PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE: I think his conception of himself as a chef, and where he sits in the universe, is a whole interesting theme of Tony. But, to me, the idea of the market was almost a hook for the piece. And then, over the time I spent writing, I felt as though, in slow motion, the idea kind of fell apart.
ROBIN STANDEFER: We had constant conversations about design—there’s something about cinema and the theater of creating spaces that transport you that is really interesting, and that was a big part of our dialogue. Tony said, “Design is stupid, and it sucks, and I hate it.” And I said, “I agree.”
I felt that my most authentic self was engaged when I was with him, and that’s a really beautiful, intoxicating way to feel. We talked about everything from Korean porn to Singaporean food—always such an engaged, awesome dialogue—we would talk and Stephen would draw. And also, he and I were raising money together, so we got up in front of [real estate investment trust] Vornado and [real estate developer] Stephen Ross; we put together this pretty epic presentation. We actually made a lot of them, for a lot of different spaces. I would never do that for anybody else, and I say that because, you know, we were barely getting paid. But it wasn’t about that; it was about such a powerful vision.
There was some ambivalence from Tony about not being true to himself, about being in these meetings, and I heard that. The bubble of our world of creation was about an alternate universe, like Blade Runner. The collaboration between me and Stephen and Tony was almost fictitious, in a way, like we were making a movie. And we got close to almost making it, but then, somehow, it was too much of a dream, and I do think that ambivalence came from the fact that I just don’t think money works that way outside the film business, where it truly is artistry. I think the mechanics of that, certainly in the United States, were too challenging to achieve, and I also think that there was a sense that it wasn’t meant to be.
We worked on it for almost five years. We just kept going down the road, and it never ultimately made financial sense, and we ended up not being able to close the deal. It couldn’t make the revenue everyone wanted it to, it was so complicated to operate, and Tony wanted real fire. There would have been health department issues, because the markets he loved were ones in places that have different rules and regulations and restrictions; they didn’t have the requirements that new developments in New York City have.
But I always felt like it was a bigger issue than that. I always felt like these [financing] guys were sort of fearful of really doing something that true, in which money wasn’t first. You need a partner who is brave enough—you need a crazy, I don’t know, a Howard Hughes, an eccentric patron—and the world of development doesn’t really have them anymore. When it comes down to it, those guys pray at the shrine of money, and it wasn’t who Tony was, and it’s not who I am or Stephen is—ultimately there wasn’t a partner.
So this project became a dream. A dream of a reality of what markets are, and what gathering is, and what food is—the kind of gritty, fucked-up, aromatic, intense, compressed environment that he wanted to make would have scared the shit out of people.
PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE: I don’t think that they could do it his way—he had these kind of outlandish— Even if you look at the stuff that he says in that piece, he’s describing a vision that— I mean, it was obviously doubly difficult, or impossible, in Trump’s America, but it wasn’t gonna happen like that—a big butcher shop, with blood all over the place, and all these different vendors, whom you get visas for, and they come in . . . To me, there was kind of an interesting tension, where he was insisting on the only version of what he would have personally been cool with, which seemed to me to be a version that was almost impossible to realize.
I think part of the reason that people loved him as much as they did, and connected with him in the way that they still do, even now, was this sense that he wouldn’t abide by any kind of adulteration, right? There was something just very unadulterated about who he was, the way he talked; he had this no-bullshit ethos. There was this sense that he wasn’t willing to put his name on something that he privately felt was kind of crappy. Which isn’t to say it never happened, but in the instances where it did, he would call it out himself.
