This week sees the release of Oscar-winning “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” director Morgan Neville’s new documentary feature “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain” which serves as a tribute to the widely loved travel show host and culinary legend who tragically died by suicide in 2018.
The film has scored strong reviews with a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes and an 81/100 on Metacritic. Various reviews cite it as being deeply respectful whilst also showcasing the darker side of a man who was both a lover of life and quietly tormented.
However it’s one small artistic choice that has been drawing more attention than the film itself. The movie makes plenty of use of actual voice clips of Bourdain from his work, but there were several occasions in the film they wanted a Bourdain voiceover but didn’t have it.
Speaking with GQ, Neville revealed that he used artificial intelligence to reconstruct Bourdain’s voice and then got that deepfake AI voice to say those lines:
“We fed more than ten hours of Tony’s voice into an A.I. model. The bigger the quantity, the better the result. We worked with four companies before settling on the best. We also had to figure out the best tone of Tony’s voice: His speaking voice versus his ‘narrator’ voice, which itself changed dramatically over the years.”
Neville says the words used were Bourdain’s own such as one instance where a letter Bourdain wrote is recited in Bourdain’s AI-created voice. He also says he did get approval to do this from Bourdain’s estate:
“I checked, you know, 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. I wasn’t putting words into his mouth. I was just trying to make them come alive.”
This choice has raised some obvious questions about ethics – especially in terms of documentary filmmaking. Why not simply hire another actor, edit your film in a way that doesn’t require those lines, or at least include a disclaimer on screen pointing out which lines are simulated?
None of those options were chosen. According to critics who’ve seen the film (via NPR), the filmmakers deliberately wanted the AI voice to blend in with the other recordings, so audience members wouldn’t know the difference.
Things took another turn when Bourdain’s ex-wife Ottavia Bourdain tweeted in response to that GQ interview: “I certainly was NOT the one who said Tony would have been cool with that.”
Distributor Focus Features has also issued a statement to EW about the use of A.I. in the doc:
“There were a few sentences that Tony wrote that he never spoke aloud. With the blessing of his estate and literary agent, we used A.I. 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.”
There may be good intentions, but this choice has ignited online debate about the right to use someone’s voice/likeness by artificial means without their consent and the nefarious ways people could use this tech for their own purposes.
“Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain” opens in cinemas today and is expected to air on CNN and HBO Max at a later date.
