Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain

Controversially, Morgan Neville includes simulations of Anthony Bourdain's voice created using "deepfake" technology. In a 2021 New Yorker article by Helen Rosner, she asked Neville "how on earth he'd found an audio recording of Bourdain reading his own e-mail." The article goes on to explain, "Throughout the film, Neville and his team used stitched-together clips of Bourdain's narration pulled from TV, radio, podcasts, and audiobooks. 'But there were three quotes there I wanted his voice for that there were no recordings of,' Neville explained. So he got in touch with a software company, gave it about a dozen hours of recordings, and, he said, I created an A.I. model of his voice. In a world of computer simulations and deepfakes, a dead man's voice speaking his own words of despair is hardly the most dystopian application of the technology. But the seamlessness of the effect is eerie. 'If you watch the film, other than that line you mentioned, you probably don't know what the other lines are that were spoken by the A.I., and you're not going to know,' Neville said. 'We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later.'" This revelation generated backlash against the movie. WBUR critic Sean Burns wrote, "When I wrote my review I was not aware that the filmmakers had used an A.I. to deepfake Bourdain's voice for portions of the narration. I feel like this tells you all you need to know about the ethics of the people behind this project." Bourdain's widow, Ottavia Busia, announced that she never gave Neville her blessing to use the deepfake simulation of her estranged, now-deceased husband, even though Neville told GQ magazine that she did.

Featured in Subject (2022)