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      Bourdain Documentary’s Use of A.I. to Mimic Voice Draws Questions

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      The documentary “Roadrunner” by Morgan Neville uses 45 seconds of a voice that sounds like Bourdain, generated with artificial intelligence. Is it ethical?The new documentary about Anthony Bourdain’s life, “Roadrunner,” is one hour and 58 minutes long — much of which is filled with footage of the star throughout the decades of his career as a celebrity chef, journalist and television personality.But on the film’s opening weekend, 45 seconds of it is drawing much of the public’s attention.The focus is on a few sentences of what an unknowing audience member would believe to be recorded audio of Bourdain, who died by suicide in 2018. In reality, the voice is generated by artificial intelligence: Bourdain’s own words, turned into speech by a software company who had been given several hours of audio that could teach a machine how to mimic his tone, cadence and inflection.One of the machine-generated quotes is from an email Bourdain wrote to a friend, David Choe.“You are successful, and I am successful,” Bourdain’s voice says, “and I’m wondering: Are you happy?”The film’s director, Morgan Neville, explained the technique in an interview with The New Yorker’s Helen Rosner, who asked how the filmmakers could possibly have obtained a recording of Bourdain reading an email he sent to a friend. Neville said the technology is so convincing that audience members likely won’t recognize which of the other quotes are artificial, adding, “We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later.”The time for such a panel appears to be now. Social media has erupted with opinions on the issue — some find it creepy and distasteful, others are unbothered.And documentary experts who frequently consider ethical questions in nonfiction films are sharply divided. Some filmmakers and academics see the use of the audio without disclosing it to the audience as a violation of trust and as a slippery slope when it comes to the use of so-called deepfake videos, which include digitally manipulated material that appears to be authentic footage.The director Morgan Neville said in a statement on Friday about the use of A.I. that “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.”Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival“It wasn’t necessary,” said Thelma Vickroy, chair of the Department of Cinema and Television Arts at Columbia College Chicago. “How does the audience benefit? They’re inferring that this is something he said when he was alive.”Others don’t see it as problematic, considering that the audio pulls from Bourdain’s words, as well as an inevitable use of evolving technology to give voice to someone who is no longer around.“Of all the ethical concerns one can have about a documentary, this seems rather trivial,” said Gordon Quinn, a longtime documentarian known for executive producing titles like “Hoop Dreams” and “Minding the Gap.” “It’s 2021, and these technologies are out there.”Using archival footage and interviews with Bourdain’s closest friends and colleagues, Neville looks at how Bourdain became a worldwide figure and explores his devastating death at the age of 61. The film, “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain,” has received positive reviews: A film critic for The New York Times wrote, “With immense perceptiveness, Neville shows us both the empath and the narcissist” in Bourdain.In a statement about the use of A.I., Neville said on Friday that the filmmaking team received permission from Bourdain’s estate and literary agent.“There were a few sentences that Tony wrote that he never spoke aloud,” Neville said in the statement. “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.”Ottavia Busia, the chef’s second wife, with whom he shared a daughter, appeared to criticize the decision in a Twitter post, writing that she would not have given the filmmakers permission to use the A.I. version of his voice.A spokeswoman for the film did not immediately respond to a request for comment on who gave the filmmakers permission.Experts point to historical re-enactments and voice-over actors reading documents as examples of documentary filmmaking techniques that are widely used to provide a more emotional experience for audience members.For example, the documentarian Ken Burns hires actors to voice long-dead historical figures. And the 1988 documentary “The Thin Blue Line,” by Errol Morris, generated controversy among film critics when it re-enacted the events surrounding the murder of a Texas police officer; the film received numerous awards but was left out of Oscar nominations.But in those cases, it was clear to the audience that what they were seeing and hearing was not authentic. Some experts said they thought Neville would be ethically in the clear if he had somehow disclosed the use of artificial intelligence in the film.“If viewers begin doubting the veracity of what they’ve heard, then they’ll question everything about the film they’re viewing,” said Mark Jonathan Harris, an Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker.Quinn compared the technique to one that the director Steve James used in a 2014 documentary about the Chicago film critic Roger Ebert, who, when the film was made, could not speak after losing part of his jaw in cancer surgery. In some cases, the filmmakers used an actor to communicate Ebert’s own words from his memoir, or they relied on a computer that spoke for him when he typed his thoughts into it. But unlike in “Roadrunner,” it was clear in the context of the film that it was not Ebert’s real voice.To some, part of the discomfort about the use of artificial intelligence is the fear that deepfake videos may become increasingly pervasive. Right now, viewers tend to automatically believe in the veracity of audio and video, but if audiences begin to have good reason to question that, it could give people plausible deniability to disavow authentic footage, said Hilke Schellmann, a filmmaker and assistant professor of journalism at New York University who is writing a book on A.I.Three years after Bourdain’s death, the film seeks to help viewers understand both his virtues and vulnerabilities, and, as Neville puts it, “reconcile these two sides of Tony.”To Andrea Swift, chair of the filmmaking department at the New York Film Academy, the use of A.I. in these few snippets of footage has overtaken a deeper appreciation of the film and Bourdain’s life.“I wish it hadn’t been done,” she said, “because then we could focus on Bourdain.”Christina Morales contributed reporting. More

