Anthony Bourdain ‘Roadrunner’ Doc ignites AI voiceover controversy – Deadline

UPDATE with more details: Normally, on the opening day of a Morgan Neville movie, the discussion would be about box office potential – after all, his 2018 documentary Mr. Rogers. Won’t you be my neighbor? won $ 23 million.

But as Roadrunner: a film about Anthony Bourdain hitting theaters today, attention has been drawn to the controversy over the Oscar-winning director’s use of AI in the film to simulate Bourdain “voicing” several lines that the late chef, author and television host wrote but did not record. The issue has sparked debate inside and outside the docs community, with some accusing Neville of committing an unrecognized “deep fake”.

“It sucks! Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel exclaimed on Twitter. Reviewer Sean Burns tweeted: “I feel like this tells you everything you need to know about the ethics of the people behind this project.”

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The ethical debate on AI might never have happened without the keen eyes and ears of The New Yorker‘s Helen Rosner. Watching Roadrunner, she paused for a moment in the film when a friend of Bourdain’s David Choe, struggling to understand why Bourdain committed suicide in 2018, read aloud an email his boyfriend had sent him.

As Rosner noted, “Choe starts to read, then her voice fades into Bourdain’s:”… and my life is kind of shit now. You are successful, and I have succeeded, and I ask myself: are you happy? ‘ I asked Neville how the hell he found an audio recording of Bourdain reading his own email.

It turns out he didn’t. Neville revealed that he contacted a software company to create an “AI model” of Bourdain’s voice in an effort to bring this emailed sentence to life and two other lines Bourdain wrote but didn’t. was not actually spoken on tape.

“If you watch the movie, other than that line you mentioned, you probably don’t know what other lines that the AI ​​said, and you won’t,” Neville said. The New Yorker. “We can have a documentary ethics panel on this later.”

This last comment – suggesting “deal with ethics later” – seems to have particularly exasperated some documentary professionals.

“I think that [remark] was as problematic as the use of technology, ”said Adam Benzine, Oscar-nominated director and journalist, director of the 2020 documentary on Covid-19. The curve, says Deadline. “But the fact that he discussed it as an ethical debate seems to suggest that he himself knew he was on risky ground. And I think that’s why so many people in the doc industry have had a hostile reaction to it.

Benzine says it might have been different if Neville had been upfront about his use of AI. Retroactively, Neville is more transparent.

A publicist for the film shared a statement from the director, in which Neville said, “There are a few sentences Tony wrote that he never spoke out loud. With the blessing of his real estate and literary agent, we used AI technology. It was a modern storytelling technique that I used in a few places where I felt it was important to bring Tony’s words to life.

But Ottavia Busia-Bourdain, Bourdain’s ex-wife and executor of his estate, appears to deny having been consulted on the use of AI. She tweeted Thursday night: “I was definitely NOT the one to say Tony would have been cool with this.”

To Alan Barker, a 40-year-old industry veteran who has lectured on documentary ethics, the Roadrunner The AI ​​problem points to broader ethical concerns that disrupt the documentary domain. He cites the use of actors to portray historical or recent events in the work of filmmaker Robert Greene, and the Emmy nominee Dick Johnson is dead, in which filmmaker Kirsten Johnson seamlessly “staged” her father’s own death in various cinematic ways to deal with the prospect of her father’s passing.

“There is an unwritten social contract that documentaries are news and not gimmicks,” Barker told Deadline. “The Bourdain case is particularly bad because much of the information contained in a voice recording is non-verbal. The fact that Morgan apparently hid the forgery until he was confronted with a reporter makes things much worse.

Barker continues: “Each of these breaches of the social contract can be dismissed, but collectively they undermine the concept and the credibility of the documentary. “

Deadline requested an interview with Neville to discuss the controversy, but aside from his statement quoted above, a movie publicist said “Morgan doesn’t do interviews.” When we spoke with the director in June for virtual studio Deadline in Tribeca, where Roadrunner created, Neville noted that he had never met Bourdain, but felt close to his subject.

“A lot of what he tried to do with his work is what I tried to do with my work, namely how culture gives us a sense of identity and how we perceive others and how culture gives us a sense of identity. culture can be a bridge to how we perceive and treat others and build empathy, all of that stuff he’s been doing on his show since the start, ”Neville noted. “[I felt], ‘Oh yeah, like he’s one of the good guys fighting the good fight.’

Neville’s decision not to request an interview with Asia Argento, the Italian actress and director with whom Bourdain had a romantic relationship for the last two years of his life, also raised eyebrows. Shortly before Bourdain committed suicide in France, where he was filming an episode of his CNN series Unknown parts, a tabloid published a photo of Argento with another man.

Neville said The New Yorker he didn’t want her movie to become a “she said they said” between Argento and Bourdain’s friends arguing over what happened in the relationship. Neville commented, “This is not the movie I wanted to make.”

With the growth of documentary programming on broadcast, cable and streaming platforms, the ethical review of documentary practice appears likely to expand. Controversies can be big or small, the question of what constitutes a major or minor issue is inevitably a matter of opinion. Benzine, the Oscar nominated filmmaker (Claude Lanzmann: Specters of the Shoah), takes note of the documentary’s current box office success Summer of Soul (… Our when the revolution couldn’t be televised), directed by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson.

Questlove said the film, featuring extraordinary musical performances from the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, is built around images that, “For almost 50 years… just sat in a basement and nobody cared. cared. ” But as author Greg Mitchell wrote in his Substack newsletter earlier this month, some footage of the performance has been circulating the internet going back several years. Mitchell cited a Facebook post by music archivist Joe Lauro who said that in 2004 he partnered with the owner of the material: the Historical Films offices… ”

Ironically, Morgan Neville was reportedly involved in the development of a documentary based on the images until the project passed into other hands.

Is this a big deal? Perhaps the fable of Harlem Cultural Festival images “locked in a basement” represents a case of stretching the truth for marketing purposes. But as Barker suggests, the entire documentary domain is built on a premise of ethical rigor, whether it has necessarily earned this reputation or not (the founding silent documentary of 1922 North Nanook, directed by Robert Flaherty, included staged scenes).

Roadrunner: a film about Anthony Bourdain, by Focus Features, debuts on 926 screens today, very wide for a documentary. It is expected to air later on HBO Max and air on CNN. CNN Films and Neville’s Tremolo Productions produced the film. Deadline reached out to CNN for comment on the AI ​​controversy, but has not received a response.