Interview: Morgan Neville on Roadrunner: A FIlm About Anthony Bourdain

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

The death of Anthony Bourdain hit me like a ton of bricks. Here's the thing – I never really watched his show, Parts Unknown, on CNN. I had never read one of his books. Yet, there was something about him that just seemed too cool to me. I always liked the idea that Bourdain, in his sixties, was still out there, living his best life, doing his thing every day, and seemingly really getting a kick out of life. After all, people turned in to his show just to watch him "enjoy" life, and I think he was an aspirational figure for many of us, made perhaps even more so by the fact that he never really achieved significant success in life until he hit his forties.

When he died, things just seemed a little more hopeless than usual, as I thought to myself, "if Bourdain doesn't think life is worth living, what hope is there for the rest of us?" But, of course, the truth of Bourdain's life was far more complicated than what we saw on T.V. or read in his books. We knew he'd struggled with drugs, but there was also a brutal bout with depression and the fact that throughout his life, he often replaced one addiction with another. In many cases, people and relationships were used to feed that addiction.

It's all explored in-depth in the fantastic new documentary, Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, which hits theaters this Friday and will make its way to HBO Max and CNN sometime later this year. It's directed by Morgan Neville, who also did a tremendous doc on Mister Rogers, Won't You Be My Neighbor? I got the opportunity to speak with Neville about his "warts-and-all" approach to Bourdain and why he thinks people who didn't even really know Bourdain's work that well were so stricken by his death.