Tony Bourdain via Bon App, not Andrew Zimmern
Here's a funny interview/PR plug from CNN via Bon App with Tony Bourdain talking about his new show on CNN, but not mentioning the water thrown through the windows after the train leaves Yangoon. This show will obviously have much larger budgets than his efforts at his previous channel, which will remain unnamed, so we hope for the best. He's funny and a former junkie. What's not to love?
The folks at Bon App have apparently never heard of a paragraph or page break, so this is the unedited mess they posted on their website. Editors, where are you? Note: I've cleaned up most of the copy, and this is a much more readable post than the link I have provided above. Tony could care less, but I like to keep things clean.
Anthony Bourdain's new show, Parts Unknown, premieres on CNN this Sunday. And right from the get-go, it's a little more ambitious than No Reservations, his long-running show on the Travel Channel. The first season has Bourdain traveling to places like Burma, Libya, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Not exactly anyone's idea of a dream vacation.
The show itself sounds fascinating, but when you're trying to make television in locations that are that war-ridden, remote, and possibly dangerous--Bourdain has already called the Congo episode "the most terrifying, stressful, physically difficult shoot of my life"--you know there have to be some good behind-the-scene stories.
So we called up Tom Vitale, the director who went with Bourdain to shoot the Burma, Libya, Congo, and Spain episodes of Parts Unknown, to ask a few questions about what it's like to make a food show in some of the world's most precarious locations.
What was the biggest punch you had to roll with for this new season?
Burma is sort of just opening up right now, and there are a lot of tourists going there. Not a lot compared to any other country in the region, but the infrastructure in Burma is totally not capable of handling the people who want to go. So even though we planned very early, we couldn't get plane tickets for the whole crew to get to Bagan, Burma's ancient capital. Which meant that half of us had to take an overnight train, which I thought was pretty cool, and we could actually film that. We were told it was a ten-and-a-half-hour ride, but it ended up being 19 hours, all pure terror. It seemed like there had been no work on the infrastructure there since the British left. We were bouncing around so much, it was a million times more terrifying, exciting, and fun than any roller coaster you would go on. We've been on a lot of old trains around the world, but this one certainly takes the cake. You would literally fly out of your seat when it was going fast, bouncing over twisted, warped, tracks with old train carriages. We had sleeping cars, and you'd wake up in mid-air only to, two seconds later, whack back down into your berth.
Was it hard to shoot in Burma?
Because they have this repressive government in Burma, we thought it would be hard to shoot there, but the access there was very cool. We had no minder, at least as far as we could tell, unlike China.
"As far as you could tell"?
The only reason I say "as far as we could tell" is that we were shocked that nobody seemed to be watching us. I mean, even just a couple years ago, if you were seen talking to a westerner in Burma, someone would take down your name, and there would be a knock on your door at 2 in the morning.
Do you typically have government minders?
In nicer places, like Vietnam, without as much political strife, you always have a minder, it's just one of those communist things. But there didn't seem to be one in Burma, unless it was someone who was very sophisticated and never got in our way. But it's sort of paranoid to think that was happening. They knew where we were going, and we stayed in the confines of the tourist triangle, not the ethnic regions on the border, where fighting's still going on.
It was really just shocking there, not just because the government wasn't involved but because the people were so involved. If you compare Burma to some places in Eastern Europe where they haven't had a communist government in 20 years but people are still paranoid, people in Burma were so open with us. We went in prepared for people to button up anytime politics came up, but that did not happen at all.
How did the decision get made to shoot in the Congo?
Part of the reason Tony's always wanted to go there is because of Heart of Darkness, which was written about the Congo River itself. Tony was a sort of armchair traveler long before he dreamt that he would see the world, and he likes a real literary adventure. So the Congo was always on his list because people wouldn't think it was possible, or give us money to go there, which made him want to go all the more. So we started in Goma, you have to go through Rwanda to get to the eastern part of the country, and then went to Kisangani, which was Inner Station, where Kurtz was, though that was obviously a long time ago. It's a big city now.
What was filming in the Democratic Republic of the Congo like?
Congo was definitely one of the more challenging locations we've worked in, but we had a great fixing team of locals who helped us get what we want. Goma was a really heartbreaking place that made Port-au-Prince in Haiti look like Club Med; I was surprised by how rough that was. But Kisangani, in the center of the country, it was still an unstable place, definitely, but one of the big surprises was how nice and friendly everyone was, considering all the shit they've had to deal with, for, I mean, 100 years.
What was the food like?
Congo is not a food lover's land, but the piri-piri peppers were excellent, spicy. There' s a lot of grilled meat you'll have, because it's one of the safe ways to not get sick, because it's cooked right there in front of you. The lack of plumbing in a place like the Congo presents a lot of issues when it comes to food safety. We never got sick, but we're all pretty good at that. You have to have a cast-iron stomach to make it on this show.
In more remote locations like that, does the crew tend to draw crowds?
In a place like the Congo, on the street, you do draw a lot of attention and people do swarm the cameras at that point, but going back to how we roll with the punches, we got a lot of interesting footage trying to get regular street scenes. Within 30 seconds, there would be about 50 kids trying to get up in the camera lens, so it just becomes a part of the show.
