Bourdain<\/strong>, the celebrity chef, author, and acclaimed host of shows like No Reservations<\/em> and Parts Unknown<\/em>, died by suicide in 2018. Filmmaker Morgan Neville<\/strong>\u00a0(20 Feet From Stardom<\/em>, Won\u2019t You Be My Neighbor?<\/em>) was app<\/a>roached by CNN to make a movie about the iconoclastic TV personality, and the result is Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain<\/strong><\/em>, a new documentary that hits theaters tomorrow.<\/p>\n

I spoke with Neville about combing through thousands of hours of footage, trying to capture the \u201creal\u201d Bourdain, figuring out how to frame this story, and yes, even creating an artificial intelligence model to produce some voiceovers for the new movie.<\/span><\/p>\n

This interview has been edited for brevity.<\/i><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start at the beginning. Do you remember your first exposure to Anthony Bourdain?<\/b><\/p>\n

Kitchen Confidential<\/i>. Actually, he published an article in The New Yorker<\/i> before Kitchen Confidential<\/em> that caused a stir, and I read that article. Then when Kitchen Confidential<\/em> came out, it was definitely the kind of thing that people passed around and said, \u201cYou\u2019ve gotta read this book.\u201d So I did, and I didn\u2019t really pay that much attention for a while, because I wasn\u2019t watching The Food Network on basic cable a whole lot in those days. But once it got into No Reservations and he started appearing more places, I started saying that I liked watching him. It wasn\u2019t appointment TV for me, but it was like a lot of people: when he was on, I\u2019d get sucked into it. I ended up reading, Medium Raw<\/i>, his second autobiography, at one point. I followed him on Twitter<\/a>. Twitter was built for somebody like Anthony Bourdain. For a smart, snarky, person like Bourdain, Twitter was a godsend, and he loved it. So I liked him, but I hadn\u2019t thought that deeply about him, other than I knew through a bunch of my friends who are writers and food people how important he was for them.<\/p>\n

The narrations Bourdain wrote for his shows were always some of my favorite aspects of those programs, and I assume you had access to all of those files while making this movie. How did you go about the gargantuan task of combing through all of this archival footage and audio to create a cohesive story in this movie?<\/b><\/p>\n

To make a film about Bourdain and not have him in some way narrate it would just feel odd. So as I thought about it, I started thinking about Sunset Boulevard<\/i> and William Holden narrating from beyond the grave. That\u2019s my homage to it.<\/p>\n

That seems like something he would have loved.<\/b><\/p>\n

I think he would have loved it, but the kicker, when I started watching old episodes of the early shows, Cook\u2019s Tour<\/em>, season one, he does an episode in L.A. at the Chateau Marmont, and he films himself floating face down in the pool.<\/p>\n

Wow.<\/b><\/p>\n

I was like, \u201cOK, he\u2019s already ahead of me on this.\u201d So then I got not only his voiceover, which we had all of those sessions, but every book on tape and podcast and radio interviews, and I went through all of it. Anything that felt like a really substantive line, we put into a spreadsheet, basically. We ended up with a 500-page spreadsheet that I organized by theme. So if it was Tony talking about food, or talking about travel<\/a>, or talking about childhood, or whatever, we organized it that way. So we had this binder of Tony on everything. There was a very fleeting moment in the beginning where I just thought, \u201cShould I just not interview anybody and have Tony narrate the entire film?\u201d Although I knew that wouldn\u2019t work. It was just an interesting conceit. Because the fact of the matter is, as great of a writer and narrator as he was, he had big blind spots about himself, too. I was never going to get those in his voice.<\/p>\n

That was actually my next question. He was an incisive, insightful, and profound analyst \u2013 of history, of politics, of societies, and often, himself. So I was wondering how you navigated how much of this story should be told in Bourdain\u2019s own words versus how much of it should be told by the people who knew him, and it sounds like you were grappling with that pretty early on.<\/b><\/p>\n

Yeah. At the end of the day, he couldn\u2019t tell that much of his story. Particularly in his backstory. He was his own best subject. He always wrote about himself, and he was a memoirist always. He loved memoirs, whether it was Down and Out in Paris and London<\/i>, which was one of his all time favorite books, the George Orwell book about working in kitchens in the \u201930s. He did tell a lot of his own story in a really entertaining way. Even going back and looking at Kitchen Confidential<\/i>, the thing that struck me was how world-weary he is in that book. He wrote it when he was 43, and there\u2019s a tone in there of, \u201cI\u2019ve seen it all, I\u2019ve lived it all, my story is over.\u201d His story hadn\u2019t even really begun, which is crazy. But there\u2019s this passage in Kitchen Confidential <\/i>that, for a while, I had in a rough cut of the film, but I took it out. It\u2019s to your point: he has this speech he gives, where he says \u2013\u00a0to paraphrase \u2013\u00a0\u201cif I\u2019m walking across the street and get hit by an ice cream truck someday and I\u2019m lying in the street and they\u2019re pulling the bumper out of my head and I\u2019m drawing my last breaths, am I going to regret that I didn\u2019t eat a certain thing or travel to a certain place? No. I\u2019m only going to regret how I disappointed those around me who cared about me.\u201d He wrote that when he was 43!<\/p>\n

