If Tony loved something, he would tell you. And if he hated it, he would tell you that, too. He wouldn’t dick around; he would give you a straight-up answer. And sometimes that would really sting, because it would be an uppercut. But those of us who stayed with it a long time, you would just know not to take anything personally. It was his life’s work, and he never slacked. He would never miss a deadline. It would always be in your inbox that morning. He loved deadlines.
You hear from a lot of people who work with him, how harsh he was, how hard he was on folks, but if you hung around long enough, you just understood it was because he cared so much about the quality. And it wasn’t even just the final show, it was, you know, people who would devote their time with him in conversation, or over a meal, or take a trip with him—he wouldn’t want to let those people down. It was out of respect for the folks who would lend their time to him that he wanted each episode, each scene, to be the best it could be. And so, if you didn’t raise your skill to that level, he would pick you up with a big wedgie and raise you up to that level.
I went to film school. Tony did not go to film school, but the expanse of his knowledge of film was just unreal. Half the directors of the films that he would talk about, before we would go into an episode, that he would want to pay some kind of homage to—half those directors I’d never even heard of. So it was almost like I went to graduate school, working with Tony. He would give us a list of films and we would go home and do our homework, and kind of absorb the style or the pacing of certain directors.
It was a language that we could communicate with, in an abstract and visual sense. We could talk about certain scenes, we could talk about certain shots within films that we would want to either completely steal from or lean into. We did an iteration of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Maria’s dance, in the Berlin episode, just for fun, over the credits.
But there was a certain pivotal point where, after years and years of working with him—he said something in the vein of, “At this point in your career, you don’t need to borrow from anyone else. You are your own director. You have your own style now.”
He saw something in me that I didn’t even see. It was just a really wild moment.
TODD LIEBLER: At one point, Tony wanted to stop smoking, and he started taking Chantix, I think. And then he was being really sweet, which for him meant he would say to the crew, “Thanks, guys.” He definitely loved us, but he wasn’t the person who would give you positive reinforcement, you know?
But when he started taking Chantix, he didn’t take us for granted as much, but that was short lived. That didn’t sit well with him, that Chantix mellowed him out.
TOM VITALE: Tony had a saying: “Only pat the baby when it’s sleeping.” True, he could be tough in the field. He could be very tough in the edits, too, but when something was working, he could actually be quite complimentary.
MATT WALSH: In things I’ve read since Tony left us, he’s been described as being quite hard on the crew. “Only pat the baby when he’s sleeping.” From my perspective, because I was an outsider, Tony was always very kind to me, very respectful to me. I think he made that distinction: insider or outsider. I would not flatter myself by thinking it’s because he liked me.
DARREN ARONOFSKY: In Bhutan [in December 2017], we spent a lot of time socializing. He was much more social than he’d been in Madagascar. And, of course, we really became very friendly. Every night, we’d hang out, and eat, and drink, and talk about what was going on in the world, which was pretty bleak. Then we flew back—I guess Tony never would eat the airplane food—and so we got to Bangkok. The layover was significant. We had several hours.
And I was like, “Let’s go into town. Let’s go get some real food.”
He was resistant, and I kept pushing it. There seemed to be a pretty interesting place fifteen minutes from the airport.
I said, “Tony, let’s hit this.” He finally agreed to it. I found a guy to watch our bags, and then we jumped in a cab, and we went into this resort, mostly, I think, for Thai people, which had fake lakes, and giant golden idols, and waterfalls, and a huge, huge dining area with a big band playing kind of cheesy eighties songs—American eighties songs—with beer—the beer girls and boys walking around, selling them, wearing the different brands. And Tony was just thrilled with the menu, and we just ordered a feast, you know. And Tony dug deep, because he knew the cuisine really well. And then we went back to the airport, and we got foot massages. And I was like, “All right, we’re in Tokyo in seven hours. Perfect for another meal.”
We were landing in the airport near the Tsukiji market, at, like, three or four a.m. I got him out. It was an amazing morning. We were leaving the airport, and you could see Mount Fuji from Tokyo, which is rare. We got to the market, and the main place was really crowded. There was this huge line outside. We just went around the corner and chose a random place that was empty, and had a great meal. It was a good moment.
43
“You Were That Guy Who Got Arrested”
Jason and Yeganeh Rezaian in Iran
JASON REZAIAN: My first introduction to Tony was through television. No Reservations was the only show that provided that window into not only worlds that I could envision visiting, but also some places I had gone to. I was just getting started, postcollege, knowing that I wanted to write professionally, but also knowing that the traditional routes into journalism are fraught with all sorts of traps that can ensnare you in mediocrity forever.
I went back home to California, worked in the family rug business, and would take trips to Iran when I could. Watching Tony on TV was part of how I would pass the time when I wasn’t traveling.
In 2007, I’d been going back and forth to Iran, I was starting to build up a body of work, and I knew the place really well. I built up the courage to cold-email Zero Point Zero, saying, “I would like to take Anthony Bourdain to Iran, and here’s why he should go.”
