So I had the show at CNN, and I got nominated for an Emmy the first year [2016]. I was just happy to be there, because I’d never put that in my dream journal. At the Emmy after-party, I thought, I have to try and meet Tony.
People think there’s a CNN cafeteria where Don Lemon and Anderson Cooper and Erin Burnett and Tony and me are, like, you know, “Waffles are good today.” It’s not like that. I’d never run into him. And everything I had heard about him was that he doesn’t suffer fools gladly. So I wanted to meet him, but I was prepared for him to not know who I am.
I looked over; he was talking to somebody. He looked my way, and his face lit up. He did the thing where I knew I was next in line. There was no, “Hi, my name is”—he knew me. He very quickly complimented the show and said, “We should do something together.”
I just thought, What a nice thing for him to say. I’ve been around long enough in the business to know everything someone says to you, at some point, you have to realize it’s just nice words.
My wife took a picture: you can see him looking like America’s James Bond, and I look like I won a contest.
Months later, we did a cover shoot for the Hollywood Reporter, and again Tony said, “We should do something together.”
[CNN executive] Amy [Entelis] was there, and she said, “Well, Kamau, where do you want to go?”
“I don’t know, maybe we’ll go to Oklahoma.”
Amy said, “Remember, he goes all around the world.”
I said, “Everyone’s always told me I should go to Kenya,” and to my immense surprise, Tony said, “I’ve never been to Kenya.” It didn’t seem like he had to be talked into it.
Then we had to wait until the schedules synced up. It took a whole year, you know—hurry up and wait.*
It was twenty-two hours of flying. I landed, went to the hotel, crashed, woke up in time for breakfast, and saw the crew—[director] Mo [Fallon]’s got a laptop and three phones working—and in the corner, Tony’s by himself, smoking a cigarette. And it was like, All right, I’ll go say hello, but I’m not going to get in his space. Hosting a show—sometimes there’s too many people trying to get your time.
But he said, “Hey, man. Sit down,” and we were off to the races.
Tony and the crew made me feel like I was one of the guys. Mo went out of his way to let me know that I was doing well, whether he knew I needed that or not. Maybe he knows that us people on camera need that.
And Tony—one of the first things we shot was us walking down the street on our way to this restaurant. I told him I’d never been to Africa. He said, “I’m going to be teasing you relentlessly about this, by the way.”
It was clear that if he liked you, you got his energy and time. And if he didn’t have use for you, you didn’t. So many of us are giving it away to everybody, because that’s the polite, societally acceptable thing to do. Maybe he had been like that his whole life. When he’s done talking, he just sort of walks away; he’s gone. He was protective of his time and energy.
When we went to see Black Panther in Nairobi, not for a scene, just for fun, it was such a big deal to me. “He wants to hang out!” One of the great pleasures of my life. They played the Kenyan national anthem before the film. And I’d already seen the movie, so I was, like, watching him watch it.
We discussed it afterward. He loved the race politics of Black Panther. He got it the same way that I got it, the same way that people in Oakland and all over the world—he totally got why this is a big thing. He’s the example that other people need to follow. He used white privilege as a tool for good, not as a bludgeon.
We talked about our kids a lot; he talked about his daughter, how they were friends. He talked about Ottavia, bragged about how she was choking people out in jiu-jitsu. We talked a lot about our lives.
He was talking about being on a lecture tour. He said, “Some people have jokes, and I’ve sort of run out of jokes.”
And I told him, “You don’t actually need jokes. People just want to hear what you’ve done since the last time you were in that town.” And I feel like he really took the note. I thought, What am I doing, giving him a note? But I do know a lot about live performance.
The thing that is so clear to me is that everyone was there in service of Tony. That was what they’d signed up for. They were in the Anthony Bourdain army. Didn’t mean it was fun all the time, but they very much believed in the mission. The whole thing was in service of what Tony needed, in a way that on my show, it was not. I learned a lot.
Tony showed me that you can both leave it all on the court, so to speak, in a way that’s healthy for you, but also have a line, and don’t let people cross it. And if you are clear about it, other people will hold your line for you.