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      Anthony Bourdain Documentary ‘Roadrunner’ Seeks to Understand His Death, Career and Struggles

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      “Roadrunner” takes an intimate look at Mr. Bourdain’s career and his struggles, using archival footage and interviews from members of his inner circle.In 2016, Anthony Bourdain sat back in a leather coach to talk to a therapist in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It was the first time he had gone to a session since his parents sent him to one after catching him with drugs as a teenager. He put on his reading glasses, and went through a list he called “all of my ailments and problems.” More

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      ‘The Boys in Red Hats’ Review: Cool Story, Bro

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      This documentary explores the incident on Jan. 18, 2019, when a high school student grinned and stared at a Native American demonstrator at a raucous Lincoln Memorial gathering.Jonathan Schroder’s “The Boys in Red Hats” is a maddening instance of a movie at war with itself. That’s appropriate enough since its subject is the encounter on Jan. 18, 2019, between white high school students and a Native American demonstrator at the Lincoln Memorial. The incident became a viral flash point over one teenager’s grinning in the face of the Native American elder.As an alumnus of the students’ school, Covington Catholic in Kentucky, Schroder presents this film as his journey toward understanding. He hears out pooh-poohing parent chaperones, agitated former students, one student’s attorney and a current pupil whose identity is concealed. Black activists on the day and Covington’s penchant for pep rallies are both advanced as explanations for the teens’ behavior.Between a bro-friendly voice-over and “TMZ Live”-style bull sessions with his producer, Schroder’s exploratory pose comes to feel exasperatingly clueless. Yet the film also assembles soothingly sharp commentators who lay bare the power and race dynamics and aggression at play in the Lincoln Memorial encounter. These include Mohawk journalist Vincent Schilling; Anne Branigin, a writer for The Root; and Allissa Richardson, a journalism professor who sees a “textbook example of white privilege.”Schroder’s request to interview the Covington Catholic student who attracted so much ire is turned down, and the same happens (in person) with Nathan Phillips, the Native American drummer. (I don’t even know where to begin with his weirdly nostalgic story of being punched in the head by a Covington teacher while a student.)A fizzled ending points fingers at media bias and our “bubbles.” Some viewers of the Lincoln Memorial events might instead invoke the pioneering media theorists The Marx Brothers: “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”The Boys in Red HatsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In virtual cinemas. More

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      ‘The Hidden Life of Trees’ Review: Magic Kingdom