Six weeks later, I get an email back from a producer, Rennik Soholt, and he and I started a correspondence. We fleshed out a shooting plan, and everybody was really into it. They asked me to come see them the next time I was in New York. Lydia [Tenaglia] was really inquisitive, and kind of tough, you know: “Why do you think it’s possible? How are we going to get into Iran? I’ve got Iranian friends, they tell me it’s never gonna happen.” Chris Collins was a little bit more like, “Tony really wants to do this.”
I kept talking with Rennik for many months, and then he said, “Travel Channel’s insurance—they’re just not gonna take this risk.” I let it go.
YEGANEH REZAIAN: I first watched a couple of episodes of Tony’s show before I met Jason. One of the first episodes that I saw back then was the [2006] Lebanon war episode; Tony and his crew went, and they got stuck because of the war. That was a very powerful episode. I grew up during war [in Iran], and Lebanon and Israel and Palestine.
I remember watching that episode on one of the Farsi satellite channels, dubbed into Farsi, and I thought, I have to find the English version and watch it again, because I’m sure the translations are not necessarily 100 percent correct. So I was able to catch that episode a few months later, and it gave me a sense of freedom, of knowing what was happening in the outside world from a different perspective than I always heard in the news of my country.
JASON REZAIAN: In June 2014, I get an email from one of the producers at Parts Unknown, saying, “We’re about to come shoot in Iran in a matter of days, and one of our contacts in Tehran said that you’re a guy to talk to about where to find a good meal.”
I was really in the habit at that time—I’d been in Iran for almost five years—I was really selfless about wanting to help any media organization that wanted to come do work in Iran. This is a massive country that’s underreported. Anything that I can do to inform good coverage of this place, I’m gonna do. And being contacted by the Parts Unknown people was a feeling of arrival.
YEGANEH REZAIAN: Jason had this email, and he was reading it with so
much joy, and he said, “Oh my god, you won’t believe. Tony will come to Tehran in two weeks. This is unbelievable. I feel like all my efforts are finally bearing results.” It was as if his mom were coming to Tehran, or his family members. So much excitement.
JASON REZAIAN: The last day they were in town, they called and said, “Would you and your wife be available to come shoot a segment with Tony?”
YEGANEH REZAIAN: The food at that restaurant was terrible. Jason was really nervous. He went and talked to the restaurant manager, saying, “You know who’s coming here in a few minutes? Make sure you go and get good food from the next-door restaurant.”
I don’t think they had a good understanding. This restaurant had such a nice ambience, and not good food. Everything’s so old and prepared, and they had plastic wraps on everything.
We sat down, and it took a while for Tony to come. Maybe we were there for an hour before Tony came. And at some point, I thought, He’s not going to show up. Or, He’s gonna just come and see us for a couple of minutes.
JASON REZAIAN: When he showed up, it was like, the wind starts blowing and a rock star walks in, you know? I assumed we’d sit there for fifteen or twenty minutes and then he’d disappear, but he lingered, and for an hour and a half, we had a really far-reaching, intense, friendly conversation.
The thing that I don’t think most people realize is just how well versed this dude was, in so much. I can just imagine him in the eighties and nineties, exhausted from shifts in the kitchen, going home and reading for a couple of hours. So when I asked him about his knowledge of Iranians, Iranian food, US-Iran relations, he said, “I can’t remember ever having much Iranian food before I arrived. I know some Iranians, and I know a little bit about Iranian-US history.”
And then he dove into this whole thing about the hostage takers at the embassy, and how they had pieced together all the shredded documents. They had little kids coming in and literally piecing all of this stuff back together. He talked about the torture of the SAVAK, which was the Iranian secret police, under the shah. He knew a lot, right? But, characteristically, he was like, “I don’t know shit, I know about as much as the average person.”
YEGANEH REZAIAN: The depth of his perspective was really interesting to me. He was there [in Iran] for only four or five nights before we met him. But his eye caught things that local people don’t pay attention to. Also, I have met other foreigners, other Americans who come to Iran, and they don’t notice these things. On the surface, he’s a famous chef, writer, traveler, but to me he sounded more like a foreign journalist who goes to a new place and observes and records everything, and when he’s back, writes about all those things.
JASON REZAIAN: At the end of shooting, [director] Tom [Vitale] said, “Tony never sits around that long. He obviously likes you guys.” Tony gave me his email address and said, “Let’s stay in touch.”
This was really special for me, but also for so many people in Iran. Most Iranians didn’t know who he was, but people who were dual nationals, or connected to the outside world, did. And it went along really nicely with this idea that Iran was starting to maybe open the door just a little bit. It was, for me, a validation of the years of work that I’d been doing. Yegi and I rode that high until a few weeks later, when we got arrested.
Our participation in Parts Unknown never came up in our interrogations, until I brought it up, after I’d been in prison for three or four weeks. I was trying to do everything I could to rationalize with my captors.
I said, “Look, right before you guys arrested us, we were on this TV show that millions upon millions of people see, and we’re talking in glowing tones about this country. You’re gonna look like fucking idiots. This is not gonna work out for you. This is one more example of how and why your plan to take us hostage is gonna fail. You’re gonna lose this public opinion battle.”
