‘Roadrunner’ Director Morgan Neville on Anthony Bourdain’s Lasting Legacy

“There’s no happy ending,” chef-journalist-storyteller-educator Anthony Bourdain says while walking along a Massachusetts beach in the beginning of Roadrunner, a documentary based on his life. Directed by Oscar winner Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, and Ugly Delicious), the doc—named after the classic Modern Lovers song—traces the late Bourdain’s humble beginnings as a chef at New York City’s Les Halles to his rise to fame after publishing his best-selling non-fiction debut, Kitchen Confidential, at 43 years old. In one of the movie’s voiceovers, Bourdain proclaims his “adventures are over” after the book release, but little did he know they were just beginning: he’d soon be spending 250 days a year on the road filming A Cooks Tour, No Reservations, The Layover, and the Emmy-winning Parts Unknown—his most indelible legacy.

But Roadrunner does more than just regurgitate footage we’ve seen. Neville weaves in interviews from chefs David Chang and Éric Ripert; producers Chris Collins and Lydia Tenaglia, who started working with Bourdain in 2000; his ex-wife Ottavia Busia; and musicians Josh Homme, Alison Mosshart, and John Lurie. One aspect is evident: They all still miss him, as do his fans—just go on Bourdain’s memorialized Instagram to see daily “I love and miss you” comments.

Neville never met Bourdain but says, “If I was friends with him, I don’t think I’d make a film about him. But the flip side of that is, I did feel like I knew him, in a way. A lot of people felt they knew him.” Ahead of the film’s July 16 theatrical release with Focus Features (and a later drop on HBO Max), we spoke with Neville about the Bourdain he discovered watching raw Parts Unknown footage, the legacy he left behind, and how we can all embody the beloved travel host as the world reopens.

What would you say to Bourdain fans who want to see this film but know it’ll be a hard watch?

I think of the film as therapeutic. The film itself is a way for us all to process what happened to this guy we thought we knew. How could that guy who had that incredible life and was so funny and so smart kill himself? I feel like the film helps people think about it and get unstuck about it. Suicide is one of those things that we are so rarely given permission to talk about it. There’s such shame attached to it, because people all feel responsible in some way, that they should’ve done or could’ve done something, which is utterly untrue. Tony was joking about suicide for 20 years. The film, in a way, is about suicide. But that being said, I wanted to be very sure that the film didn’t feel like a eulogy, that the film itself wasn’t utterly sad.

What did you learn the most about Bourdain through making Roadrunner?

What I liked the most was just how quick he was. He was one of the world’s great talkers. Just watching him go in conversation was always fascinating. But the things I didn’t expect were his vulnerabilities and shyness—the insecure parts of him that were always there but were pretty well-masked in the final shows. You see much more of [it] in raw footage of the shows. As people told me, there was a part of him [that was] really uncomfortable with being a public figure or even having to deal with other people. We talk in the film about the agoraphobia that he developed more later in life. That’s something I had no idea about, and his sense of anxiety and shyness and [this] protectiveness that he had to keep some part of himself away from that public self.

With travel reopening, do you think people will be doing more meaningful travel?

The idea of searching for meaning is something that we’re all going through. Searching for meaning and happiness—if that’s what comes out of the pandemic, then that gives it some silver lining. Travel is so important. It’s important to how we see the world and how we see ourselves. Tony talks about it in the film. All these ideas of “don’t tell me where a man is from, tell me where they’ve traveled,” this idea that we travel so we return home with new perspective and wisdom. Travel is not just to have a nice vacation somewhere and eat good food. It’s really about something much deeper, and about trying to grow as people and trying to get out of our own little cocoon. And so much of what Tony was doing was traveling for us. Most of us are never going to go to Libya, Indonesia, Bhutan. Those shows make us feel like we’ve been there, and that is not insignificant.

How do you think he would’ve reacted to the pandemic? Would he have been happy to stay home for a while?

I wonder. I think he might’ve written a great novel.

Having watched hours of archival footage, what do you think is Bourdain’s legacy?

He showed more of the world to the world than anybody. That sounds lofty, but I can’t think of anybody else, certainly in television, who did. If there was ever anybody who made you want to get a passport, it was him. We live in a world where people are [often] not that interested in learning about how other cultures and other people on the far side of the world live and what they hope and dream about. Tony was the antidote to that. He was spreading curiosity as much as he could. He was trying to spread open mindedness, and he himself was an exemplar of that. I think it’s part of why people liked him, because they trusted him, because he didn’t have a big agenda. He was going to experience things with an open mind and to be surprised whenever he could be. It’s so rare for public figures to not have their mind made up.

I think we need him now more than ever. He was able to bring people together.

He always called himself an “old New York punk rock lefty,” but he also was somebody who hung out with Ted Nugent. In the wake of the 2016 election, the first episode he did was West Virginia. He was like, “I just want to see what these people are about.” Again, it was him not being close-minded, just trying to understand.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler