BOURDAIN: Mmm-hmm.
NOAH:—happening not just in America, but in many parts of the world. Your girlfriend was one of the people who first came out and exposed a story regarding Harvey Weinstein.
BOURDAIN: Mmm-hmm.
NOAH: Your comments posted were really interesting because not only were you supportive, you felt disappointed in yourself because there were many women you now heard stories from who didn’t tell you the stories, and you regarded them as friends.
BOURDAIN: Yeah.
NOAH: Why were you disappointed in yourself?
BOURDAIN: Um…you know I came out of a brutal, oppressive business that was historically unfriendly to women. I knew a lot of women, it turned out, who had stories about their experiences about people I knew, who did not feel I was the sort of person they could confide in. And suddenly, because of my association with Asia, people were talking to me. And, in fact, I had started speaking about it. I have a sense of real rage. I mean, I’d like to say that I arrived, I was always enlightened in some way, or that I’m an activist, or I’m virtuous, but in fact, you know, I have to be honest with myself. I met one extraordinary woman with an extraordinary and painful story, who introduced me to a lot of other women with extraordinary stories, and suddenly it was personal. And that, that woke me to the extent I ever woke up, that certainly had an effect.
So, I think like a lot of men, I’m reexamining my life. I, you know, I wrote sort of the meathead Bible for uh, restaurant employees and chefs. And, you know, I look back like, I hope, a lot of men in that industry, and say, not so much what did I do or not do, but what did I see, and what did I let slide…what did I not notice? I think that’s something people are really going to have to take into account now.
NOAH: Yeah, it is something the movement is definitely demanding of men in all industries. And I think what was particularly painful was you expressed it so honestly, you know, when Mario Batali’s story came out, and then other chefs came out—these were people who you regarded as friends, and these are people who, you know, in a nuanced world people struggle to understand, may still be a friend. But-but how do you grapple with that? Like, how do you wrap your head around that? What do you aim to do going forward? Will you go, like, “As Anthony Bourdain, I have a platform, I have, you know, an imprint. I have access to this world, of chefs, of restaurants…” What do you aspire to now?
BOURDAIN: Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve been in the—it’s been about 20 years since I’ve been in the industry, and I have been removed from it. But, I mean, look, no matter how much I admire someone, or respected their work, you know, I’m pretty much Mean the Merciless on this issue right now. You know, I’m not in a forgiving state of mind. I mean, that shit ain’t okay.
[Audience applause and cheering]
NOAH: The business that you are in now involves not just travelling around the world, but helping people of diverse backgrounds have a voice writing cookbooks, telling their stories about their parts that are unknown. You, Anthony Bourdain, you could have just done it for yourself. Why was it so important for you to get these people involved, and to help them get their stories out there?
BOURDAIN: Um, you know, I’m one of those annoying people, if I read a book, or see a movie, or listen to a record I really, really like, If I could I’d come over to your house and shove it in your hands, and sit there and you know, listen to it with you to make sure you don’t miss anything, or re-read every line, you know?
NOAH: That is an annoying person. [Laughing] Yeah, I know those people.
BOURDAIN: I’m passionate to the point of being evangelical about things that I love, that give me pleasure, and make me excited. And, um, you know I didn’t really travel until I was forty-two years old, I spent my whole life in kitchens. I’d seen nothing of the world. So, this is all still relatively new to me. People have been very kind to me. I feel very, very, very fortunate. So as a publisher, as somebody who puts people from all over the world on television, you know, to a great extent it is a selfish act because I’m having fun, I enjoy it, it makes me feel good. But I’m also, um, coming to as many people’s houses as possible, and sitting down next to them, and watching the movie next to them and saying, you know, I want you to notice this. I want you to see how awesome these places are. I don’t feel like I’m an advocate, or a spokesperson for anything. I’m just, you know, I’m an enthusiastic son of a bitch. And I’m having a really good time, and the things that make me happy, uh, you know, especially if I feel it’s somebody who’s not reaching a wider audience, well I’d like to help.