YEGANEH REZAIAN: At some point, Jason and I were permitted to see each other in prison, toward the end of my imprisonment. In the very few seconds that Jason and I had together in prison, Jason conveyed the message to me that when you go out, no one should stop the premiere of the show because of our situation. It’s more important for the people around the world to see us in that show and know who we are.
JASON REZAIAN: I had this deep concern that, ultimately, CNN and ZPZ would end up not using that segment, because they would be worried that it would make things worse for us. And when I found out that we had appeared in the episode, and that they talked about our arrest, I just thought, That’s a good thing.
YEGANEH REZAIAN: I got out, and a couple of nights later, I remember that Jason’s brother called me and said he was going to be on Anderson Cooper’s show, with Tony, that he wants to advocate for us.
And I can’t believe that I sat on my bed in Tehran, watching Tony and my brother-in-law on Anderson Cooper’s show. It was so emotional, and so meaningful for me.
JASON REZAIAN: I’ve had the opportunity to meet all sorts of famous people over the last ten or fifteen years, and some of them are huge disappointments. From that first encounter until the last one, which was an interview for my book, in December 2017, Tony was so much more than the expectations. Just our ultimate champion. He didn’t have to do all the stuff that he did. From the moment we were arrested, he didn’t have to talk about us, he didn’t have to write about us, he didn’t have to stay in communication with the government about how to edit that [Parts Unknown] scene.
There have been so many times over the last five years when Yegi and I have said to ourselves, or to other people, “Thank god for Anthony Bourdain.” I get recognized more because of being on that show than anything else. Eight out of ten times, people say, “You were that guy who was on Bourdain’s show who got arrested.” And at least half of those times, people add, “You were arrested because you were on Bourdain’s show.”
I’ve seen it in print, and I’ve heard people say it on TV, and countless people have said it to me, and every single time, I take the opportunity to say, “Actually, no, it wasn’t the reason that we were arrested, and, more than that, I look at it as the thing that made it impossible for us to be ignored.”
So often, you have somebody who gets in trouble, or is missing on the other side of the world, and all you’ve got is a couple of grainy photographs of them, and the neighbors who say, “He was a quiet man, he didn’t cause any problems,” but we had the most beloved television personality of our generation sitting having a really cordial and affectionate conversation with us [on Parts Unknown], that got played over, and over, and over again.
YEGANEH REZAIAN: One of the people who appeared on the Russia episode was killed. And I saw people tweet at Tony saying, “Wherever you go, someone dies, someone who appeared on your show dies,” or something like that. But that just broke my heart, because what happened to us had nothing to do with being on his show, or meeting him, nothing like that. I remember telling Jason that Tony was being harassed, being unfairly judged by random people on social media. Jason was really upset about it, and he was like, “Every chance you get, make sure you make it very clear that our situation has nothing to do with this.”
And, honestly, the first time we saw him again in New York, a couple of months after we were released, that was the first thing he asked. He wanted to make sure that he was not responsible, that he didn’t do anything to cause us a problem.
JASON REZAIAN: It was important to me that Tony knew that our being on his show wasn’t something that we thought of as contributing to our arrest. [On a 2016 visit to New York], we met him in the front door of this restaurant, the yakitori place that he liked—quick hello, hugs, waiting for a table, “How you guys doing?”—and it was the first thing that I told him, and I just sensed his shoulders loosen a little bit, and he just relaxed, and the three of us had the loveliest encounter that we’d had with anybody since the last time we’d seen him.
He said, “If I were you, I would go somewhere very quiet for as long as you need to. Go hang out on a b
each for a month, go to rural Japan. Write a couple of travel articles. Don’t even mention the imprisonment. Do something therapeutic for yourself; take the edge off a little bit.”
People had been telling me that if I didn’t take advantage of this now, my window would close, people would forget about me. I was interviewing agents; I did a whole thing at CAA [Creative Artists Agency]. They were gonna put us on Dancing with the Stars. It was just, like, the classic pitch: “We’re gonna give you this, we’re gonna give you that, does your wife wanna do this, does your wife wanna do that? There’s gonna be action figures, and scholarships in your name.” It just felt gross. We were already scheduled to do a couple of big TV interviews.
And Tony said, “You don’t wanna do that. If you go on TV, all they’re gonna try and do is bring up these really hard memories. They’re gonna try and make you cry. You’ll be on for a max of three to seven minutes, and that will be you, to the world, for the rest of your life. And you won’t feel good about it.”
This was permission from Anthony Bourdain to give a big middle finger to everybody. And that’s all I needed. He was so certain about it.
Yegi and I said to ourselves, “There’s a lot of people right now representing themselves as friends to us, who have some kind of ulterior motive, right? If we’re honest with ourselves, there’s nothing selfish in Anthony Bourdain telling us to take care of ourselves.” His motive was caring for us.
When you come back from a situation like that, you’re in uncharted waters. Your life is different from the one that you left behind. You’re scarred, you’re scared, you don’t know the world that you live in anymore. And the opportunities that you have, and the decisions you’re trying to make, are really different from the ones that you ever had to make before. It felt really foreign to be putting my trust into people whom I didn’t know very well. But Tony showed up for us.
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