The Anthony Bourdain Documentary Faked His Voice. Would Other Filmmakers Do the Same?

If you've heard Anthony Bourdain speak even a few sentences aloud, it's impossible to read his writing without hearing it in his own voice. In Morgan Neville's documentary portrait Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, Bourdain describes how he would roll out of bed in the morning and head straight for his keyboard without pausing for so much as a cup of coffee. His writing was a fluid extension of his life, and his life was sometimes inextricable from his writing. His longtime collaborators describe how, even in the recording booth, Bourdain would relentlessly cross out and rewrite his own voice-over, in part to purge from it any of the clichés of TV narration that wouldn't feel true to himself--or at least to the version of himself he was presenting. The intensely personal connection with that voice may be one reason why some of Bourdain's admirers reacted so strongly to the news that Neville had used a digital simulation of it in Roadrunner, using artificial intelligence to extrapolate from hours of his actual voice recordings. As Neville told both GQ's Brett Martin and the New Yorker's Helen Rosner, he worked with a software company to create audio readings of three passages that Bourdain wrote but never spoke out loud, at least one of them taken from a personal email never intended for anyone but its recipient.