Ottavia Bourdain denies giving permission to recreate Anthony Bourdain’s voice with an AI for Roadrunner
Ottavia Bourdain tweeted “I certainly was NOT the one who said Tony would have been cool with that.”
Film News Anthony Bourdain
Roadrunner, Morgan Neville’s documentary about Anthony Bourdain, features narration by the chef and No Reservations host. While most of that audio was recorded by the actual Bourdain, Neville took on the ethically questionable approach of using stitched-together clips, taken from TV, radio, podcasts, and audiobooks, to create an AI model of Bouradain’s voice to recite emails and text. “If you watch the film, other than [Bourdain reciting an email he sent to his friend David Choe], you probably don’t know what the other lines are that were spoken by the AI and you’re not going to know,” said Neville to The New Yorker’s Helen Rosner in an interview published on Thursday. “We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later.”
Neville also told GQ that he checked with “his widow and his literary executor, just to make sure people were cool with that. And they were like, ‘Tony would have been cool with that.’” But turns out Ottavia Bourdain, the widow in question, was definitely not. On Friday morning, she tweeted, “I certainly was NOT the one who said Tony would have been cool with that.”
The day before, Twitter user @rcisneros1233 reached out to Ottavia Bourdain, asking if she had “anything to do with the documentary.” “Besides the interview I gave and supplying some of the footage, not really,” she responded.
Neville has given a follow-up statement to Variety, though it doesn’t address why people might feel uncomfortable with the director using an AI to essentially deepfake Bourdain’s voice. “There were a few sentences that Tony wrote that he never spoke aloud,” Neville says. “With the blessing of his estate and literary agent we used AI technology. It was a modern storytelling technique that I used in a few places where I thought it was important to make Tony’s words come alive.”
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Not sure why she’s changing her mind; I’m told Morgan Neville has an audio recording of Ottavia giving express permission to use the AI to recreate his voice. Allow me to play it for you.
“YES. YOU. CAN. USE. HIS. VOICE.” *audible clicking sounds between each word*
I work for Radio Shack and that… sounds funny.
I work for Radio ShackYou’re a time-traveler?
Great, whose fault is it this time? Barry or a variant Loki?
But Michael Jeter testified in court that it was legit!
Someone still works for Radio Shack?
She then added.“Sweet-sweet can-”
Wait, so it turns out that Neville wasn’t quite.good.at.turning.her.on?
Depending on the batteries.
“Hello. morgue. Anne. you. Are. turn. -ing. Me. On.”Ottavia! That’s wholly inappropriate! I was just asking permission to use your former husband’s voice.“Sweet. S-s-s-s-s-sweet. Cans.”Ottavia. No. NO. NOOOO!
“Good luck with your movie, [INSERT USER NAME HERE].”
Between this and the decision not to interview Asia Argento, this feels like a very shady and shoddily made documentary. I have been told that Morgan Neville claims Ottavia refused to participate of Asia was interviewed, but I don’t even know if that is true at this point. In any case, this is all a shame an Anthony Bourdain deserves better. You don’t have to like Asia Argento to know that the ethics of not even asking her for an interview or statement are suspect. Now there is this. I wouldn’t be shocked if HBO Max pulled the documentary.
You don’t have to like Asia Argento to know that the ethics of not even asking her for an interview or statement are suspect. Really at a loss to understand what is unethical about not interviewing Argento.
Well, from the reviews I’ve read, the movie stops just short of blaming her for his suicide.
It’s one of the most basic tenets of journalism. You give everyone a chance to tell their side of the story.
it’s more like “Well, we’re going ahead with this story so you may as well give us your side!”
Have you ever watched a documentary that gave every single person involved in a story the chance to talk, even every important person?They were under no obligation of any kind to include her.
Yes.
They weren’t but the documentary goes out of it’s way to theorize that Bourdain took his life because his obsession with their relationship had left him in a fragile mental state and when she was photographed by the paparazzi as ‘out’ with other men, that’s the thing that caused him to unravel and kill himself.
That’s a narrative but one that is deeply troubling, because it blames a woman for a man’s unraveling which is a tired as hell trope and it blames another human being for an alleged calculated campaign to inflict enough emotional suffering that their only way out was completing suicide. Bourdain’s suicide is dark and fucked up because suicide is dark and fucked up. But people kill themselves because they take those actions themselves through their own agency and difficulties.They’re marking a really horrific allegation here and don’t want the person they’re essentially blaming for ‘murder’ involved in it? Nah, that’s fucked.