NOAH: I love that, man. Anthony Bourdain, “enthusiastic son of a bitch.” Thank you so much for being on the show.
BOURDAIN: Thank you.
NOAH: Anthony Bourdain, everybody!
* Donald Trump’s physician had recently released the results of his examination of the President, claiming this was his weight, to derision from the press, which noted that Trump was obviously heavier than that.
THE LAST INTERVIEW: ANTHONY BOURDAIN ON ASIA ARGENTO, HIS FAVORITE MOVIES, AND WHY DONALD TRUMP WOULD BE A TERRIBLE DINNER COMPANION
INTERVIEW WITH ERIC KOHN
INDIEWIRE
JUNE 3, 2018
Anthony Bourdain watched thirty minutes of Baby Driver before he walked out of the movie theater. “It rubbed me the wrong way from the beginning,” he said, looking back on an experience that led him to tweet “Fuck BABY DRIVER” to his millions of followers. “I felt like right away I knew what was going to happen to everybody in the cast. I just felt it was telegraphed so early and painfully. I had a violent physical reaction. I stumbled out the theater in a pit of depression and fury.”
That’s the thing about Bourdain, who has spent two decades hosting food shows with a unique blend of machismo, travel fever, and cultural inquiry: A television personality who’s a creature of cinema, he devours movies almost as frequently as the cuisines at the center of his show. And in all instances, he’s man of discerning tastes.
“When you called, I was watching Edge of Darkness, with Mel Gibson, which is this horrifyingly bad film based on this incredibly great five-hour British series,” he said, picking up the phone on a Thursday afternoon in between shoots. “I’m mesmerized by its awfulness. Some things should never be remade.”
That said, Bourdain often indulges in remakes and homages within his shows. On CNN’s Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, which he’s hosted for five years, his cinematic influences often overshadow the food in the various countries he travels. “It’s always been, to one extent or another, a stealth food show,” he said. “We pretend it’s about food. It rarely is. We always talk about films first, before we head to a location, for visual cues, for sound, for editing. We love nothing more than duping, emulating, or riffing on a film that few of our audiences have actually seen.”
A PERFECT MATCH
On his show, Bourdain has spent time with film luminaries ranging from Frances Ford Coppola to Darren Aronofsky, but the June 3 episode is an especially potent reflection of his cinephilia: “Hong Kong” finds Bourdain celebrating the city through his longtime affection for Wong Kar-wai movies, sampling expressionistic clips from Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love, and hanging around the city with the filmmaker’s rambunctious cinematographer Christopher Doyle. Watching Doyle, a kooky ball of energy whose grey hair and lanky figure resemble Bourdain enough to make them look like brothers, it’s a wonder it took so long for their paths to cross. “He was a hero to me,” Bourdain said. “I had hoped and planned to just do a couple of scenes with the guy, talk about his films, how he looked at Hong Kong, what he looked for there.”
Instead, Doyle zipped around Hong Kong with Bourdain and his crew, talking through his creative philosophy and introducing him to various locals. Ultimately, Doyle took charge of the camerawork—in the show, he arrives late to one restaurant sit-down a
nd forces the team to redo the setup—and served as one of three credited cinematographers. “It was this wonderful, magical sort of kismet,” Bourdain said.
Speaking to the host as they roam the city, Doyle expresses a series of philosophies that resonate with Bourdain’s own. “Our job as artists is to show you the world you think you know and celebrate it,” the camera guru says at one point, later adding, “If we try to be as true as possible to the way we see things, perhaps, perhaps, it translates [and] gives voice to the unspoken.”
The forty-two-minute episode celebrates Wong and Doyle’s work, but in a broader sense, it feels like a natural extension of Bourdain’s homegrown oeuvre—it’s a lush, riveting overview of Hong Kong’s history, its struggles with gentrification, and multicultural inhabitants. They just happen to be eating great food, too.