That was the interesting question about the market; if they’d pulled it off, there was no way they’d have been able to do it in a way that he wouldn’t have had his private misgivings about. It’s not that the vision itself wasn’t amazing; it’s just that doing that in New York City in 2017 was tough.*
ROBIN STANDEFER: It never really ended. We weren’t like, über close with Tony by any means, but I think he didn’t want to let us down. I think we had a meaningful, creative connection, and I think that because Stephen and I just believed in him and the market so much that whatever version of it, whatever weirdo version in the ground floor of Tokyo Tower, or with those RXR [Realty] megadudes on the pier, whatever it was—certainly, the pier one fizzled out, but it wasn’t super over. There was always this little secret area [of discussion] like, “Maybe someone else will come up with the money.” Stephen and I created, with Tony, these vision books; and they existed, and the drawings existed, and the sketches existed and all the oratory existed, and so it was, “Why couldn’t we put this incredible vision in another space?” There was always the hopefulness of that potential there.
42
“You Don’t Direct Tony Bourdain”
Life on the Road with Parts Unknown
ERIC RIPERT: When Tony joined CNN, I went on with him in Peru; we did the French Alps; we went to Chengdu, in China. Where we really had a fantastic time was Marseille, in France. He was in a good place, mentally and physically. He was happy, and it shows. And we’re having genuine fun, and we really go on a tangent a lot on that episode, and ZPZ just had to witness what was going on, and just film and put it together. It was like a vacation with cameras behind, which we didn’t see anymore, because we wouldn’t acknowledge them. When you see too many cameras, suddenly they become invisible.
Tony is, and he will admit himself, he was a barely OK skier. And I’m a pretty good skier. But, the way they edit the ski scenes in the Alps [episode], he looks like he’s much better, and I’m much worse. And they make him actually win the competition. He wanted to compete, but he couldn’t. He completely manipulated with ZPZ the outcome.
DARREN ARONOFSKY, FILM DIRECTOR: I was dating someone who was a big Tony fan, but I had never really watched the show yet. I noticed that he was following me [on Twitter], so I just followed back. I was really enjoying his feed, and I started to get to know his personality a bit through that. And then I had finished shooting [my film] Noah, and when you’re in deep in post[production], you can get lost about what you’re going to do next.
I wrote to him, saying, “Hey, do you ever have people tag along?” or something like that.
And he wrote back, “Where do you want to go?” And I kind of jokingly said, “Madagascar,” because it was one of the farthest places in the world, and a place that is intriguing but very hard to get to. And he said, “When?” That kind of started a conversation.
It was coincidental that I had been doing jiu-jitsu at the same gym as him. I remember walking into the locker room and seeing Tony a couple of weeks before we were going to go, and I went up to him and introduced myself.
When I started to walk up to him, he had this look of—it wasn’t quite confusion, or fear, but it was—I guess we were in a locker room, so it was a little weird to go up to him, half-dressed, and some guy, he had no idea who I was. I introduced myself, and he was like, “Oh, great, bring your gi. We’ll do some jiu-jitsu on the trip.”
The next time we met was in the airport in South Africa, before we took a shorter flight to Madagascar.
I could see when he was sort of shy about things, and it would take him a few minutes to kind of get into his storytelling mode. Then he would take control of the situation, as soon as he got comfortable. But before he was comfortable, he would be on the back
foot a little bit.
I think he has a point of view when he starts, and he keeps pursuing it. In Madagascar, it was about ecotourism. He felt it was like a form of colonialism, a different type of colonialism, and that the service industry was an extension of that.
What happened on that trip, it was pretty interesting. And it was pretty sobering. We had a— I don’t know, it was like an eighteen- to twenty-four-hour-long train ride. It was supposed to be like a nine- to twelve-hour ride, this whole French colonial ride to the coast. We were told that we were going to get food at this certain stop, and there had been some— It was a very strange train ride, because a lot of the train went through villages that had no road access.
JEFF ALLEN: That was such a perfect example of fixers promising, “In three hours we’ll be at the food stop, and everybody will get to eat, and that’ll be a great cultural moment for the show.” We always send our fixers on a scout, they actually ride the train, and we have them take photos of detailed, time-stamped moments.