Good documentaries? Yes, obviously. Especially if you’re going to include other people giving their opinions about said person. If they refuse to go on camera then you note that in the documentary. That’s pretty standard stuff. And his excuses for not even reaching out to her are bullshit. He said she’s given interviews so, “I kind of know what she was going to say,” and that he didn’t want it turn into “he said/she said,” and, “I felt like I’m trying to make a psychological portrait of a person’s entire life. And I just didn’t want to be capsized by it.” There could be no he said/she said, because he is dead. I could understand if he wanted didn’t want a single relationship in Bourdain’s life to overtake the overall “psychological portrait” he was trying to paint. Then don’t actually make the end of the film all about that, and allow everyone else to talk except the actual subject of the discussion. Not to mention the director, while mostly diplomatic in interviews about saying there’s no definitive reason someone commits suicide, he let slip in a GrubStreet interview what he really believes: “I want to be careful about how I say this, but for him to feel that he had staked himself so far out on the limb to be made to feel like a chump so publicly,” he said. “That was the thing — not heartbreak. Humiliation.” So he knew exactly what conclusion he was trying to draw.
Wow, yeah. Pretend his partner at the time of his death, that the filmmakers are throwing shade at, isn’t a relevant interview.
Every documentary and piece of decent journalism I have watched/read will have something pertaining to the participation of someone who is alleged to have done something negative and is still alive. Either that person gets a chance to speak (Scientology: The Aftermath had letters from Scientology responding to most of the claims made in the show that they show put up before and/or after commercial breaks, for instance) or a note somewhere saying that they reached out to the person and either there was no response or the person refused to participate (you see this on a large majority of articles on these sites and it’s been ubiquitous in journalism for a very long time.)So, yeah, not every single person somehow related to the person or story, but definitely for people who are alleged to have done/caused something negative.
Documentaries aren’t journalism, they’re vehicles to push a filmmakers point of view and more often than not intentionally disregard journalistic standards to achieve that. HBO has produced some incredibly flawed documentaries so I don’t think they’re worried about someone not being interviewed here.
Is every documentary necessarily a work of journalism? Most of them seem more in the way of Op-Eds or commentary, where you don’t necessarily owe anyone you malign the right to weigh in with a statement or denial. If I want to make a documentary calling out Tucker Carlson as a racist piece of crap, I don’t owe him the chance to deny it, or the opportunity to claim that I misused or buried interview footage I shot of him. I certainly don’t owe him advanced warning that a work critical of him is coming out, so that he can have an opportunity to lawyer up, or to try to intimidate distributors, or to frame the narrative of my documentary before anyone has a chance to see it. There’s a reason why in real journalism, the request for comment is often the last thing you do before you go to print. Sadly, that approach is harder to pull off with documentary filmmaking.
If you are making a real documentary then, yes, you absolutely reach out to the person who is going to be discussed in it and ask if they want to comment. If they don’t, you put that in your documentary. The art of the documentary has indeed mostly crumbled. Michael Moore’s early success made the “op-ed” style become fairly ubiquitous. Where the starting point wasn’t to actually document something, but to weave a particular narrative, by omitting anything that doesn’t fit your predetermined conclusion.
I’m no fan of Michael Moore—particularly, he has this habit of using people who are subjects of what is supposed to be serious reporting in his docs, and later bringing them back to play a part in some “fun” skit or gag he’s thought up to show the absurdity of the situation, which has the unfortunate effect of destroying any credibility that subject might have had. But let’s not give him too much credit: he hardly invented the op-ed documentary. Throughout history, many of the most impactful documentaries have not been dispassionate acts of journalism by neutral filmmakers, they’re works of activism by people with an agenda. Those are “real” documentaries, too.
Man, you watch some crappy documentaries if that’s what you think they are.Documentaries are not meant to be op-eds or opinion pieces in any way. And, yes, they are considered journalism.
It’s my understanding that she wasn’t even asked to be involved in the film, which if true, is a VERY serious lapse in ethics given the accusations made against her. They needed to at least offer the opportunity to comment, just as any journalist does (or should do) prior to printing a piece about a particular figure or institution. You do it both so they have the chance, and so you can then be protected if they speak out later. But that wasn’t their concern here. Their concern was telling a nice juicy tale of scandal.
Agreed. If she decided not to participate, then a note saying that should have been added to the epilogue.
Exactly. The fact that so many people are ignorant of some basic standards of journalism/nonfiction storytelling shows how broken our media is and how so many people are complicit. People want propaganda, not the truth. A reporter doesn’t have to have every source to tell a story, but they should at least try to interview/get a statement from everyone who is still alive/available. It’s also up to the reporter to vet the source and fact check it, as sources do things like not tell the truth.
The least Neville could have done was use an AI to create dialogue in Argento’s voice.
Rumor has it that Eric Ripert among others claimed they would not appear if Argento was included.
Herman Cain’s Twitter account said they really liked this decision.
“Modern storytelling technique?” How far has this guy shoved his head up his own ass? This is one of the more egregious examples of outright fraud I’ve come across in the documentary industry. I guarantee you these bits will get cut out, because if they don’t, CNN will have a nice fat lawsuit on their hands, and rightly they should.
