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Why Roadrunner Director Morgan Neville Skipped Interviewing Asia Argento
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parts unknown July 15, 2021


WHY ROADRUNNER DIRECTOR MORGAN NEVILLE SKIPPED INTERVIEWING ASIA ARGENTO

By Chris Lee@__ChrisLee
The limited presence of Anthony Bourdain’s former girlfriend raises more
questions than it answers in the documentary. Photo: Focus Features

To those who knew him most intimately, Anthony Bourdain was a kind of armchair
expert in the minutiae and arcana surrounding famous people who have died by
suicide. Over the course of his 18 years in the public eye — exploding out of
obscurity as a line chef at New York’s Brasserie Les Halles with the
best-selling 2000 culinary tell-all Kitchen Confidential en route to hosting a
suite of acclaimed travel docuseries, including CNN’s Parts Unknown — the lanky
Manhattanite both spoke and wrote often on the topic. Then, in June 2018, while
filming a segment for that Emmy-winning show in the Alsace region of France,
Bourdain was found dead at the age of 61.


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The new documentary Roadrunner (which arrives in theaters July 16 and will later
air on CNN and stream on HBO Max) vividly unpacks the career ascendancy of the
roguish truth teller, whose final decades could be fairly defined by their
superlatives. A former cocaine and heroin addict, Bourdain traveled the
farthest, ate the wildest things, and spent time with some of the most
intriguing people on earth.



Roadrunner’s director Morgan Neville (20 Feet From Stardom, Won’t You Be My
Neighbor, Netflix’s Ugly Delicious), however, admits he was only willing to
delve so far into the circumstances surrounding Bourdain’s death by suicide.
Most contentiously, Neville chose not to interview the author-chef’s last
girlfriend, Asia Argento — the Italian actress-filmmaker and one of the
figureheads of the Me Too movement, who was photographed by an Italian tabloid
in what appeared to be the romantic embrace of another man a few days prior to
Bourdain’s death.

Although Argento’s limited presence in Roadrunner raises more questions than it
answers, Neville insists that speaking to her would have “been painful for a lot
of people.” He tells Vulture an interview with Argento would have distracted
from the story of what made Anthony Bourdain who he was. “It instantly just made
people want to ask ten more questions,” Neville says. “It became this kind of
narrative quicksand.”



Before watching your film, I had the question I’m sure a lot of other people
have. Anthony Bourdain seemed to lead such a charmed existence. What made him
take himself out of it? But I understand answering that question wasn’t the top
of your agenda.  
I read Kitchen Confidential when it came out, read Medium Raw, and had watched
his shows. I felt like I could relate to him. He was a smart, funny ambassador
for curiosity. And then when he died, I felt like that doesn’t compute with the
guy I thought I knew. Dave Chappelle even made a joke to that extent in his
comedy special on Netflix. He was saying the thing everybody wonders, which is,
How the hell does somebody who seems to have it all kill themself?

But the thing I was also very leery of in the beginning is for the film to feel
like a eulogy; we often read history backward, but we live history forward. And
so how do we kind of be in the moment with him? Because there is so much that is
funny and exciting. So in a way, I felt excited [to learn] about all this stuff
that made him who he was. And then it was the weight of contemplating and
understanding his death and then trying to build a bridge from the beginning to
the end.

What I came to realize pretty early on is those threads were there all the time.
Rereading Kitchen Confidential, there are passages in that book that are pitch
black. Where he talks about: “If I get hit by an ice cream truck and they’re
peeling the bumper out of my head while I’m dying, I’m not going to wish that I
had eaten more or traveled more or taken more drugs. I’m just going to regret
how much I disappointed people in my life.” He wrote that in 1999.

There was a trail of bread crumbs going all the way back if you bothered to look
for it.  
One hundred percent. [In Roadrunner,] there’s a clip for half a second of him
floating face down in the pool; it’s from A Cook’s Tour season one. He’s at the
Chateau Marmont and has this fantasy of him killing himself several different
ways in a hotel, including in a bathroom and then floating face down in the
pool. I was kind of shocked. Things like that kept coming up again and again
through his shows.

He joked about it. Nobody really understood the depths of that fascination
around it. It’d been there for so long people just assumed, “Oh, that’s Tony. He
has a black sense of humor.” In Medium Raw, he told this story once — in some
raw footage, and we almost put the scene in — of almost driving off a cliff.
Around 2004, he had split from his first wife and was in Saint Martin, the
island he liked to go in the Caribbean. There’s a mountain pass, and he was
drunk. He was going to drive over the edge of the road. And when the Chambers
Brothers came on the radio, he decided that was a sign not to and turned the
steering wheel.

Tell me about the people you interviewed. Éric Ripert discovered Bourdain’s body
in the hotel room in France. He seemed limited in what he was willing to discuss
with you, but the fact that he was willing to go on-camera is significant. You
also interviewed Bourdain’s wife Ottavia, who seems to have resisted speaking
publicly until this point. Did you have to assure people that you were going to
take a certain approach — or that you weren’t going to take a certain approach?
In the couple of months after Tony died, several people started talking about
wanting to make a documentary about him. And everybody in Tony’s life came
together. His agent Kim Witherspoon, CNN, the production company he worked with
ZPZ, the estate, and Ottavia. They put out a press release: “We are going to
make a film about Anthony Bourdain,” initially as a defensive maneuver just to
get people to stop. It succeeded. Nobody else made anything.