The episode also points to another new collaborator in Bourdain’s life: Actress and filmmaker Asia Argento, Bourdain’s girlfriend, served as a last-minute director when the original director fell ill. (The couple first met when Argento appeared on the show’s eighth season in 2016.)
It’s a welcome new chapter for Argento, who has spent months contending with being one of several victims of sexual abuse by Harvey Weinstein to speak out about it. With the episode airing a week after Weinstein’s courtroom arraignment, Argento declined to be interviewed about her experience on the show, but in an official Q&A posted to CNN’s site, she said she “happily made this leap into the unknown,” and noted that her experience acting in Olivier Assayas’ 2007 Hong Kong thriller Boarding Gate prepared her for the challenge of running around the city with a camera. “I felt a kinship with the organized chaos,” she said.
For Bourdain, bringing Argento further into his professional world proved to be a natural extension of their bond. “Look, anytime I can get work out of Asia, even random suggestions, like when she calls me mid-show to make me aware of a Nigerian psychedelic rock scene of the mid-to-late-’70s—that’s a huge help to the show,” he said. “I’d love to have her a continuing director. I just don’t think we can afford her. But, my god, I’d love nothing more than to repeat the experience. She made it incredible.”
Argento’s own work on both sides of the camera tends toward rough, visceral narrative experiences, and her sensibilities prove a natural union with Bourdain, whose baritone voiceover and John Wayne swagger sits at the cross-section of Hong Kong’s evolving identity. From a swift overview of the city’s growth from a fishing village into a global center of urban development, the episode careens through beguiling locations: upscale cantonese eatery Happy Paradise, a grimy punk rock club where he dines with a young band named David Boring, tranquil boat rides, and a Ghanaian restaurant for African refugees.
Doyle frequently usurps Bourdain’s penchant for poetic observations. Considering the impact of construction and rising costs of living for the city’s older population, Doyle asserts, “We can’t change the evolution of history or gentrification—but at least we can see what we’re losing.” He’s joined by filmmaker Jenny Suen, who co-directed The White Girl with Doyle last year. Suen’s perspective rescues the episode from the lingering possibility of an Orientalist simplification. In considering the challenges of representing the culture for non-Chinese audiences, she concludes, “The only way is not to be cynical about it.”
AN INQUISITIVE SPIRIT
This has been Bourdain’s own ethos as he has settled into his groove. “I’m there to listen,” he said, reflecting on a scene in the episode where an African man notes over one meal that he has been stuck in Hong Kong ever since the Trump Administration’s travel ban has prevented him from traveling to the U.S. “I don’t go in asking hard-news questions, but incredibly enough, again and again, just by sitting down with people over food and giving them a platform where I can listen to them, they say extraordinary things that can be very political in their implications.” He pointed to an episode last year, set in Laos, where he dines with the victim of American attacks during the Vietnam war. “It’s obscene to sit there enjoying a platter of half chicken when somebody in the room with you has been injured by landmines or American explosives,” he said.
Though he’s an outspoken critic of many issues in his public life, Bourdain has tip-toed around politics for much of his show, with the exception of the current season opener in West Virginia. “I went into West Virginia with a political agenda in the sense that I wanted to go in and just let people speak for themselves,” he said, referring to the Trump supporters in the program. “I wanted to give them a break in spite of any preconceptions I might have had.”
However, while he shared a beer with Barack Obama last season in Hanoi, Bourdain sees no potential to bring the current president onto his program. “I talked to President Obama as a father, as a parent, as a famous guy, who deals with that, being looked at—in his case, guarded at a restaurant, unable to go out for a beer,” Bourdain said. “I asked him very general questions to which he gave thoughtful, honest, reflective, and entertaining answers. I can’t honestly say there’s any reason to expect that kind of experience with our current president, who seems to have few interests beyond himself. That’s not interesting dinner company.”