If it’s fraud then he’s doing it wrong by not lying about recreating Bourdain’s voice.Didn’t anyone tell this guy that if you’re trying to be fraudulent you shouldn’t admit to the truth.
How far has this guy shoved his head up his own ass? The AV Club!
You must have skipped half the popular documentaries from the last 15 years to think that’s anything close to as bad as the mischaracterizations docs normally get away with.
Isn’t fraud just a kind of storytelling, though?
– Trump Defense Team
I don’t think that “fraud” applies when telling a story.
This is all above board. Just ask this scientician:
How is it fraud if he’s using Bourdain’s words?They had someone reading Michelle McNamara’s words in I’ll Be Gone in the Dark.How is it fraudulent?
Leonard Pierce saw the movie last year and didn’t have a problem with this.
Pauline Kael gave it three i-spit-in-your-eye.
*groan*The beginning of the end of this place being great.
holy shit deep cut
But where’s ‘Firefly’?
Downvoted.
*tearfully* I see there are some who remember the old ways.
God I love beating that Leonard Pierce drum every few years. What an absolute fuckwit.
Finally, thanks to AI and CGI a new Anthony Bourdain live “No Reservations” will be returning to CNN in the fall.
It was a modern storytelling technique that I used in a few places where I thought it was important to make Tony’s words come alive. Bullshit. OK, I’m sure from a storytelling standpoint it would be better to hear these words in Bourdain’s voice. But when a documentary needs to read something that was written by someone who’s passed away, don’t they normally just have a narrator read it? I can’t think of an example off the top of my head, but I feel like that’s kinda a standard practice, and that viewers understand the context of the words being written post mortem. This is a technique that works just fine even if it’s not 100% ideal from a storytelling perspective. Ethically having a narrator read it leaves things up to interpretation becuase viewers understand that these words were written and not spoken, and the narrator generally reads them without any specific emphasis. using AI to reconstruct a facsimile of someone’s voice seems like an ethical minefield at best, and at worst you’re more or less fabricating a primary source. Sure, the words are the same, but any inflection or emphasis that are added to what is said impacts how those words are perceived, and that effect would be magnified if viewers are left with the impression that it was actually Bourdain that said it that way.
The biggest problem isn’t using the AI dialogue (after all, a narrator or actor hired to read these letters is also going to interpret them, adding inflection that isn’t necessarily Bourdain’s), it’s using AI dialogue in a film that has actual recordings of Bourdain’s voice, and not distinguishing between the two. This guy wants a pat on the back for his ingenuity and for the fact that he doesn’t think anyone can tell the difference, when that’s the danger. It wouldn’t be difficult (or make the dialogue less “alive”) to put a chyron with “AI narration” on screen, so that the audience knows when Bourdain is speaking for himself, and when it’s Siri reading stuff Bourdain wrote in Bourdain’s voice. Otherwise, it’s like trying to pass off a recreation as archival news footage. No one cares how skillfully an FX team reproduced tracking errors to make it look like 80s-vintage news camera footage, they care more that it’s a lie.
That’s exactly my point, they essentially representing this recreated audio as a primary source when it’s not. And yes, the words were his but people say things differently and they’re interpreted differently when they are written vs spoken. Using a narrator calls the audiences attention to the fact that the source was written and not spoken in a way that a chyron doesn’t, becuase we’re used to seeing narrators read things written by the deceased. This technique blurs the lines much more than just having the narrator add inflection or emphasis. To that point, I think that varies from one documentary to another. But a lot of documentaries handle that balance ethically and it’s possible to keep things from being too dry and clinical without putting words in the subjects mouth posthumously. Here that’s going to be a very fine line to tread becuase they actually are putting words in Bourdains voice.
I think we’re largely in agreement. I’d rather this technology wasn’t used at all, because it draws us a step closer to people outright inserting deepfakes into their documentaries and the potential for unethical use is off the charts. But I think that since this technology does exist and people are going to use it (if Neville’s being truthful about getting the Bourdain Estate’s approval, he cleared the main legal barrier to its use), we have to deal with this as just another form of cinematic recreation. The use of recreations—such as having actors play out a murder scene rather than just relying on a narrator or talking head’s description of the scene—blurs lines in a similar way. However, they’ve become a standard feature of documentaries for a similar reason to why this guy wants Bourdain-bot reading that letter, in that it presumably has more impact on the audience to hear the letter in Bourdain’s (faked) voice than in Peter Coyote’s.That being the case, the biggest ethical concern is for the audience to know what is real and what is the documentarian’s reconstruction. The first use that gets called out in the New Yorker interview actually comes close to developing a cinematic language for telling people when this form of recreation is being used: Neville has the friend Bourdain sent the letter to start reading the letter, then has the AI pick up after the first line. But until and unless we reach the point where an audience immediately understands that this convention means that the dead person’s voice we’re hearing next is an AI reconstruction, we’re going to need a chyron or something to make it clear what’s going on, so the audience doesn’t think that Bourdain spoke his personal emails into a dictaphone for his secretary to type up later.