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      Jörg Adolph uses the sensorial capacities of cinema to thrillingly visualize a German forester’s contention that trees are social, sentient beings.In his best-selling book, “The Hidden Life of Trees,” the German forester Peter Wohlleben drew in millions of readers with a tantalizing hypothesis: that trees are social, sentient beings, who talk to each other, feed and nurse their young, sense pain and have personalities. While Wohlleben’s anthropomorphic language and seductive blend of science and speculation rankled some professionals, this was precisely the selling point for lay readers: an opportunity to see how trees share some of our own traits, and are worthy of our empathy and care.Directed by Jörg Adolph, the documentary “The Hidden Life of Trees” uses the sensorial capacities of cinema to thrillingly visualize Wohlleben’s observations. Jan Haft’s camera peers deep into tree bark, and the entire universes of organisms therein; it captures the blooming of plant life in rapturous time-lapse shots; it lovingly traces the outlines of rustling, sun-kissed canopies. All the while, the voice-over reads snippets from Wohlleben’s book, letting us into the secrets of nature that lie beyond human vision and temporality.These scenes are interspersed with Wohlleben’s field trips and lectures, and as in the book, his accessible style and infectious passion is the main draw here. What the film successfully imparts is not so much scientific certainty as an affecting sense of curiosity and reverence, which Wohlleben deploys to a pragmatic end: to argue for the ecological management of forests, which would ensure their communal health and longevity, and therefore that of humankind. Crouching next to a 10,000-year-old spruce, Wohlleben reminds us of man’s comparative insignificance as well as power. “The only thing it cannot withstand,” he says of the spindly tree, “is a chain saw.”The Hidden Life of TreesRated PG. In German, Korean and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Andrea Arnold Has Directed A-Listers. Her Latest Star? This Cow