But sometimes you get there and there’s no food stop. Sometimes there’s not even a fucking train, you know? So what’s supposed to be three hours ends up being like ten, because the train broke down.
DARREN ARONOFSKY: We’d held off from eating, and by the time we got to this one town, there was kind of a mad grab for the little food that was there, and there were also a lot of hungry children around. And it was almost, at a certain point, they were kind of surrounding Tony—because he had some food in his hands—begging for food. And Tony was not comfortable with it and—at the moment, he got angry with the crew, because we were put in that situation.
JEFF ALLEN: There were a couple of European tourists on the train, and they had a basket of bananas and some rice packets that they started passing out, and this swarm of starving children start attacking Tony and Darren, too. It was a really bad scene, and really unexpected, and it shows how nothing ever goes as planned. What was supposed to be this kind of cute adventure ends up being a really kind of sad look at humanity.
Tony thought it was our fault, and it’s true that production takes time; you have to ask people all the time to stop and start all the time, but we didn’t have the power to stop and start the fucking train. He was pissed; he also was hungry.
DARREN ARONOFSKY: You saw this kind of weird colonialism that we were thrust in the middle of. I think Tony wanted to show that there’s many ways to show a sequence like that on a travel show, where you could edit that out, or you could really show what was going on. Because the poverty in Madagascar was hard to fathom. And there seemed to be a lot of prostitution going on, and a lot of underage prostitution.
So there were some really dark things. And you’re sitting there in your kind of incredible wealth, going, “What the hell’s going on here?”
Really hard to understand. And it was impossible for you to ignore. And then the environmental destruction that was going on was just everywhere. You’d be riding a train, and you’d see the forest being burned down in the distance, these huge plumes of smoke. When we flew on a small plane from the coast back to the capital, you could just see the country burning. So, it was pretty bleak.
BEN SELKOW, DIRECTOR: There’s very little turnover in the directing corps of Parts Unknown, but there was a year when they hired three of us to come in, and I directed an episode in Mississippi.
I remember first meeting Tony and trying to play it cool; he was this fucking huge guy with a giant head and a stoic poker face, and you don’t know how he’s perceiving you. I was intimidated, but it was underscored by the creative respect I had for him.
In the prep, he was a total mystery. There were a couple of emails exchanged, but the dynamic part of our working relationship happened in the field, and in post.
For the first scene we were shooting in Mississippi, I’d found a conscious hip-hop performer. We shot a music video with him, inspired by a Kanye West video, and then we were gonna have a chat with him and Tony at a community bar in Jackson. So we rigged it out, we did our lighting, made sure people were there—it was January, in the midst of an unprecedented cold spell, and people were not really trying to go out to a bar that night, but we got people there. Tony calls me right before the scene and says, “There were heavy winds out of Newark, I was a little late getting here. I ran into Mick Jagger’s entourage in the lobby of our hotel, he invited me to a party, so I’m not coming to the scene tonight.”
What are you gonna say? (A), it’s Tony, and (B), it’s fucking Mick Jagger. I pushed him a little bit, but he was like, “No, man, I gotta do this.” So that was our kickoff: my first big scene with Tony, and he stands me up.
Two days later, we were due to do a scene on the Mississippi River, and go canoeing. At this point, this is pre–Tony quitting smoking, pre–Tony diving into jiu-jitsu. We get out on the river and it’s windy, and there’s a huge chop, and it’s actually extremely strenuous. There’s this island that we’re paddling out to, and he’s got to look cool paddling, but he’s dying. Mo [Fallon] is looking at me like, Oh man, this is kicking his ass; I don’t think he’s gonna make it.
We’re paddling alongside him, I’m taking pictures, and he’s not mugging for the camera, but he did find a moment to give me the eyeball, and I’m like, Oh, shit.
Then we make it to the island, and we’re OK. We’ve got all this meat: he’s going to be grilling out with this Mississippi bluesman, outdoors guy, man of the river, and Tony says, “OK, this is heaven. I love to grill meat. Where are the beers?”
