Editor’s Note – “Roadrunner: A Movie About Anthony Bourdain” premieres Sunday, April 10 at 9 p.m. ET on CNN. The film traces Bourdain’s rapid transformation from line chef to writer to global television host.
(CNN) – His mission was complicated: tell the complex story of the late Anthony Bourdain, a man he never met.
Documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville said that when researching a film subject, he tries to get into the person’s head as much as possible. While researching Roadrunner: A Movie About Anthony Bourdain, he found a treasure trove of content to sift through to understand what drives Bourdain.
“He was a real culture vulture and he devoured books. He devoured music and he devoured films. I feel the same way,” Neville said. “I understood through the kind of music he liked, the kind of books he liked and the kind of movies he liked, how he saw the world to some degree, and that helped me understand his.” story to tell.”
Bourdain’s dark and offbeat taste in music
Music was one of the ways Neville came into contact with Bourdain, who was very vocal about his tastes.
Neville tracked down every song Bourdain has ever mentioned — whether it was featured on one of his shows, used on an Instagram story, or referenced in his writing — and he’s put them all into one playlist.
The 21-hour Spotify playlist features songs from a variety of artists, including the New York Dolls, Sonic Youth, Snoop Dogg and Rihanna.
“I totally understood his taste in music,” Neville said. “It was shaped by that kind of post-’60s proto-punk energy and in your face-ness.”
While working on Roadrunner, the crew listened to the playlist to channel Bourdain’s energy. And some of the songs ended up in the movie.
Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain follows Anthony Bourdain’s journey from being a chef in a New York restaurant to becoming one of the most prominent and well-loved figures in the food world and beyond. Don’t miss the film on CNN this spring.
“I like to think that if Tony saw the film he would be quite impressed with the music choices,” Neville said.
One of Neville’s favorite songs on the playlist is one that Bourdain posted to his Instagram Stories titled “Forbidden Colours” by Ryuichi Sakamoto. It’s the theme song to the 1983 film “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” a bittersweet story about the Anglo-Japanese War.
Neville wanted to use it in the film, so he wrote a letter to the composer – explaining how much Bourdain had loved his work – to get permission to use it. It worked, and the tune made it into the documentary.
“Dave says in the film that it’s heroin music. I just think it’s music that you want to listen to alone. I think Tony was alone a lot,” Neville said.
No Wave, the downtown New York post-punk scene that Bourdain experienced in the late ’70s, keeps popping up on Neville’s playlist. The music captures the lawlessness and hopelessness of the times. The songs are aggressive, confrontational and nihilistic.
Bourdain’s favorite no wave acts included Iggy and The Stooges. Bourdain wrote of The Stooges’ first album, saying it was “an anti-social masterpiece of do-it-yourself aggression and raw, evil, dirty rock ‘n’ roll”.
In 2015, he said he’d never been more intimidated, scared, or intrigued by the stars when he met rock legend Iggy Pop for the filming of the Miami episode of Parts Unknown.
The episode ended with the song “Passenger,” one of Iggy Pop’s more darkly romantic songs.
“It’s that kind of haunting song from someone who sees the world but at the same time is kind of disconnected from it. And I think that’s a song Tony can relate to,” Neville said. “It’s something that’s more tired, world-weary in a way.”
Bourdain’s musical interests didn’t end with the ’70s, however. Neville was surprised to see that the Parts Unknown host liked Kendrick Lamar, Outkast and A Tribe Called Quest.
“There were songs that kind of expanded on his rock ‘n’ roll credentials, but still, I think, make a lot of sense,” Neville said of Bourdain’s love of hip-hop and R&B. “He understood that these artists are brilliant.”
How the Big Screen Affected Bourdain’s Worldview
“Tony devoured movies like he devoured so much culture,” Neville said.
Bourdain didn’t travel much until he started working on his first television show, A Cook’s Tour, in his mid-40s. For this reason, he understood the world largely through films. When he first visited places, he compared them to how they were portrayed on the big screen.
Movie references seeped into his shows, often of Bourdain’s own design.
For example, the Rome episode of No Reservations was inspired by Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Bourdain mirrored Fellini’s style and had the episode shot in black and white.
