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Oscar-winning US film producer Morgan Neville, best known for films like 20 Feet from Stardom and food series Ugly Delicious, releases his latest project, a posthumous ode to the legendary Anthony Bourdain on 16 July.
Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain explores the life and early death of chef, foodie, and TV host and all-around personality that inspired and captivated chefs and food lovers around the world.
Neville spoke to Fine Dining Lovers about the cathartic process of learning about the late Bourdain during making the documentary, a man that was both 'shy' and 'smart'.
What's the most surprising thing you learned about Bourdain that you didn't know before making this film?
I think that he was shy. He was somebody that always seemed to be so cool and have such swagger. But he was so shy at the beginning, also I just think insecure about what he was doing. He had this, kind of, imposter syndrome where he never thought he really deserved the success and always felt like it might just go away. It's something that many people talked to me about: that he always felt like whatever he was doing was fleeting and he was going to end up cooking omelettes somewhere at a buffet.
Do you have a favourite Bourdain anecdote?
You know, he loved Twitter, because it was a perfect format for somebody as smart and snarky as he was. And he actually created fake identities of people so he could troll himself and get into fights with them. One was a barista from San Francisco that rode Vespas who would criticise Tony. And he had many of these alternate personas. It's something that seems revealing to me about Tony.
What was your favourite memory of making this movie?
Just getting to spend time with Tony. One of the gifts of making this film during the pandemic, when none of us could leave our houses, was we got to travel the world with him through all this footage. It was actually kind of the perfect thing to be working on. The stuff they used in the shows was one thing, but in the raw footage, he's so funny and dark and honest about everything that it's just great to see him work. He was just so quick-witted, I love that.
Did you ever meet him?
I never met him. I did a food show called Ugly Delicious and a bunch of people on that show, including David Chang and David Choe were good friends with him. So I knew from one step away how important he was to them. Everybody called him Uncle Tony. He was kind of the godfather of the alternative food media scene. Everybody had utmost respect for him. When he died, I knew that he meant so much more than just being a guy on TV that people liked, that he was actually important, both in front of and behind the camera.
What do you think Bourdain would say about this film?
I think he would have had mixed feelings about the attention. There's a scene early on, where he's talking about doing Oprah for the first time and he says, "Oh, I hate myself". And then he smiles. On the one hand, there's a little bit of self-loathing and on the other, he loves it. He loved the attention. I think the fact that I'd made a film about Keith Richards and a film about Iggy Pop would have helped. He would have liked that I had some tastes that he liked. His friends tell me that he would have begrudgingly loved the film.
Very early on, we have the poignant line from Bourdain: "There's no happy ending". We all know the ending. So how did this frame the narrative for you?
When I first started cutting the film, I just started at the beginning. I didn't want to think or talk about his death, because I didn't want it to infect the entire film and for it to feel like a eulogy. So we told the story of him having that flush of success, where Kitchen Confidential takes off, and then he gets a TV show and all the excitement of that. And when I put it all together, it seemed like we were never going to get to the ending. So, I wanted to put something at the beginning that reminds people that we know where the story's going, and we'll get there, but we're going to take our time. We tend to read history backward, but we live our lives forward. I wanted to make sure that the film felt like we were actually on this journey with him and that the answer wasn't preordained.
Why did you decide to make this film and what fascinated you so much about him, as a subject?
There were a few things, one of which was that I thought he was a fellow traveller. To me, there was part of him that was a documentary filmmaker, in addition to being a TV host and a writer and a chef. But writer was really the label he liked more than any other. I felt like he was somebody who was fighting the good fight. He had a purpose to what he was doing, it wasn't just to make TV or make money - he couldn't care less about making money. It was really to show how people on the far side of the planet live and to make them dimensional people with hopes and dreams and fears. That just made me like him and feel like there was more to explore.
The other part of it was his death, which was so inexplicable to me and to people who didn't know him, and even to some people who did. I felt like unpacking that, in a way like a public service. I thought the film could maybe be cathartic for people.