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      Arnold’s new documentary, “Cow,” is one of the most moving films at Cannes. “A few times, I’ve just burst into tears about it,” she says.CANNES, France — Andrea Arnold waved her hands in front of her face, trying to keep her composure. “I’m a bit pathetic today, sorry,” the British director said, tearing up.Arnold hadn’t expected to cry during our interview, just as I hadn’t expected to be so moved by her new film, “Cow,” which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival this week. On the face of it, “Cow” hardly sounds like a tear-jerker: It simply chronicles the day-to-day life of Luma, a cow on a dairy farm. She moos, she is milked, she mates and she gives birth.But maybe those black-and-white patterns on a cow’s hide form a sort of Rorschach blot, because as I watched Luma lick her newborn calf or endure the indignity of a milking machine, I began to ponder all sorts of weighty concepts: love, nature, dehumanization and death. Arnold lets her camera linger for a while and as you’re staring into Luma’s enormous eyes, you may start to wonder if it’s the cow you’re recognizing or something within yourself.Previously known for directing “American Honey” and the second season of “Big Little Lies,” the 60-year-old Arnold welcomed the change of pace that “Cow” afforded, and filming (shot on a farm just outside London) stretched for years. Arnold told me she had long wanted to make a documentary about an animal, but she was unprepared for the cinematic and emotional connection she ended up forging with her star.Andrea Arnold in Cannes. She had been working on “Cow” in between projects like “Big Little Lies.”Caroline Blumberg/EPA, via ShutterstockHere are edited excerpts from our conversation.Did you always know you wanted a cow as your subject?I considered all the animals, of course, and I thought about a chicken because chickens usually live for about 90 days and they’ve got amazing personalities. But for some reason, I just kept coming back to the cow. Dairy cows work so hard and they have such a busy life, I thought that would be interesting to look at.How much experience did you have with cows before?When I was about 18, I met my first herd of cows. I was with a boyfriend walking in the countryside, and we just walked to a field of cows and they all came and sat around me. I remember it really vividly because I was just amazed at how huge and gentle they were. Actually, they were all licking me as well.Really? Were you putting your hand out?The natural thing I did was sit down so I didn’t seem threatening, and I guess they were like, “Who are you? What are you?” They’ve got these huge tongues and they were licking my clothes and my hands. At that point, it had a profound effect on me.So once you decided it would be a cow, what’s the first step? How do you cast a documentary subject like that?I wasn’t sure whether we’d need a cow that you could pick out in a crowd. Luma had a very distinct white head, with this sort of black eyeliner around her eyes. She also was described as having some attitude and I loved the sound of that. All the people I spoke to who look after cows say that they do have quite distinct personalities.You can sense that personality, though I couldn’t help but wonder if that’s part of the empathy and projection that’s created when you watch a movie. When you were on the ground observing Luma, could you feel that personality, too?Very much so. I was saying the other day to somebody that I find it very moving when she … [Arnold pauses, tearing up.] I can’t say it, almost. I find it moving now, telling you. A few times, I’ve just burst into tears about it.What is it she did that you found so moving?I always said early on that if the cows are aware of the camera, just let it be honest. We can’t pretend we’re not there and our presence is going to have an impact on the way she behaves. Sometimes, she did get sort of angry with us and head-butt the camera, but I really felt over time that she felt seen. I don’t know if I’m right, but it feels very profound, because the whole point was to see her.Some of the looks she gave us when I was there, I thought, “She’s really looking at me and I’m really looking at her and we see each other.” Obviously, she doesn’t know what this thing is that is filming her, but she could certainly feel that we are focusing on her. I think she felt the gaze. When we were editing, I kept feeling like, “I see you Lu, I see you.”It must have been an interesting thing to return to this in between projects.And I did “Big Little Lies” in the middle of that.A very different production.Very different. This was a project from a very true place in myself, so it was always like a touchstone to go back to it.Would the farm give you a heads up when anything significant was happening with Luma?We were in touch all the time because that’s their lives: Having calves and making milk is what they do, and that’s incredibly hard. They start really early and they work so hard on the farm and they just do it every day. I’d be absolutely exhausted, and I was full of admiration for them at the end of it.And it made me think about our own lives, too.I’m having so much of that reaction from people, which is really interesting. I kind of hoped for that, actually. I’m getting stopped on the street and people are telling me very interesting takes on how they found it and what it brought up for them.What are they telling you?All kinds of things. Some people think it’s really feminist, some people think that it’s about being discarded, some people think it’s about systems. I’m quite enjoying that actually, hearing people’s take on things.As the maker of this film, what surprised you about the final film you’ve made?I hadn’t seen it on the big screen, and that was like seeing it anew. I guess what I found surprising is that I thought, “Gosh, this is tough.” And I’m used to it! I know the story and I’m very realistic about their lives and how it is and … [She tears up again.] It’s so weird! Talking about it really gets me.I never wanted to explain this film, I just wanted to show it and allow people to have their own experience. I knew I was being bold, but I’m not deliberately being bold, I’m just trying to do something that’s pure. I genuinely wanted to know if you followed her around enough, would you connect and see her? I feel like in the world, we don’t see each other. We don’t see other living things.Not in that way.Not in that way. If we could, then things would be different, maybe. More

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      ‘Fin’ Review: Eli Roth Wants to Save the Sharks

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      The first documentary from the “Hostel” director uses a little expert advice and a lot of pathos to advocate against damaging commercial fishing practices.Eli Roth really, really loves sharks. That’s the newest information available in his first feature documentary, “Fin,” a screed against shark fishing that borrows its most galling stats and images primarily from other places and fills in the gaps with footage of Roth being upset.There is little here that was not already tackled in Rob Stewart’s 2007 documentary “Sharkwater,” nor in the more recent, less artful “Seaspiracy.” Though where Stewart painstakingly explained the beauty, intelligence and importance of sharks, Roth would rather that we love these animals simply because he does. This presents a challenge for anyone prone to find Roth, the director of exploitative horror films like “Hostel” and “The Green Inferno,” unsympathetic.The fishing practices shown in “Fin” are harming our oceans, to be sure, but Roth seems more comfortable painting East Asian people as savages for eating shark fin soup than he does explaining marine biology. (He spends a good half of this documentary doing the former, and very little time on the latter.) In one scene, as he sits down to try the delicacy, he compares what he is about to do with his own film, the cannibal horror movie “The Green Inferno,” in which a cartoonish Amazonian tribe butchers a group of American college students.Roth stands in for the outraged viewer for the duration of “Fin,” his indignation apparent as he repeatedly condemns the shark fishing he witnesses as crazy and pointless. Roth calls a shark clubbing the worst thing he’s ever seen. He passionately pushes for the maternal rights of a felled pregnant shark. He snidely condemns women who wear cosmetics, which can be made with shark liver oil. These words — coming from a director who helped coin “torture porn,” and whose fiction work consistently and degradingly compares makeup-caked bombshells to animals — feel disingenuous at best.There are passionate, knowledgeable experts at the margins of this film: ecologists, activists and divers. Why Roth had to be its focal point is anybody’s guess.FinNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Watch on Discovery+. More