I would have paid for that—you know, master classes, Neil Gaiman teaches you how to write, or whatever? I would have paid to go to Parts Unknown camp and not even be in the show, just be around it. I didn’t expect it to be that valuable.
He spent a lot of time on camera asking questions, and then sort of sitting back and waiting. When he sat down at those tables, he never sat at the head. He let the person in charge sit at the head, and he took a seat. And it’s clear Tony had a huge ego. You can’t work in TV, on camera, and not have an ego. But it was like, My ego demands I know this. My ego demands I experience this, and not, My ego demands that you watch me do this. He didn’t need to prove to you how smart he was.
When he passed away, I thought about the [Parts Unknown Kenya] scene on the side of the hill, where we’re looking out over the animals. I told myself when I went there, I’m not going to be too cool for school that I don’t tell this man how important he is to me. I’ve lost people before. You have to let people who are important know it.
So we shot the scene on the side of the hill, and then he called for wides. We were still mic’ed, but they weren’t looking for content from us. They’d pulled the cameras.
We were chugging gin and tonics for the shot. And I was like, All right, I can feel my feelings now. I told him how surreal it was for me to be sitting there after watching him on TV for years, and how it’s pretty cool. Things are going OK for me.
He leaned in and said, “As soon as the cameras turn off, and the crew will be sitting around having a cocktail, I’ll fucking pinch myself. I cannot fucking believe that I get to do this.” And the way his voice was, it was beautiful. It was not the guy on TV. It was Tony.
55
“I Knew Someone Was Doomed”
Hong Kong
Shortly before the Hong Kong episode of Parts Unknown aired on CNN, Tony published an essay in the Hollywood Reporter about the experience of making it:
On Parts Unknown, we reference films frequently—and whenever possible, invite filmmakers I admire to talk about their work and the places that inform it. . . . I have long been particularly besotted with the work of Wong Kar Wai’s frequent collaborator and director of photography, Christopher Doyle. For me, he was always the Big Kahuna. For years now, every time I visit Hong Kong, I can’t look at it without thinking of his incredible work on such films as Fallen Angels, Chungking Express and his masterpiece, In the Mood for Love.
My highest hope was that someday, just maybe, we could convince the man, known locally by his Mandarin name, Du Kefeng, to appear on camera, talk about the city he’d lived and worked in for 30 years, and tell us what he looked for when he looked at Hong Kong through his lens. Secretly, I hoped we might convince him to pick up a camera to shoot a few seconds of B-roll—just so I could tell people, “I worked with Christopher Doyle!”
To my surprise and eternal gratitude, after years of my reaching out, Doyle agreed to appear on my show. Plans were made, tickets bought, equipment packed. [“Anthony Bourdain: My ‘Cinematic Dream’ Filming with Asia Argento and Christopher Doyle (Guest Column),” Hollywood Reporter, June 2, 2018]
SANDY ZWEIG: I always felt like we had a relationship of mutual respect, one that was fairly straightforward and honest. I do
think that that changed with Asia, because then I felt like there was really only one focus. Certainly, that Hong Kong episode [of Parts Unknown] was another turning point.
[Director] Michael Steed had to have his gallbladder removed, and we needed to replace him as a director on very short notice.
When Tony found out, it became an “It’s my way or the highway” kind of thing. And that meant Asia directing. And the fact that that hadn’t been our first thought, it really angered him. I got a call at eleven something at night, and when I talked to him—I mean, I’d never dealt with him when he was that angry.
I feel terrible saying this, but there did feel like there was some sort of desperation in his voice about, somehow, if she directed, that would kind of solidify something, or they would be collaborating again, and that somehow would make his life better.
NICK BRIGDEN: I think there was an obvious distraction in that final year, a vampiric kind of energy suck that, you know, Tony could be on the other side of the world, and still that cyclone would be sucking him in. Once it started bleeding into the work, it was surprising. There was a lot of confusion within the crew. There was a lot of concern.
