ALISON MOSSHART: He was going to do a Nashville show; Dean Fertita, who’s in Queens of the Stone Age—Tony had reached out to Dean and said, “Do you have any ideas?” Dean panicked and asked me, “Do you have any ideas?” I said, “I have a thousand ideas. I’m ready.” I was just such a massive fan of all of Tony’s work. I’d seen every single show. I’d read every single book.
It was a couple of months of working with the producers, writing emails full of things that I thought we should do. I met Tony for the first time at the part in the episode with the hot chicken, in the parking lot. I was a little nerved out by him. He was having this very heated discussion about jiu-jitsu [with the crew]. Then we sat down and filmed that chicken thing, and he had me laughing so much I was crying. He was exactly as I’d imagined him. We went for a ride in my car, and I was like, “We are gonna be friends forever, you know.”
He really dug my car [a Dodge Challenger], and threatened to buy the same car. I wish he had done it, because it would have made him really happy. He loved that car.
So, working on that show was when I first got to know him. And then much more so when we did the party scene at my house. He wanted a scorpion tattoo, and I drew it for him. I was like, Someone needs to explain to me if this is real life. I don’t know if this is happening—I was drawing Anthony Bourdain a tattoo that was going to be on his body forever, and I’d just met him, like, two days ago.
Tony seemed like he was floating. He was having so much fun. It really was the greatest week or two in Nashville.
After that, I went out on tour; Tony would write me almost every day. We became total pen pals. We wrote each other every single day, and the letters got longer and longer and longer and longer. We both just traveled for a living all the time, and we could relate to that on so many wonderful, spectacular, and bad levels.
JEFF ALLEN: Toward the end, dude had been fucking everywhere, probably more than any human being, and so to find a new, surprising thing about a country that you’ve been to four times already is, like, really fucking difficult. It’s so easy to be jaded.
NARI KYE: On Parts Unknown, the production level had gone up dramatically since No Reservations. The amount of equipment, all the elements of production were drastically elevated. We wanted to push ourselves, do bigger and better things. And, Tony, the episodes he wanted to do were getting more and more adventurous. More dangerous.
TOM VITALE: Tony didn’t want to be a high-maintenance host. He would usually rather be hungry than bother me [for a snack]—and it wasn’t even a bother, because he would bother me for all kinds of shit that was so much harder to deal with, and he could punish you for things that weren’t your fault. But he didn’t want to be “the talent.” He was very aware, I think, of his hunger needs. I don’t think he was out of touch with that. I mean, emotional needs, he could be more out of touch with.
I guess some of it used to be funny, but the pressure was so much greater on all of us in the later years. I totally lost my sense of humor. The stakes were too high. We’d have a scene, and it would go really well, and especially if it was something that he hadn’t been into in the first place. And then after a great scene, everybody was having a great time, and I’d say, “How’d that go? Are you happy?” And he’d totally change, and say, “Nothing to write home about. It was fine. Can we try to find something better next time, though?”
And I knew that he was doing that just as a game. He had very different relationships with different people. Tony was good at sizing people up very quickly, seeing what it was that they wanted. Then he’d either provide or withhold that resource in order to get whatever his end may have been. In my case, it was making the best show possible.
There was a lot of stress and pressure to get it right, in a very short amount of time. Even by the end, with what I presume are comparatively ample resources, it still wasn’t enough. You could always use more time, or money, to make things happen. So I couldn’t not take it really seriously. And I think maybe Tony had some fun with that.
MORGAN FALLON: Some of the most profound experiences, for me, and some of the most insightful ones into who Tony was, were the experiences surrounding the West Virginia [episode of Parts Unknown]. We went to McDowell County, a place that really just had the shit kicked out of it, in a really unfair way, for a very long time. And it’s a place that has no restaurants.
I remember asking myself that question a lot: How’s he gonna respond to this place that’s, on the surface, ideologically opposed to where he’s at, though that’s not true once you get under the surface? In a place where there’s no food, none of the things that we normally get into. Is he gonna get this?
