Director Morgan Neville's poignant documentary, Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, chronicles Bourdain's trajectory from New York chef to celebrated author to beloved globe-trotting TV personality.
We spoke with Neville about what he discovered in making Roadrunner, and here's what he said:
Q: What intrigued you about this project? You hadn't met Bourdain. What drew you in?
I had questions about him. I think I was like a lot of people, I was a fan. I had read a couple of his books starting with "Kitchen Confidential" when it came out.
I watched the show off and on, but always really liked it when I saw it and liked him and found him a funny, complex, smart guy who is really kind of an ambassador for curiosity, I guess ... I felt like the work he was doing was important work, you know, that what he was doing was humanizing people on the far side of the planet and showing the commonalities and talking about breaking bread with people and what all these things mean.
So that was all stuff I liked about him, but I also ... I just had questions about him, like I think a lot of people did. And certainly in the wake of his suicide, I think the reaction I've gotten more than any is how the hell does that happen?
Q: You wanted to figure out who Bourdain was. What did you come up with that surprised you?
The first surprises were that he was a shy, nerdy guy who just read books incessantly and worked in the kitchen on his feet 12 hours a day, six days a week for 20 years.
You know, like that's who he was before. ... The "Kitchen Confidential" version of his early life is great and it's funny and it's romanticized, but I don't think you quite understand his shyness and his kind of geekiness, his gangliness too, just his physicality and all of that early on.
And so that was part of it, and then just starting to see once the world opened up to him and he could travel all the time, how these things that he had always wanted became the kind of new defining principles of his life. ... And that when he left the kitchen behind, he was aware of the fact that he was suddenly wading out into dark waters and he didn't know what was going to be there. ... So he was very aware of the fact that he was becoming unmoored from the things that had really anchored him for a long time.
And parts of those things he found on the way were really energizing and exciting but part of it is I felt like he never really found a new mooring that stuck. I mean, he got married, he had a child, he had these moments of kind of, oh, I can live this kind of life and I can kind of be this kind of responsible person and I can get really into all these new things ... whether it's jujitsu or writing. But ... there was a restlessness that I think he really kind of unleashed that he could never turn off.
Q: So what was travel to him in that context?
A drug. You know, an addiction certainly.
And again, travel is amazing, you know, travel is great, and so many of the things he espoused were amazing. But traveling 250, 270 days a year -- at a certain point, it's not traveling, it's running away and I think that's something that he never really came to terms with. I mean, I know he thought about it ... He negotiated a book contract to go take a one-year sabbatical and take his family and live in Vietnam and write a book about it.
He had these kind of escape plans or modifications he could have made in his life. And he never made any of them. He never did one less episode a year. And that's the thing that I think most people would've, most people would have said, "Oh, my life-work balance is out of whack, maybe I should work less."
But for Tony, I think it was both the sense of maybe it'll go away if I ... don't hang on to it so much, and that there's something about the addiction to travel and to experience that became its own kind of self-fulfilling obsession.
Click here to read more about Neville and the film about Bourdain.