Because sampling is a thing that’s not going away, there is also the potential for someone down the road to excerpt the AI audio in a different product. That far removed, it’s just getting further from a disclaimer.It’d be much better to me, if he had got Peter Coyote to read them like Ken Burns. There is no reason for Bourdain to have read his correspondence out loud.
“There is no reason for Bourdain to have read his correspondence out loud.”Weirdly, that’s not your decision to make.
“If you watch the film, other than [Bourdain reciting an email he sent to his friend David Choe], you probably don’t know what the other lines are that were spoken by the AI and you’re not going to know”. Yeah, that’s the problem. When an artist is presenting something as factual, the audience has a right to know what’s genuine and what’s been created. I think your suggestion of a chyron is perfectly valid. Once the viewer knows it’s fake, they can admire the technical skill involved without being deceived.
“But when a documentary needs to read something that was written by someone who’s passed away, don’t they normally just have a narrator read it?”Why is it OK to have Tom Hanks read someone else’s words but not have a computer read them?
This is what they did for the I’ll Be Gone In The Dark documentary. The woman who read Michelle’s written words sounded a lot like her, but it wasn’t her. And it was fine. I felt her words came sufficiently alive with another woman reading them.
So, is Roadrunner the AV Club’s new Snyder Cut?
To be honest, I was more disturbed by the fact that they have him dancing with a vacuum cleaner in this movie.
But turns out Ottavia Bourdain, the widow in question, was definitely not.This, if true, seems far more egregious than the whole AI thing in general.
Yup. Honestly, “People have the right to not hear simulacra of their dead loved ones say whatever a filmmaker decides” doesn’t seem like it should be a hot take.
Honestly all the Bourdain semi worship and public grief kind of freaks me out.
You mean as opposed to the total worship of Donald Trump by some? That really freaks me out.
would legit haunt anyone who did this to me, i hope everyone involved in this is cool with burning everything they cook for the rest of their livesit’s super creepy at the very least
“We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later.”
No, let’s have it now.
I almost said, “Oh, fuck you” out loud when I read that. What a shitty, smug thing to say when people voice legitimate concerns about this. And yeah, ethics committees exist to stop awful things going forward before they happen, which is what needed to be done here.
You know that “now” is “later” from when he said it, huh.
Deep faking is kind of creepy. They should jut hire the guys from the Howards Stern show and have them construct the narration from any of the TV shows and audio books, if he did them.
I never met Bourdain and I’m only a fan of his books and watched all of his shows, but even with only that knowledge, it’s pretty clear that what Morgan Neville did is clearly something Tony would not have been a fan of. Tony would have totally called this guy out if he was alive today. It’s too bad too because I was really looking forward to this documentary until this came up. I can’t help but think it will make me question everything else in the film.
“Besides the interview I gave and supplying some of the footage, not really,” she responded.”Ummm….isn’t that a huge contribution to a documentary film? That is like my saying I poured the foundation for a house, built the frame, built the roof, added some sheetwall and worked a bit on the plumbing and wiring but other than that, I did not contribute much to building the house, lol!!Some sort of buyers remorse thing is happening here, she seems unhappy w/the docu film but she did not have to contribute to the film by you guessed it, not supplying footage and providing an interview for the film.
Most documentaries are edited together from dozens of hours of footage. “some” could mean a small fraction of what they had available. So no, not really like your house analogy.
“We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later.”
Yes, always best to discuss ethics after you’ve done the thing you can’t change.
“Well, that whole super-soldier program was a horrific mess. Should provide some interesting talking points at the ethics committee.”
A film can’t be changed? That’s an interesting piece of abject ignorance.
A few years ago I watched the Gilda Radner documentary, which heavily used her voice (I assume from her recording of her autobigraphy). They managed to tell the story through those snippets and made it feel like we were hearing her story rather than just seeming ghoulish. If I’d heard that they’d used AI for any part of her voiceovers I’d probably feel pretty ticked off, even though in the grand scheme of things I know there are much bigger problems in the world.
And the CGI Bourdain looks even worse:
It would have certainly been a bit corny, but I was thinking they could have gotten some of Tony’s musical heroes and friends, the ones with quite identifiable voices (I keep thinking Iggy…) to read the lines. Match the voice to the tone of the passage being read.I know, corny. But not appalling.
Anthony Bourdain would have 100% not been ok with it. Besides creepy, it’s unnecessary…