The second day, we took him down into a coal mine, five thousand feet underground. We were hanging out with real coal miners, and not putting words in their mouths, and not trying to use it in a political way. We came back out; the crew and I went to film a homecoming parade, and Tony went back to the hotel. All of a sudden these tweets just started coming out; what he was expressing was exactly what I had hoped he would feel, and it was just this moment of, Of course he gets it. How could you ever question that?
That was the best of him, where he was able to strip down all the celebrity bullshit and connect with a group of people in a really openhearted, embracing, fearless, and empathetic way.
Later that week, we were in a high school, shooting a scene with all these football players. At the end of the scene, Tony made a beeline directly for me, in a very aggressive way, and grabbed me by the back of the neck. He said, “The fucking Secret Service wants to meet with me.”
He had expressed his desire [to a TMZ reporter, who’d ambushed him in an airport parking lot with a video crew] to cook hemlock, a very Shakespearean entrée, for Trump and Kim Jong-un. I guess it’s just a matter of protocol; the Secret Service had to make sure he wasn’t serious.
We were supposed to go to the homecoming game at this big high school. Everyone knew we were going to this game, and there are some folks out there who take this shit seriously, so we ended up putting an armed off-duty cop right behind him in the scene, because I just couldn’t take the risk that some wingnut—and, of course, everyone was lovely and amazing, and no one expressed anything but gratitude that we were there—but still.
NICK BRIGDEN: The one thing that I heard from a few folks was, “Don’t make Tony wait. If he rolls up to a scene, and he has to sit there and wait for the crew to get their shit together, inevitably that is not going to turn out to be a good scene, no matter how great the sidekick is. When he waits, you start to see the kettle boiling.”
I made superhuman efforts to make sure we were ready to roll as soon as he rolls up there. And I did that for every scene that we shot, because I learned the hard way once.
And it wasn’t that he was being a dick, it was just— If he was sitting there with a sidekick, you want to get all the great, juicy conversation on camera, but he’s sitting there silently, while the crew’s trying to get their shit together. So it was avoiding that kind of awkwardness, making Tony as comfortable as possible, because this was his life. It wasn’t like he was clocking in going to work; this was his life, day in and day out. And so if it’s not fun, and if it’s not comfortable, if it’s not intriguing to him, he’s gonna tell you, and it’ll show up.
MICHAEL STEED: After wides is when you could get exactly the line you wanted.* So I would call wides, knowing that I wanted two things from him because . . . Tony didn’t want us there, you know what I mean? Ever. Like, he would prefer that we weren’t doing the show.
And that’s what made the show fucking great, all the shit we had to do to make it seem like we weren’t present. So if he thought you were directing, you know, he called it “stovepiping,” he’d fucking murder you, you know what I mean, right then and there.
So you’d call wides but, right after wides, Tony’s guard is down, he thinks it’s over, so you can be like, [whispers] “Oh, can we just get this one more thing?” And I used tha
t 100 percent of the time. Whatever he said after wides was always used.
TODD LIEBLER: Postdeath, everyone was saying, “Rest in peace,” but Tony didn’t enjoy peace, per se. He loved— I wouldn’t say conflict, but energy. He was attracted to chaos. On set, he would even instill it.
As a camera guy, you want your actor to hit the marks and to be in the light. We gave our subjects as much room to breathe as possible, but there’s certain things, like, you can’t stand in the doorway with your back to us.
He would— I don’t know if it was just him challenging us, or being passive-aggressive, but we’d say, “OK, Tony, just come from the door and stand right by this chair.” And he’d walk from the door and go in the exact opposite direction.
If I really needed him to do something specific, 90 percent of the time, he would give it to me. But that’s only because I asked for it maybe 10 percent of the time.
There was one time when he yelled at me and Zach [Zamboni], and Tom [Vitale]. I think we were in South America; I can’t remember where. Essentially, we had a scene in this really big bar, and inevitably what would happen is, as we backed out of the scene to get our wide shots, all the fans would come in. So, often, we’re running back in, to get people out of the shot.