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      ‘Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters’ Review: Still Making Waves

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      A striking new documentary explores the enduring legacy of a dance piece created by Bill T. Jones at the height of the AIDS crisis.What happens to a work of art when time displaces it from its original context, and from the impetus that inspired it? That’s a question that can elicit dry theories. But in “Can You Bring It?: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters,” a new documentary directed by Tom Hurwitz and Rosalynde LeBlanc Loo, the answer is passionate and moving.Jones is the co-founder of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, a modern dance troupe. It grew out of the performing duo that Jones formed with his partner Zane, who wasn’t a dancer when they met in the early 1970s.Zane died of AIDS-related lymphoma in 1988. The movie gives a moving précis of their work-life collaboration before addressing the decisions Jones made in the aftermath of Zane’s death. One of those decisions took the form of the piece “D-Man in the Waters.”The dance was inspired by a series of group improvisations. It was a reflection of the troupe’s experiences, its struggles and its losses. As a piece of choreography, it’s since been performed by dozens of collegiate and professional companies. “Can you bring it?” is what Jones asks a group of dancers at Loyola Marymount College in 2016 as they prepare the piece under the direction of Loo, a former Jones/Zane company member.These students have little knowledge of AIDS, so Jones and Loo ask them to find points of struggle in their lives, as part of a student community and otherwise. The intercutting between vintage footage of the Jones/Zane company and the student production, as well as footage from another contemporary production of the piece — shot with an onstage intimacy that recalls the in-the-ring segments of Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull” — make for an unusually lively documentary experience.Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the WatersNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain’ Review: Salt, Sugar and No Fat

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      Morgan Neville’s sharp and vividly compelling documentary tries to pin down a brilliant, troubled man.There’s scarcely a dry eye in the frame at the conclusion of Morgan Neville’s vivid, jam-packed documentary, “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain,” but this isn’t a hagiography. Bourdain, who died almost exactly three years ago at the age of 61, was many things — chef, sensualist, addict, world traveler — any one of which could have served as the movie’s lodestar. Yet it was as a writer that he found renown, and it is around his words that “Roadrunner” constructs its ominous, uneasy shape.Those words, punchy and aromatic, spill from Bourdain’s books, his television shows and multiple public appearances as Neville wrangles a personality, and archive footage, that’s almost too much for one film to corral. Having attained in midlife a fame he distrusted and a title — celebrity chef — he despised, Bourdain wavered between euphoric family man and fretful workaholic. Though free of heroin and cocaine since the late 1980s, he was also without the punishing restaurant routines he had relied on to stave off his demons.With immense perceptiveness, Neville shows us both the empath and the narcissist: The man who refused to turn the suffering he saw in war zones into a bland televisual package, and the one who would betray longtime colleagues to please a new lover.“You know, something was missing in me, some part of me wanted to be a dope fiend,” he confesses in one clip. That dark awareness looms over interviews crammed with frisky anecdotes and fond remembrances, helping explain a death that seemed to many inexplicable. The once miserable, angry child had grown into a brilliant man who suspected his talent and his pain were inextricably linked. “Roadrunner” recognizes that he was probably right.Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony BourdainRated R for raw profanity. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. In theaters. More