LIZZIE FOX: When I sort of had a little alarm ring for me was when he shot Hong Kong, the one that Asia directed. That’s when I was like, “There’s an issue here,” just because of what happened on that shoot, how that all went down. That was my first red flag.
MICHAEL STEED: I say this jokingly but, having to direct this Hong Kong episode, then me losing the gallbladder—I often blame my gallbladder as the sort of beginning of the end of Tony’s life, weirdly.
The second that I knew that [Asia] was slated to direct, I knew it was doomed; I knew someone was doomed. I had already planned on how I was going to keep Tony’s focus off of having [guest cinematographer] Christopher Doyle take over. I knew [cinematographer] Zach [Zamboni] was not going to be cool with it. But, man, once Asia took over, I was just like, Oh boy.
JARED ANDRUKANIS: When I met [Asia] the first time, it was in New York, at a VO [voice-over] session. She came in and was wrapped up in this shawl, or giant scarf thing, very quiet. She’s, like, sitting there, and her presence was so—she could expand into this massive fiery thing, and also compress to this weird little dwarf.
Tony was in the booth and just rips through his lines like he always does, just blasts through four pages of narration. Does the whole thing in like fifteen minutes. He comes out of the VO booth and is bouncing around and asks her, “Hey what did you think?” She’s like, “That’s what you fucking complain about all the time?”
When I got to Hong Kong, I met with them in the hotel room that they shared.* I walk into the room, it’s a nonsmoking hotel, and the room is a cloud of smoke. There’s just papers everywhere, and she’s full-tilt smoking, going through the schedule, tearing apart all the work that we did, which is fine, I mean she’s directing the episode, and we’re support for her, but . . . I didn’t want to interact with her at all, because I knew it would just be dangerous for my career. It’s a weird feeling, one I never had on any shoot before. She had snapped at me so many times that first meeting.
MATT WALSH: She was not rude to me, but her influence on the whole thing—it was Yoko Ono in a Beatles recording session. She didn’t bring anything to the table.
Things got weirder once we got out to [the fishing village] Tai O. Asia felt that Zach was taking too long to set up the scene. That’s, I think, that was where things broke.
But, Tony being such a fanboy of Christopher Doyle, there’s no— He had extra-thick rose-colored glasses on for the whole experience.
JARED ANDRUKANIS: Tony changed. The way that she operated as a director, which was so opposite to the way the directors he liked to work with acted, showed me very clearly— Actually, in the show, when Asia and Christopher Doyle interrupted him, midscene, to move a fucking light and change the blocking of the scene—if I did that, if any of us did that, he would have wanted to murder us. [In that scene] he was talking to two literal refugees, but he goes, “No, no, fix the light.”
I see now that the work thing went out the door, for her. And I was like, Oh, shit, this is bad. This is one of those kind of relationships that can push someone with a code like Tony’s, like his top ten rules, she could blow that out in a second in front of the entire world. I didn’t really know how to deal with that with him.
MATT WALSH: I understood her frustration with Zach.* Many of us got frustrated with Zach, because he’s such a perfectionist. I love Zach, and I learned so much from him. But the deeper he got into feature film work, the more he carried that kind of work approach into the scenes for Tony, and we just weren’t able to do that. I respect what he wanted to do, but we weren’t building sets to work on, or spending tens of thousands of dollars to lock down a set, so you could spend six hours lighting it. The old run and gun [approach] was acceptable-enough quality. Losing patience with Zach the artiste is, I think, reasonable. And Asia lost patience with Zach on that.
JARED ANDRUKANIS: Tony called me a couple of times that night, drunk. He told me I had to send Zach home that night, and I could hear her in the background, just screaming, “It’s me or him!” Pressuring this guy to [fire] one of his friends. Tony knew that this move . . . It’s like, you can never see this person again, you have to fuck up his job, get him fired, and make him embarrassed for the rest of his life.
I said, “I’m not gonna send him home tonight. It’s midnight, and I’ve had five beers. We’re going to deal with it tomorrow; please don’t do anything until we talk tomorrow morning,” because I wanted them to sleep it off and maybe change their minds.