At this bar, there were musicians who came in next to him, and all these other people, and I went in and said, “Guys, we gotta—” And Tony starts yelling at me, at everyone, that it’s his experience that we’re capturing, so we have to capture that as it is. Of course, it didn’t play well for TV; it played well only for his experience.
NICK BRIGDEN: You don’t direct Tony Bourdain. If a new director came on and tried to direct Tony, they would learn very quickly; Tony would throw a grenade into it. My job was, as a director, to direct the crew around him, and to lead the sidekick, or Tony, into areas of conversation that we really wanted to hit on. It was a lot of prep work, and once he walked into a scene, my approach was always just to let the cards fall where they will. But also, you had these veteran camerapeople who knew how to cover the scenes, and it wasn’t so challenging to get really great stuff, because they just knew what to pick up.
Tom [Vitale] told me once, you know, if at all possible, if the scene calls for it, and if it’s appropriate, if Tony walks on into the scene, and you can hand him a beer, sure as shit, things are gonna go a lot better.
MORGAN FALLON: Generally, I could get one question in, at the end of a scene. If that went really well, I could maybe get another one in, but that was it. It just wasn’t gonna go down that way. He was gonna experience the adventure in the way that he wanted to, and the conversation was gonna go the way that he wanted it to.
And sometimes you’re sitting there dying, because you spent all these resources, all this time, two months in preproduction; you have so much of your heart invested in these people and these scenes, and to listen to him fucking talk about John Wick for an hour, and then call for wides? And you go in, and you’re like, “Dude, can we just talk about this one thing?” And he’s like, “Ehhhh . . .”
At that moment, you wanted to grab him and say, “Motherfucker, do you know how heavy this camera is? Just deliver a few lines. You want to talk about John Wick? That’s great. We’ll go to the bar and order a round of beers. When you’re done with John Wick, call us and we’ll shoot the scene. Trust me, this person is fucking important. I wouldn’t have sat you here if he wasn’t.”
All these people [in scenes with Tony] were highly vetted. It’s hours of conversations and research that goes into who those people are, why they’re important to that story.
TODD LIEBLER: In Egypt, I think, we were filming, filming, filming, filming, and nothing. I mean, they’re talking about rock and roll, or something that has nothing to do with what we’re there for, and then finally we say, “OK, let’s just pull back and go for the wides.”
And then, as soon as we pull back, content comes out of his mouth. You know? So I don’t know if that was his passive-aggressive nature. Sometimes it seemed like he was oblivious, which I guess he could have been, too.
MORGAN FALLON: He had these very reactionary moods that he was capable of. It made navigating the creative worlds with him very perilous. Everything was about how you phrased stuff, how you corroborated your evidence, how you presented things. He could shoot down really good ideas very quickly, based on some impression that he had, and basically those books were closed once they were closed.
DIANE SCHUTZ: He always wanted, going into a scene, as much info as possible, as much written info, any background that you could give, but once the cameras were rolling, and once the scene was going—he was fond of the expression “Stop stovepiping.” We were shooting at the Ganesh Temple in Queens, and I said to him, “Don’t forget to talk about xyz,” and he got snarky about it, and said, on camera, “Diane says we should talk about xyz.”
MORGAN FALLON: We’d all send him bullet points for the scene and hope that he hit those. You’d try to get the sidekick to get those in. But if you were really pushing, that was “stovepiping,” and that was a quick shutdown. The problem, too, was once you got shut down like that, it really fucked you. Once he said that word, you’re not getting another one in. You’ve spent all your bullets, for a couple of days.
You lose one of your major interviews because Tony’s not into it, your whole narrative comes crashing down. You’ve got to reconstruct shit as you’re going into the field. You’d see all of us in our notebooks, moving scenes around, moving conclusions and shit around, because Tony wasn’t into it that day.