I was like, Shit, I didn’t bring any beers. We’re in the South, so there’s all kinds of rules around church and alcohol, and it’s a Sunday. I go to [producer] Jeff Allen, who never says no to anything, and delegate to him. I hear the motor start on our extra gear boat, and it tears off down the river. We start shooting the scene, and Tony’s looking at me, looking real thirsty. It’s going terribly.
And then, like the cavalry coming back, Jeff comes ripping up the river in the motorboat, dismounts into the water, and comes running up with a cold case of beer. Somehow, he’d made it into Arkansas, found an open liquor store, secured a case of beer, and crisis averted. So that was a big learn for me.
JEFF ALLEN: It took about two years for Tony to remember my name. I was the new guy. He never talked directly to me. I think it was in Borneo [in 2015] when he finally really acknowledged me.
It was fucking insane, getting a TV crew to go up the Skrang River, packing into these canoes with millions of dollars’ worth of equipment and no support, in terms of PAs, because we didn’t have a budget for it. The best shit comes out of chaos, and that was the most chaotic.
Paddling up the river with all the equipment in longboats took a lot longer than it was supposed to. “Oh, yeah, we’ll be there in three hours.” Ten hours later, it’s sunset; we’re arriving after dark. All the things we were supposed to film, we couldn’t, because there’s no lights, and we were in the middle of the jungle. We almost lost some gear on the way up. Tony was mad that it was taking so long. We have to stop and go, for TV. Things just never go according to plan.
What I’d walked into was, “You don’t really let on to Tony how the sausage is made, because we need him to have an experience.” We were just scrambling to pick up this insanity behind the scenes, left and right, and oftentimes that would become the story.
So, in Borneo, the whole idea was to have Tony spear this pig as part of a celebration, and he’s standing down the river, getting furious, in a thunderstorm, and the pig isn’t arriving on time, and it’s out of our control. The tribe is supposed to bring the pig; we’re just capturing the action. Meanwhile, in the thunderstorm, the pig got loose and it’s running around the village, but Tony didn’t know this, and he’s just like, “Where’s the fucking pig? I know it’s production’s fault!” He’s standing there holding a spear, which is terrifying, and everyone was so scared of him anyway.
He demanded excellence, and he never settled for shit. I think he just wanted t
he show, and the experience, to be the greatest thing ever, all the time. And we all had that mentality, but it’s not like it was a fucking vacation. It was insanely hard work, to think of creative new shit to do, to make every episode better than the last one, and then you had to impress Tony all the time. So you have this really demanding, powerful force who could get angry if shit wasn’t going well, and it didn’t go well all the time.
Anyway, he got to kill the pig, next to the chief of the village, and then we filmed the rice festival, which was three days of drinking and partying and insanity, and Tony ended up really loving how it all went down in the end. The last day, he was encouraging us to put the cameras down and stop filming. He said, “We got the story. You need to live here for a moment and have an experience. Yes, we have a job to do, but life is short.”
He’d said his favorite thing was to go down to the river and swim in the morning, because that’s when the ladies of the village would go and clean clothes, and bathe with the kids, and it was a really joyful and peaceful time. The last morning, I walked down to the river, and there was no one else in the water except Tony, and he was clearly having a moment by himself, and I was like, Oh, fuck, I’m not gonna interrupt Tony’s moment. And then he saw me and said, “Hey, come in! The water’s amazing!”
We swam in the river for like an hour, just hanging out. It was a little awkward at first, but then we just started talking about stories, like he would do. You never really talked much to Tony; you listened a lot, and the dude was fucking funny, and had a lot to say. He asked me what were my plans after the season, because I was still a freelancer, and then he said, “It’s good having you around. You should stay.”
No one ever got compliments from Tony, and even that wasn’t really a compliment, it was like, “Don’t leave; you’re useful,” which was probably as big a compliment as you’d ever get from him.
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