It sucks, because he was not operating logically, but he didn’t want to upset her.
MATT WALSH: My heart was breaking for Zach. It wasn’t nice to be around.
JARED ANDRUKANIS: I sat and talked with Zach for three hours in his hotel room, then I went to scene. I won’t speak for him, but can you imagine what that felt like for him? In front of everybody? Zach was the senior DP [director of photography] on the Hong Kong shoot, and had brought on the AC [camera assistant] personally. And he ended up getting canned.*
Zach and the other DPs were responsible for how the world saw Tony as the show evolved. They had the burden of delivering on higher and higher demands, as the cinematic scope grew and grew. You’ll hear that we all have pretty particular relationships at work, but Tony loved the camera guys. He knew they made him look good. Made us all look good, really. And Zach was one of three people who did that job, consistently, for over a decade. All untouchables, really. Or so I thought.
The only good part was that we clearly could figure out a way to utilize this newfound enjoyment of making television; as Tony had said on Twitter [about shooting in Hong Kong], “Making TV is fun again.” Christopher Doyle shot Tony riding in the back of the Star Ferry. I mean, no one lives that life, and that’s amazing. I’m happy that he was happy. His happiness was also a wonderful thing for us to see.*
Shortly after Zach was fired, Asia wanted to walk Tony through a throng of tourists [for a shot] because it looked cool. Usually [with Tony] that’s a “No, you’re fucking crazy.” You might even get fired if you suggest that at this point in his career. And he didn’t know that this was coming up—another rule was “No surprises”—so he’d gone to his hotel for downtime. And another rule was, “Don’t fuck with my downtime.” I call him, ready for some pushback, and he answers right away, and I’m like, “Asia was wondering if you could maybe take a walk from your hotel?” He’s like, “Yep, when do you need me there? I’ll be ready.”
We meet at the hotel; I’m there in five minutes, and he’s already ready. We’re walking under this underpass to get to where Asia is waiting for him. He turned to me and said, “I had to do it.” It was the first time he had ever said anything like that to me; I knew what he was talking about, because clearly it’s been on his mind, that he had to fire his DP whom he trusted for a good twelve years. Zach was one of
the biggest heads you could go after. He’s like, “I had no choice. I love her.”
I told him, “I know you had to, and I understand why you did it . . . but it doesn’t make it OK.” He was like, “I know, I know, I know.” But he didn’t get mad at me for calling him out on that part.
We were all like family at that point, especially the people who had been with him for so many years, but now we were all of a sudden expendable, if his girlfriend hates us.
He put a lot of everything in that basket—he shoveled his work life, his personal life, he shoveled his persona into his relationship, and that is a recipe for fucking disaster, no matter who you are.
MIKE RUFFINO: When he got back after Hong Kong, he came through LA, and he said, “I’m coming in. We’re having dinner.” It was during that dinner conversation that I got a little . . . I guess worried is the word. Because his take on what had happened in Hong Kong did not jibe with what I understood. He was thanking me for putting together the band [that appeared in the episode], along with arranging a couple of other things. I’m like, “What band? What are you talking about?” I had done none of it. It was all [producer] Helen [Cho].
Whatever work Helen had done, he thought I had done, because Asia, I guess—she was trying to kind of maneuver Helen out of her position with Tony. I’d never had that experience before, where he was not on top of it. I mean, there were times when he may have had people keeping information from him, for one reason or another. It was not serious then, or he just didn’t give a shit, but never before was there a deliberate [attempt at] misinformation. He didn’t understand it. And I didn’t understand it. But, at the same time, his level of commitment [to her] seemed to be getting even deeper. So I was a little unsettled.
MICHAEL STEED: She had made her way into the inner circle, and now was being treated as a director—and she brought nothing to the fucking table. All the decisions that were made in that episode, I manipulated her into believing these decisions were hers and could be good. It was a whole game I played with both of them, to make sure the [Hong Kong] episode was something, because she was giving nothing. I put all the footage up and said, “Let me know; I wasn’t there.”
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