But at a certain point, everybody had said, “Okay, if we’re going to make a
film, what’s that actually going to look like?” More than a year after he died,
I was having a conversation with CNN and they said, “We’re working on this. Are
you interested?”

Part of it is, I want to tell a story. I want to feel like it’s the
authoritative story, that I would have access to everything. There was a certain
feeling among people in Tony’s world that this was a once-in-a-lifetime thing.
Ottavia says in the film, “This is the only time I’m ever going to talk about
this publicly.” But at least three or four other people said the same thing to
me. There was just this sense of, I need to tell the story. I’m going to do it
now, and then I don’t ever have to do it again. Several people were reluctant,
but they all came around.

Roadrunner director Morgan Neville. Photo: DeSean McClinton-Holland

Were they protective of him?
Well, yes and no. There’s a moment with David Chang where he hesitates to tell a
story, and he’s like, “Fuck it.” He tells the story about what Tony told him
about being a father. [In Roadrunner, Chang recalls Bourdain telling him he was
unfit for fatherhood.] I feel like Tony was into a kind of brutal honesty, and
there was a certain sense of permission in that.

The first meeting I had with Chris and Lydia [Chris Collins and Lydia Tenaglia
were executive producers on Bourdain’s shows for 19 years and are founders of
Zero Point Zero Productions], I started talking about how important I thought
the show was and what they had done and what Tony had done to humanize people in
cultures on the far side of the planet. I was going on and they were nodding and
finally they stopped me and said, “Yeah, but you have to remember, Tony could be
such an asshole.”

I felt like there was a lot of that, Don’t sanctify him. There is so much
sanctification that goes on in the wake of somebody’s death where people want to
put him on a pedestal. That was so not Tony.

So we’ve talked about who participated. Let’s talk about the person who didn’t
participate. Your film puts forward an idea that Bourdain’s behavior as a former
addict in conjunction with his tempestuous relationship with Asia Argento
brought him to this dark place in his life, where suicidal ideation took hold.
But you deliberately did not ask her for an interview. Why?
She’s given interviews. I kind of know what she was going to say. And even as I
was putting the story together, as I was trying to make the decision about how
to handle it, when I started to put more of that story into the film, it
instantly just made people want to ask ten more questions. It became this kind
of narrative quicksand of “Oh, but then what about this? And how did this
happen?”

It just became this thing that made me feel like I was sinking into this rabbit
hole of she said, they said, and it just was not the film I wanted to make. I
just want to know why he was who he was and felt like the balance of the film
would have tipped over if I had put her in it.

Yes, it would have added a lot of complexity to your job. And you knew what she
most likely would have said, but there was always the chance that she would say
the surprising thing. Part of your job as a documentarian is to sit there and
ask the question and hope that you’re going to get the surprising take.
We debated it for months. I just felt like if I crack that door open, I really
better be damn sure it’s what I want. Because it would have been painful for a
lot of people, honestly, if I had interviewed her. So I just said — and believe
me, we talked and talked about it — is this really what I want?

Again, we played with edits of trying to go deeper into the story and looking at
everything she had said. And every time I even screened it for people in longer
versions, all I got were people wanting to go down this rabbit hole of more and
more about their relationship in the last year of his life. I felt like I’m
trying to make a psychological portrait of a person’s entire life. And I just
didn’t want to be capsized by it. So I made the call. People can disagree.

Has she reached out to you?
I’ve never heard from her.

I was reading David Chang’s memoir Eat a Peach recently. He goes into Bourdain’s
toxic masculinity circa Kitchen Confidential, the sexual relationships that go
on around kitchen life. Chang brings this up in terms of the work Bourdain did
to improve himself as an individual. You get into some of that, especially in
the part of the film about the Me Too era, where Anthony wages a campaign
against Harvey Weinstein. But I wondered if this larger idea of toxic
masculinity was something you sidestepped?
I know Chang really well. We’ve talked about it. The thing is, Tony went on a
kind of mea culpa tour around Me Too, where Kitchen Confidential became kind of
this bro manual for guys who wanted to get into kitchen life. It’s kind of like
people watching films like Scarface or Wall Street in the ’80s and feeling like
they’re how-to movies rather than cautionary tales.

I went back and reread Kitchen Confidential with Me Too in mind, and I think he
has nothing but respect for women in that book. The women are badasses in that
book. And in a way, I felt like he was being harder on himself than he needed to
be. What he was reacting to — which is not really in the book — was more of a
kind of permission and a kind of pirate’s life of being in the kitchen.

But Tony himself, I never heard about him sleeping with anybody. I’m not saying
it didn’t happen, but, I mean, he was in a very committed, very monogamous
relationship his entire culinary career. From the time he was 15 till he was 47,
he was in a single relationship with a woman who he really loved. So I don’t
think there’s any there there. Honestly.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.


TAGS:

 * roadrunner
 * anthony bourdain
 * q&a
 * movies
 * morgan neville
 * asia argento
 * kitchen confidential
 * parts unknown
 * More

37Comments Leave a Comment
Why Roadrunner’s Director Skipped Interviewing Asia Argento



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