Roadrunner: A film about Anthony Bourdain hit theaters on Friday July 16, giving people a never-before-seen glimpse into the life of the late chef and pop culture icon.
Even more controversial, Roadrunner contains parts never heard before, as Bourdain narrates the documentary posthumously, in part because director Morgan Neville used artificial intelligence software to “recreate a few things that he wrote but never said “As Neville explained in a GQ interview published earlier this week:
In the beginning I collected everything he ever said about his life. I went through every book, podcast, and voice-over session and put together a folder of about 500 pages in which he talks about his life. There was a moment when I even said, ‘Geez, I could do the whole movie with his voice’ even though I immediately stopped myself. But then I came across a few things that he wrote that he never said. And so I came up with the idea of creating an AI model of his voice, which we did.
We fed more than ten hours of Tony’s voice into an AI model. The larger the amount, the better the result. We worked with four companies before choosing the best. We also had to figure out the best tone of Tony’s voice: his speaking voice compared to his “narrator” voice, which has changed dramatically over the years. The narrator’s voice became very performative and rich in songs in the No Reservation years. I checked with his widow and literary executor just to make sure people were okay with it. And they said Tony was cool with that. I didn’t put words into his mouth. I was just trying to bring them to life.
Well, Bourdain’s ex-wife Ottavia Busia sees the situation differently: