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AAnthony Bourdain was a singularly beloved cultural figure. His death by suicide in 2018 at age 61 while filming an episode of his travel series on CNN Parts Unknown remains, for many, one of the most tragic and disconcerting public losses of recent years. Given the intense bond with the chef-turned-television personality felt by his fans and the shock of his death, Roadrunner: A Film about Anthony Bourdain, a tonic and gracious new documentary on Bourdain that presents his entourage, was to be greeted with sensitivity. . .
News broke on Friday that the filmmakers have used artificial intelligence to simulate the TV host’s voice for three synthetic audio lines. In interviews with the New Yorker and GQ, the film’s director Morgan Neville revealed that he introduced 10 hours of Bourdain voiceover into an AI model for the narration of emails written by Bourdain, totaling about 45 seconds. The reaction to the news was startling, if perhaps predictably angry. Some have rejected the film outright, which grapples with Bourdain’s less acceptable qualities – his obsession, his flaking, his gnawing impostor syndrome.
“When I wrote my review, I didn’t know that the filmmakers had used an AI to falsify Bourdain’s voice” tweeted Sean Burns, a Boston WBUR film critic who criticized the film negatively. “I feel like this tells you everything you need to know about the ethics of the people behind this project.”
Others on Twitter, where it was a trending topic, called him “macabre”, “a very bad idea”, “terrible”.
Neville didn’t really help matters with his comment to The New Yorker that “We can have a documentary ethics committee on this later,” which sounded more flippant than you might think. Said panel seems relevant, but not as a verdict of the film. While much of the discussion has focused on the ethics of resuscitating the voice of a deceased person, the issue of AI, in this case, seems to be in the wrong direction. Bourdain wrote the words; we don’t know if he read them aloud, but it’s not synthetic material, nor is it akin to peddling the holographic performance of a deceased pop star for money .
The biggest problem is that of disclosure, both to the public and to those close to Bourdain. (In response to Neville’s claim in GQ that he checked with Bourdain’s widow and literary executor “just to make sure people were cool with it. And they were like, Tony would’ve been cool with it. that “, Bourdain’s ex-wife Ottavia Busia tweeted: “I was definitely NOT the one who said Tony would have been cool with that.”) If you know what lines to look for, you can hear how the AI voice is a little stiffer and a tic higher than the truth . But for the average viewer, the difference is blurry. You can’t tell – a point that may eventually become irrelevant as audience comfort levels with synthetic audio change. As Sam Gregory, a filmmaker-turned-nonprofit director on ethical applications of video and technology, pointed out in an interview with Helen Rosner in The New Yorker on Ethics of the Voice of AI, no one blinks when a narrator in a documentary reads a letter written during the Civil War.
The nauseating part here was the mixing of the truth with the interpretation of the truth, the fact with the simulation, the archive with the embellishment. Neville’s obscuring of the AI voice is misleading. But then again, all documentaries bend the lines of reality; the public often conveniently forgets or ignores the artifice in favor of cohesion and momentum. This is, ironically, so much the subject of Roadrunner – the blurring of the person and character, the portrayed portrayed on camera and the ambiguous mess, the lingering burden of stardom. Bourdain’s voice AI model, for three lines, is a questionable artistic choice, that’s for sure. But it’s not an outright transgression that should overshadow a difficult and deeply emotional film.
Roadrunner doesn’t start with Bourdain’s childhood, which is almost entirely overlooked, but his rebirth, in a way: to stardom in middle age, thanks to his successful memoir Kitchen Confidential, published at 43 in 2000. Bourdain was, as we can see, at first a clumsy, unsightly student but eager for the camera and the world around him. Most of the film chronicles the rapid change in her life after fame. He left the kitchen, his companion of nearly 30 years, his anonymity. He started hosting for CNN, remarried, had a daughter, shifted his addictive personality – an intimidating and exhaustive relentlessness that was once addicted to heroin – to jiujitsu, among others. He was annoyed at 250 days a year on the road, at the gulf between the harshness of his storytelling and the red carpets of promoting the story, at the role of a traditional TV dad he played by at – shots at home.
The final third is dominated by her personal unraveling – pushing away friends, almost leaving the show – and her death. Perhaps the most pressing ethical concern is Neville’s decision not to reach out to Asia Argento, the Italian actor / director and Bourdain’s latest romantic partner, who is described as the agent of defeat for both the series and for Bourdain. Friends and crew recall an emotionally tense shoot in Hong Kong after Bourdain installed Argento as a director at the last minute and fired a longtime cinematographer, at which point his infatuation with Argento seemed. maniacal and teenager, how angry he was over paparazzi photos of her and another man shortly after his death.
Neville said talking to Argento would have “been painful for a lot of people.” Digging into the last days of Bourdain’s life “immediately made people want to ask ten more questions,” he told Vulture. “It’s become that kind of quicksand narrative of ‘Oh, but then what about this? And how did this happen? It just became that thing that made me feel like I was going down that rabbit hole of ‘She Said They Said’, and it just wasn’t the movie I wanted to make.
Still, it’s a lot of focus, words, and images on a person who doesn’t have the opportunity to speak for themselves. It’s also clear that the inclusion of Argento’s interviews, if she was okay with it, would have drawn the film into a litigation over Bourdain’s death rather than an exploration of his life. There are no easy answers here, the type Bourdain avoided in his lifetime.
Roadrunner is ultimately an inviting, bewitching, disturbing film, which does not hesitate to name the star’s frustrating multitudes. There’s Bourdain the supernaturally magnetic host, Bourdain the heartlessly loving boyfriend, Bourdain the demanding boss and unreliable partner, the unbridled friend who once told confidant David Chang that he wouldn’t be a good father. There is his unyielding curiosity, his enthusiasm for a successful experiment, and a hollow hunch. The scene I can’t help but think of is a fragment of footage from 2006, filming a crucial episode of No Reservations in Lebanon as war erupted between Israel and Hezbollah. Savoring the pleasure amidst the devastation, lost for words, Bourdain simply shakes his head – “there’s no right way to sum it all up.” There isn’t a completely cohesive portrayal of a person in Roadrunner, perhaps never any meaning to be made. But there is something to sit on, to consider, and it feels like a tribute well done.
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