Bourdain has explored dozens of countries through the four iterations of his show, but a few continue to elude him: Venezuela (“We just can’t get an insurance company to cover us”), Afghanistan (“We keep trying”), Yemen (“The security situation is impossible”), and Somalia. “They’re all beautiful countries with incredible stories other than conflict, terrorism and war,” he said. As for North Korea: “I think under current circumstances it would be in really poor taste to do that,” he said. “I mean, the people are starving. I do a food-based show, ostensibly. If you see the hard news coverage, you’re so limited in what you’re allowed to see. They create a comfortable bubble for you at best; they clear everything. We look for natural, authentic experience and that would be impossible for us in North Korea.”
CINEPHILE FOR LIFE
Bourdain said he spends more time in between shoots talking about movies with his crew. He cited a flurry of directors—Antonioni, Truffaut, Kurosawa, Fellini, Godard and Cassavetes—that he expected anyone working with him to know well. “I can’t really even start a conversation unless you’re already familiar with those guys,” he said, adding that he also likes “great, trashy drive films from the ‘70s,” particularly the ones directed by Peter Yates. “There’s a baseline: Do you really like films? It’s a requirement,” he said. “With some directors, if you don’t know them, it’s weird.”
Bourdain was raised in New Jersey in the ‘60s and ‘70s, when his father worked at a camera store in New York that had a rentable 16mm projector. “I grew up with really great films being shown in my house on weekends for family and a few friends,” he said. “I’d probably seen the entire Janus Films collection by the time I was twelve. My parents were the sort of people who went to theaters to see Bergman and Antonioni. Filmmakers were respected in my house from the beginning.” He delights in fusing his cinephilia with the design of the show: Anticipating the latest installment, his Buenos Aires episode is an explicit homage to Wong’s Happy Together, while the editing style of the Paraguay episode was inspired by Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey.
He also lists directors who are more obscure to Western audiences, such as Kinji Fukasaku and Shinya Tsukamoto, as key influences. “That’s a fun part of making the show—getting to make small, cheap versions or homages to things that we love,” he said.
Bourdain lives much of his life in transit, and watches a lot of movies when he’s on the move. He rarely gets a chance to see new releases, though he did catch Black Panther during a stop in Nairobi. “It was a religious experience,” he said. He tends to work through entire directors’ filmographies. Recently, he said, he had been on a Bertolucci kick, until Argento insisted they focus on Pasolini. “When we’re not shooting, we sit around tal
king about movies,” he said.
Bourdain’s relationship with Argento has overlapped with a dramatic chapter in her life, as the revelations about Weinstein’s behavior included her own disclosures in Ronan Farrow’s Pulitzer-winning story for the New Yorker. Argento endured traumatizing backlash from the media in her native Italy, and she fled the country as a result; she has been flinging a mixture of invective and messages of empowerment from her Twitter feed for months. “It’s been a huge part of our life,” Bourdain said. “As you can probably imagine, it’s been very hard and continues to be very hard for Asia, but at the same time, it’s inspiring. She’s at the center of a conversation with a lot of women who want to share. That’s something she takes really, really seriously.”
Case in point: When Argento came to the Cannes Film Festival to present the best actress prize, she took the opportunity to call out the hypocrisy in the room. “In 1997, I was raped by Harvey Weinstein here at Cannes,” she said. “This festival was his hunting ground…He will live in disgrace, shunned by a film community that once embraced him and covered up his crimes. And even tonight, sitting among you, there are those who still have to be held accountable for their conduct against women for behavior that does not belong in this industry.” (Argento later tweeted that only Spike Lee congratulated her for her remarks.)
This is the speech I wrote and spoke out loud tonight at Cannes. For all the brave women who came forward denouncing their predators, and for all the brave women who will come forward in the future. We got the power #metoo pic.twitter.com/ttJN1pNFxR
—Asia Argento @AsiaArgento May 19, 2018
Anthony Bourdain: The Last Interview Page 8