But all of that belies the fact that you had, probably, the greatest TV host that we’re ever gonna see, and when he was good, the conversations were so abundant that they became problematic in post[production], right? You just were like, I don’t know what to cut out of this, it’s all great. He was so far beyond where other people are that that made it all worth it. And I think he kind of knew that.
BONNIE MCFARLANE: My husband and I did a segment on the New Jersey episode, in Atlantic City. I was actually really nervous about that, because my husband [comic Rich Vos] is—he’s very funny, and very outspoken, and I was really scared that somehow he and Anthony wouldn’t mesh, but they got along great.
I’ve worked on a lot of television shows, and I fully expected to be sat, and then be waiting, and then having Anthony come in, and do it again, and then having us do an entry again—that’s how TV is shot—but we walked in, we got our mics on, somebody got us a drink while we waited for Anthony, he walked in, we sat down and legitimately had dinner, did the show, and then we all left. Zero direction, zero notes. Nobody told us what to do or how to do it. There was no stopping. When someone knows what he’s doing, and knows what he wants, it doesn’t have to be as complicated as the industry sometimes makes things.
TOM VITALE: You couldn’t win an argument with Tony; ultimately, he would always get what he wanted. My approach in the field was often to lead from behind. In the edit, on the other hand, the best strategy was sort of a war of attrition. If Tony disagreed about something I felt really strongly about, rather than try to reason with him—which usually just caused him to dig his heels in deeper—we’d address as many of his notes as possible and leave the thing that I liked. The hope was that his opinion would change, or that he wouldn’t notice. It worked a lot of the time. In the field, though, getting what you wanted was much more complicated.
Everything happened so fast, and he would always say, “Just let it happen.” But as the show got bigger, there were a lot more moving pieces. We had to worry about turnarounds, schedules, and setup times. “Just let it happen” was not a great business model. There had to be an element of—certainly not fabrication, but making sure that all the pieces were in place.
There was just so much less flexibility than there had been in the old days, when it was just one van. Back then, if something amazing started happening, someone could just pick up a camera and get the shot, you know? In the later days, the cameras were alm
ost unliftable, and it was important to adhere to things like turnarounds and the length of the day. Each different place around the world, there was a new set of rules, and no matter how much you plan, and learn, and preproduce, you can’t really ever know what’s gonna happen.
I don’t know to what degree Tony was aware of the issues we dealt with. He seemed not to be, but he must have been, because he was rather omniscient.
NICK BRIGDEN: The process was, in post, before he wrote any narration, he would want to see the scenes in a very rough-cut state, even B-roll sequences, so he could write to picture. That was always a little challenging, because we had a finite amount of time to get these edits done. We would write some scratch, just some ideas about where we thought the narration should lead within the scene.
MUSTAFA BHAGAT: As an editor, you were just always trying to make Tony excited about the episode. It was always just about getting that first cut, the first thing that Tony sees. It was the most stressful and loaded delivery you were gonna have in an episode.
Sometimes I’d send act 1; sometimes I’d send acts 1 through 3, so he could see where we were going, never any more than that, because I could pretty much be guaranteed that he was gonna blow it up on the first cut. I think the best example of that was probably the Jamaica episode of Parts Unknown. I was working with Tom Vitale on the cut, and he sent it out to Tony, and Tony writes back and says, “This is a beautiful mess.” And I was like, Oh, shit, this sucks. Tom said, “No, this is the highest compliment you can get, because he said the word ‘beautiful.’ You’re already about sixty percent of the way there.” Tony’s reaction emails were always full of tough love, but what sucked for me and the director was he was always right, in the way he saw things and wanted to reorganize things.
NICK BRIGDEN: Sometimes he would stay on track, and sometimes he would take it in a completely different direction, which meant the edit would have to be recut. Sometimes he would cut shit out that I really loved, and I was banging my head against the keyboard, and then grudgingly recutting it as Tony saw it. But it was so wild, because he was always fucking right. Ten out of ten times, I wouldn’t see it until I’d recut it. And then I’d recut it, and I’d be like, “Oh, of course.”
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