“I don’t think that was the best idea. I’m sure there was a fight with the network over black and white on a food show,” Neville said, laughing.
One of Bourdain’s favorite films was Chungking Express, a 1994 romantic crime comedy. Bourdain was a fan of writer-director Wong Kar-wai and liked his rich take on Asia.
Neville said Bourdain looked for darkly romantic films that were beautiful at the same time.
Another all-time favorite was the 1973 film The Friends of Eddie Coyle, starring Robert Mitchum and directed by Peter Yates. The film follows dark working-class criminals, and Bourdain used the Boston-based film as inspiration for the Massachusetts episode of Parts Unknown.
“It’s a movie where there’s moral compromise in the air and the characters are trying to do their best and probably aren’t going to succeed,” Neville said.
He also found that Bourdain liked the nuances of the story.
“He loved movies that didn’t tell you what to think or feel when you came out of it,” he said. “You know, movies to argue about.”
Neville continued, “There’s no way we can talk about Tony and movies and not ‘Apocalypse Now’.”
The 1979 war film follows fictional Captain Willard’s journey from South Vietnam to Cambodia during the Vietnam War on a top-secret mission to assassinate renegade Colonel Kurtz, who had gained the trust of a local tribe. The film, based on Joseph Conrad’s book Heart of Darkness, set on the Congo River in Africa, served as a visual reference for the Congo episode of Parts Unknown.
Key questions presented in the film resonated deeply with Bourdain: What did it mean to be a traveler in a foreign land? Was this relationship nurturing or toxic?
“I think about Tony’s life so much [was] “Am I an observer or am I a protagonist?” Neville said in Real World Episodes?”
While filming “A Cook’s Tour” in Los Angeles, Bourdain recreated a scene from the 1950 film “Sunset Boulevard” – where he was floating in a pool just like actor William Holden at the beginning of the film. Holden played a struggling screenwriter narrating the film from beyond the grave.
Neville said Roadrunner was deeply inspired by the film’s storytelling.
“I immediately thought this was the way I wanted to make this film,” he said.
The documentary used Bourdain’s narration from television, radio, podcasts and audiobooks to tell the story of his life, evoking both “Sunset Boulevard” and the experiential feel of Bourdain’s own shows.
“From the start, I just had this idea of making sure Tony could help tell the story, and that was 100% influenced by ‘Sunset Boulevard’.”
Neville’s use of AI to narrate several lines of Bourdain’s written words sparked controversy when the film hit theaters. “It was a modern storytelling technique that I used in a few places where I felt it was important to bring Tony’s words to life,” Neville told Variety.
Bourdain loved books that amaze
Bourdain was also a voracious reader.
Any house
“It was something that checked all the boxes for him. It was smart, it was funny, it was disrespectful,” Neville said.
Thompson’s gonzo journalism, a writing style in which authors become part of the story by simultaneously experiencing and reporting from the first-person perspective, was a major influence on Bourdain.
“‘No Reservations’ owes a lot to Hunter Thompson,” Neville said. Much like the book, the show was about a character throwing himself into a new world and coming out on the other side with a deeper understanding.
marine books
Down and Out in Paris and London is a romantic book about being young, going through these incredible experiences and surviving to tell the story on the other side, similar to Bourdain’s memoir about all the challenges he faces the restaurant industry has been through and somehow managed to stay in the game.
Penguin Books
HarperCollins
“But if I find myself writing in a hole? I always go back to Elmore Leonard. He was a pro,” Bourdain said of his reading habits in a 2017 interview with The New York Times. Bourdain found his work inspirational. Because of the nature of his work, Bourdain also sought out books on the effects of colonialism, such as Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, a work on colonial Vietnam that he brought with him on his visits to the country. 
Penguin Classic
The book, Neville explained, is about being a colonial misfit in a country that regards you with suspicion, but somehow you’re still inseparable from it, even if you’ll never fully understand it.
Bourdain told the Times that The Quiet American made him cry. “It always grabs me,” he said.
The deep connections Bourdain evidently formed with the media around him allowed Neville to identify with how the late Parts Unknown host perceived and interacted with the world.
“I’ve thought long and hard about making the film so that it’s my audience,” Neville said. “I wanted him to recognize himself and recognize these little things.”
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