I was fortunate to meet Tony while he made an appearance at the South by Southwest interactive festival in Austin, Texas. He is a bit of a rock star, filling a massive convention center with lines wrapping around the block. Fans clamored to meet him and take his photo.
Apart from being incredibly active and busy traveling the world for the seventh season of his hit CNN series “Parts Unknown”, he is also the sole investor in “Roads and Kingdoms”, an independent online journal of food, politics, travel and culture.
If that is not enough work for the busy Bourdain, he returns for season 2 web series of "Raw Craft" along with Balvenie Single Malt Scotch Whisky. Debuting four new episodes on a regular basis, the series celebrates a new group of America's most talented craftspeople, all handpicked by Bourdain.
Guiding Bourdain through their process, each craftsperson provides a unique insight into the dedication and sacrifice required create things the old fashioned way - by hand. Bourdain says, "The term handcrafted gets thrown around a lot these days. It's become a movement - a trend - that can obscure passionate folks who actually make amazing things by hand." Through Raw Craft, Bourdain uncovers the true meaning of craftsmanship and aims to raise a new level of awareness for the American craft movement
2016 Mike Pont
The latest season of “Parts Unknown” on CNN premiered in the Philippines, during the same time a cyclone was hitting. I spoke with Bourdain and found myself enthralled with his sense of humor and confidence. This is a man who knows what he wants and in a no-holds barred discussion along with his R&K publisher Nathan Thornburgh, bares his soul on his worst travel experiences and where he looks forward to traveling to in the future.
Do you consider yourself a journalist?
“I think the word enthusiast sounds good. I like essayist if I was really full of myself.” he laughs, “I have a point of view and I am very aware of that fact that making television is a manipulative process. I wanted people to feel a certain way watching these shows. For years I wanted people to feel hungry when they see all the food I am eating. The way you lay in music or what you cut away to. It’s a very manipulative process and I enjoy that process. It’s storytelling but not journalism.”
You do have strong opinions on many of the places you visit though.
“There are clearly times and shows where I feel really strongly about an issue and I will throw everything I have at convincing people the righteousness of argument. There are a lot of times where I don’t feel conflicted at all."
"Years ago there was a Mexican immigration show that I had done and I obviously had an opinion and the show reflected that. I came out of Iran feeling very, very heartbroken and confused and encouraged. There is no easy sum up, which is why we do that final closing narration less and less as the series goes on because its 42 minutes. We had to sum up all of Iranian post-revolutionary history in 42 seconds. I figured the best way to do that was have my 9 year old daughter tell it as a fairy story because to try and tell it as a grown up was even more stupid."
Do you find yourself looking for locations and subjects that your audiences will love?
“We never think about what audience we are shooting for. We know what people like and if we cared about that, every show would be about BBQ. Making TV should be fun, it should be a creative expression. To have the budget and freedom that we have, which is absolutely unfettered and spectacular, I feel it is an obligation to make the most of it. "
You have an amazing resilience to criticism and not caring what people think about you. Is it dangerous to put yourself into the conversation in such an intimate way on your shows?
“I am an open book. I don’t have a reputation to lose which is a huge advantage. I mean it’s an enormously liberating thing when everybody knows all the nasty shit about you already, nobody can hurt you and you’re free to say what you want and have an opinion."
"I’ve done many bad things in my life. Awful things that I am not proud of but I think it’s a matter of age as well. I joke about the fact that not giving a fuck is a great business model for me. But it’s true! The absolute certainty that nobody was going to care about, read or buy “Kitchen Confidential” was what allowed me to write it. I didn’t have to think about what people expected. I didn’t care. As a result I was able to write the book, quickly and without tormenting myself. I learned from that experience and I tried very hard whether meeting with a group of television executives or telling a story."
"I don’t think about the fans, I don’t think about what audiences expect and I am not afraid of what will they think of me or what if they don’t like it and I’m not on television anymore. I found that works. If you don’t value your own life, that’s taking it to an extreme, people tend to be afraid of that person. Like a person in a bar fight who has clearly no concern over their personal health or welfare is a dangerous person. The great unifying factor of television is that everyone who is on television is desperate to stay on television…no matter what. Anyone who’s ever been on “Top Chef” thinks about what happens when it’s over. When you are the rare person that walks into a room with a television executive and really don’t care, I just think, I’ll go back to brunch motherfucker…I don’t care.”
Let’s talk about your worst travel experience, and the episode you shot in Sicily that literally put you over the edge and you quickly spiraled into a near hysterical depression.
The Sicily episode featured a trip to catch cuttlefish and octopus but ultimately turned out to be staged by the fisherman, with store bought dead seafood thrown into the water.
“We were supposed to go off with an artisanal octopus fisherman and obviously nothing living had ever been near the site in Sicily. It was heavily trafficked by tourists and pleasure boats. Something snapped in me, and a big mistake with the producer at the time, was he put me in a café to calm down until the next take and I began pounding negronis, 18 of them. I was blackout drunk for the next scene, which was good because the artisanal fisherman was going to take us back to his 'traditional' restaurant. I go back and it’s a square plate with a metal ring full of tuna tartar with an avocado on top and squeeze bottle designs. (As I saw later on film, because I don’t remember the scene at all.) It was a low point. I am snake bit as far as Sicily. You cannot make great TV in Sicily. It’s a fantastic location, the food is awesome, the people and everywhere you look is great, but for some reason both times I have made shows in Sicily everything has gone wrong.”