Wow.<\/b><\/p>\n

He was also very good at owning his own flaws, I guess is what that is.<\/p>\n

Yeah. So in addition to being a recounting of Bourdain\u2019s trajectory, to me this movie is about the impossible task of trying to capture the \u201creal\u201d version of someone. Even armed with all of these tools \u2013\u00a0the archival footage, the talking heads, Tony\u2019s social media posts \u2013 how close do you think you got to getting to the heart of who Bourdain really was?<\/b><\/p>\n

I always feel like my films are about questions more than answers. That idea of, \u201cOh, you got it,\u201d that it was tidily summed up is so un-Bourdainian. There\u2019s a quote of his I found after I finished the film where he said, \u201cThe root of most of the world\u2019s problems can be attributed to people trying to find a simple fucking answer.\u201d The grey of what existed in life was where the interesting stuff happens. I think Bourdain, too, is somebody who was an immensely protean character who was always shapeshifting. He was slightly different with different people. What I kept coming back to, not only in this but in most of my films, is that I\u2019m just trying to get an essence. A real essence of who this person is. It\u2019s not all of the truth or all of the dimension, but you really feel like you understand an essence of who this guy is. Hopefully we got that.<\/p>\n

How did you decide that Kitchen Confidential <\/i>would be the start of your movie?<\/b><\/p>\n

A couple of reasons. One was I didn\u2019t want to make a six hour film. [laughs<\/i>] There\u2019s also no footage of that [earlier] era at all. I just felt like telling that whole story, as great as it is, would have been a little like playing a greatest hits album. \u201cOh, you read the book and want to meet the characters and [see] the stories Tony told.\u201d But nothing really changed for Tony throughout that whole period. Where I wanted to begin was the end of that life. The first act of the film is the end of the Kitchen Confidential<\/i> years, the end of him being in the kitchen, and all the transformations that come after it. That was me feeling like I was trying to take a deep sliver of a person\u2019s life and hopefully get something out of it, rather than trying to be Wikipedia, which I think a lot of times, documentaries do.<\/p>\n

Was there anything you learned during the research phase that surprised you about Tony?<\/b><\/p>\n

I think his own insecurity. Part of that is maybe shyness. But the sense that so many people told me that he had incredible imposter syndrome. Maybe it\u2019s because he had success so late in life and it was so life-changing, that he just didn\u2019t trust it. He didn\u2019t feel like he deserved it. People told me that even up until the end, he would feel like he was getting away with something. Part of me feels like he maybe intentionally nurtured that kind of feeling, because the other part of that is that he was very unaware of his importance. I think he would have been shocked by the impact his death had on people. I know people who were in his little world with him were utterly shocked by it. He even says in the film, \u201cI\u2019m not a journalist, I\u2019m not trying to inspire people.\u201d I think he always had this idea of, \u201cI\u2019m just doing a little cable show,\u201d or, \u201cI\u2019ll just write my little books.\u201d It\u2019s also just kind of a survival mechanism in a way, to feel like he\u2019s not important or hasn\u2019t earned it. It kept him motivated, but it also kept him insulated.<\/p>\n

Can you tell me more about that binder that you mentioned? I\u2019m still hung up on that: that you guys went through all of this stuff and had everything organized by theme.<\/b><\/p>\n

I\u2019ll tell you one other thing, which I\u2019ve only talked a little bit about. But I\u2019m happy to talk about it, because I thought it was interesting. So when I wanted him to voice all of the narrations, there were a number of things that he wrote in his books that he never said anywhere, or he wrote in an article, but he had never voiced them. So we actually spent months creating an A.I. model of his voice.<\/p>\n

No way.<\/b><\/p>\n

And a few of the narrations in the film are actually an A.I. Tony saying those lines. Which is interesting.<\/p>\n

Wow. I want to ask you what they are, but I also kind of don\u2019t, because I couldn\u2019t tell. I obviously didn\u2019t know that. Do you want to say which lines they are?<\/b><\/p>\n

I\u2019ll tell you off the record, because you\u2019re curious. [Divulges an example of an A.I. line.<\/i>] Deepfakes and all of that are very ethically murky, but I definitely talked to his literary agent and everybody to make sure they were on board. We weren\u2019t putting words in his mouth. We were merely trying to articulate things that he had already said.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain<\/i> will be in limited theaters on July 16<\/b>, 2021<\/b>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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“#Roadrunner Features Some Bourdain Voiceovers Created with A.I. \u2013 \/Film” Anthony Bourdain, the celebrity chef, author, and acclaimed host of shows like No Reservations and Parts Unknown, died by suicide in 2018. Filmmaker Morgan Neville\u00a0(20 Feet From Stardom, Won\u2019t You Be My Neighbor?) was approached by CNN to make a movie about the iconoclastic TV…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":300033,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/d13ezvd6yrslxm.cloudfront.net\/wp\/wp-content\/images\/Bourdain-voiceover.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[1570,1361],"class_list":["post-300032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-social-mediaa","tag-features","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300032\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/300033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}