In Europe, nobody cares, which makes it a very easy place to film. In Asia, people know who Tony is because he's very popular there. You have a problem with people interrupting scenes for an autograph or picture. He's very gracious about it, more so than me--I just want to get back to shooting. In Congo, it wasn't about us, it was just six white people, which is a pretty rare sight for them, especially with cameras, at least in Kisangani. Goma gets more foreigners, but really very few people go to Kisangani.
Have people ever really harassed the crew, or tried to steal equipment?
The only time I've ever had a camera stolen was in Naples, and we're talking 70 shows at least. It was in the back of the van, and the driver was supposed to be watching things, but he was on the phone or something--the city is notorious for pickpockets, anyway.
Do you get much hostility from the people who live where you're filming?
In general, people treat us really really well, even in places where they don't particularly like Americans. I think it comes back to the food: we're interested in being there, we're not going there to exploit people. Tony generally wants to share a meal with people, and food is how a lot of people express a better part of themselves.
Europe is probably one of the places where we're not treated as nicely, not that we're treated poorly, but nobody cares. There's a lot of "You're not going to inconvenience our restaurant, I don't care about your TV show."
How about in Libya?
Libya was a shockingly friendly place. I think because for so long, Qaddafi was telling everyone how awful the West was and how evil they were, and everyone was just so sick of Qaddafi. Western culture in Libya, unlike some other places in the Middle East, is viewed as a beacon of freedom. We went to one restaurant, Uncle Kentaki, it was a complete rip-off of KFC-slash-McDonald's, such a bizarre place. And you see people really gravitating towards western culture there, you see that in the music and what people are wearing.
How was the food there?
When you say Libya, people think of a desert country, but most of the population is on the Mediterranean coast, and it just has this amazing bounty of unbelievable seafood. We killed, or, not we personally, but we killed a sheep at a barbecue in Misrata, which was a lot of fun. And they actually have pasta--some people claim that it's where pasta was invented, but it's more likely a holdover from the days of Italian colonialism under Mussolini. We had a very interesting sheep ragu pasta.
What's it like making a food show in places where some people might not have enough to go around?
Well, there's food everywhere. Even in the Congo, people are still eating. The question is, is it varied and different, will it look good on TV, is it colorful, will people watching at home think I want to eat that versus That's brown mush. In a place like Congo, people are eating, but they don't really have the luxury to have a lot of fun with the food. That was the thing about Burma, the country's quite poor, but still the food that we saw people eating there was really, really good. People put a lot of thought and effort into it.
Are there any places you've shot that you definitely want to go back to?
Vietnam is probably one of the most magical places I've ever been, and I'd definitely relish the opportunity to go back there anytime. There might be one day when this magical trip around the world ends, and I do something other than stay in my own bed for vacation. When you do what I do for a living, getting on an airplane is not what you do on vacation. Especially because I'm terrified of flying.
You're terrified of flying?!
Half of the crew is. That's often the most nerve-racking part of a shoot, just getting on Cathay Pacific to go to Hong Kong.
How have you stayed in this job for so long?
Compared to somebody giving you an all-expenses-paid ticket around the world, the fear isn't that bad. You just have to get over it. The fear of flying is definitely awful, and doesn't get any better, but I wouldn't let it stop me from going somewhere.
Does it mean that you tend to go for more car rides than small prop plane flights, though?
Generally the smaller planes are a little less terrifying, because you're not in this tube 70 rows back from the pilot in this claustrophobic way. The exception is places like the Congo or the Amazon where bad weather factors in, because bad weather in a small plane is really fucking terrifying.
We took a really weird prop plane in Congo, because Congo has something like the worst commercial aviation safety record on the planet. Planes go down all the time, it's really bad there. When we were trying to get from Kisangani back to Goma, we had three options: a commercial plane, a private plane, or drive. Driving was not going to work, because it takes four days through all kinds of rebel-controlled areas. And our fixer, Dan McCabe, who's a documentary filmmaker working in the Congo, asked us: "Do you want to be in a Boeing going 500 miles an hour when you crash, or a bush plane going 75?"
So we chose the bush plane. It was a very old airplane, and they told us that it was formerly Queen Victoria's flying wardrobe, which would carry her clothes when she flew around the world. That is clearly not true, since Queen Victoria died in 1901, before airplanes were invented. So then they updated it to Queen Elizabeth's flying wardrobe, but we haven't been able to verify. It was a really strange plane, just a box.
Did the flight go okay?
We had a great pilot, but just as we were about to take off, this intense thunderstorm rolled up, so we had to get out. We made it to Goma, but three days later, a big commercial plane crashed right into the city in similar weather, very close to the hotel we were staying in. So we were quite happy we took the bush plane.
Are there any locations where you still want to go, but can't?
Iran and North Korea are probably places we definitely can't go. But CNN really does open up a lot of doors, as far as what they have an appetite for, like Libya and Congo. But Tony doesn't really want to go to places just because they're dangerous, he wants to go because there's a story to tell, or a place that fascinated him. I'm sure a place like North Korea would be very interesting, but the government would have to fall first, because they're very strict about film crews. There wouldn't be much of a point in going now--there would be a minder, and they would show us a very limited cross section of the country. We do our best work when we're down with the people.
The first episode of Parts Unknown, which takes Bourdain (and Tom) to Bruma, airs this Sunday at 9 PM on CNN.
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Hobo Traveler at Machu Picchu