“It’s become a hideous, funny failure. But it wasn’t funny to me down there where those dead octopi were splashing down behind my head. I felt like I was speaking in manic, double speed for the next week. I couldn’t breathe, my crew was very concerned and there were some personnel changes afterwards. I'm still pissed about it. This is sort of a dangerous paradox about the shows over the years where the producers understand that when things go really, really badly, its comedy gold sometimes, but its not fun for me. I don’t go out there looking to make a funny show mocking this well-meaning but thoroughly corrupt fisherman who was just trying to make things entertaining.”
“I think I give up on shooting again in Sicily. Look, my wife is Italian, I love the country, I love Sicily, but I think if I went back and screwed up again it would break me. I don’t think I could bear it. I will go back for pleasure though.”
The episode in Romania was also a disaster. The government office created a tourist itinerary rather than showcasing the real Romania. How did you survive that?
“The Romanian show we did on “No Reservations” was another example of a show where absolutely everything went horribly, horribly, tragically wrong. It was a misery to make the show, but of course it was a career maker for producer Tom Vitale and it was a very funny show. It’s not the type of TV I go out there looking to do. We are not looking at making fun of people on the show, we are looking at showing people as they are. Which is why it is so painful when you see someone trying to make it better than it actually is and improve on reality and it makes me berserk.”
How do you keep your show authentic without losing integrity?
“There are a number of rules for my show that we have instituted over time to avoid that kind of painful fakery. We don’t do walk-in scenes anymore. You won’t see me entering the house or the restaurants meeting the chef. We don’t do retakes and no thank you exits, it ruins everything. What if you are a Vietnamese rice farmer and I am coming into your house to eat dinner and we do a scene where I am shaking your hand and say I am very happy to see you and then the camera guy says we missed the shot? And I do it again, just as sincerely. What do you think of me now? You think I’m an insincere asshole of course. It throws into question the entire enterprise and ruins everything. It’s already an artificial, weird construct, but with that kind of nonsense, the walk-in, which is of course staged, and you start with a lie and it’s only going to get worse. We have also done shows where there are no two-shots, meaning no over-the-shoulder including us both, which is really tough for shooters to do. We hope this makes an essentially artificial process, less artificial.”
Anthony Bourdain (photo courtesy CNN)
Is there anywhere in the world that you are still excited about visiting?
“If we haven’t been somewhere, it’s because of security reasons. No insurance company will cover us, the security advisors say no. Northern Afghanistan, tribal areas in Afghanistan I would very much like to shoot. I am told we can do that relatively safely. Look, I have a young daughter, I’m not interested in being a daredevil, look at me and how brave I am. We are hoping to shoot in Kashmir, and in Yemen which is supposed to be beautiful but the security situation there is obviously problematic."
"Venezuela, I am hoping to shoot at some point in the near future. There are places I just want to keep going back to and I don’t feel we did as well as we could have, or we got it wrong. I’d like to do better in places I am happy with the shows we did, and the challenge is to go back and tell the same story from a completely different perspective."
"I’m very proud of the Los Angeles show that we did. It’s a place that has been on film maybe more than any other location in the world. We figured lets go and pretend that no one lives in LA but Koreans and we tried to stay as much as possible within that world. We are hoping to go back to LA and do another show there and pretend there is nobody there but Mexicans, and shoot completely within that world. Never show anything outside of it. I think that would be a cool show. That’s also a story I very much would like to tell."
What is the most dangerous position you have found yourself while traveling abroad?
"In Libya it got bad quickly. It spiraled out of control. We had security advisors on that show that were not armed…ever. But by day 2, they wake us up at 1 in the morning and say pack your bags, get your passports ready and be prepared to go back to the airport. Every day it was like this. They said, if we knew then what we know now about the situation we wouldn’t have let you come. You talk about confusing, the people who ended up kind of saving us when we suddenly needed armed security and couldn’t continue shooting the show. We couldn’t shoot anywhere for more than 20 minutes safely. We couldn’t call ahead. Restaurants or locations couldn’t know we were coming. We had to gang rush the place and shoot. Anyone with a cell phone is going to be a problem so we ended up in and out quickly. We ended up hiring this young, adorable militia from Misrata. We were rolling around in a car full of hand grenades and automatic weapons and usually when the host of a TV show asks the security guy, just in case…is it selector on the left and clip release on the right? It’s like… ‘slow down there Geraldo, don’t touch the fucking gun!’ But in this case the answer comes immediately and he quickly says ‘selector on the left, quick release on the right and if you need a grenade there is one under the seat and more clips in the door’. These kids looked after us and they were lovely to us. Just getting me to the airport and out of the country was an incredible accomplishment. Shortly after the show, they all went over to the other team, meaning they’re the bad guys now. You talk about confusing, people we barbecued with and who were lovely to us, probably saved our lives or at the very least kept us out of some very awkward situations.”
“The dangerous times when you are traveling around are often not military situations, they’re desperately poor countries where you are in a public market for instance and you have a cameraman walking backwards through crowds. There are desperately poor uninformed people, where that camera represents a year’s pay or more, and their family will eat tonight. Your cameraman steps on one toe, someone across the room yells CIA and points at you and suddenly things get bad.”
Aside from his continued work on “Parts Unknown” for CNN, next year Bourdain’s name will be attached to an enormous 155,000-square-foot $60 million international market place in New York City's Pier 57. It will be a market that will sell produce and fish, with butchers and bakers. But it will also have one-chef, one-dish specialized, independently owned and operated stalls according to Bourdain.
“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” Graham Greene
Note: The interview above has been edited for length and clarity.
