Firstpost
  • Home
  • Video Shows
    Vantage Firstpost America Firstpost Africa First Sports
  • World
    US News
  • Explainers
  • News
    India Opinion Cricket Tech Entertainment Sports Health Photostories
  • Asia Cup 2025
Apple Incorporated Modi ji Justin Trudeau Trending

Sections

  • Home
  • Live TV
  • Videos
  • Shows
  • World
  • India
  • Explainers
  • Opinion
  • Sports
  • Cricket
  • Health
  • Tech/Auto
  • Entertainment
  • Web Stories
  • Business
  • Impact Shorts

Shows

  • Vantage
  • Firstpost America
  • Firstpost Africa
  • First Sports
  • Fast and Factual
  • Between The Lines
  • Flashback
  • Live TV

Events

  • Raisina Dialogue
  • Independence Day
  • Champions Trophy
  • Delhi Elections 2025
  • Budget 2025
  • US Elections 2024
  • Firstpost Defence Summit
Trending:
  • Charlie Kirk shot dead
  • Nepal protests
  • Russia-Poland tension
  • Israeli strikes in Qatar
  • Larry Ellison
  • Apple event
  • Sunjay Kapur inheritance row
fp-logo
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: On the unusual, gonzo art of scriptwriting in an ever evolving scenario
Whatsapp Facebook Twitter
Whatsapp Facebook Twitter
Apple Incorporated Modi ji Justin Trudeau Trending

Sections

  • Home
  • Live TV
  • Videos
  • Shows
  • World
  • India
  • Explainers
  • Opinion
  • Sports
  • Cricket
  • Health
  • Tech/Auto
  • Entertainment
  • Web Stories
  • Business
  • Impact Shorts

Shows

  • Vantage
  • Firstpost America
  • Firstpost Africa
  • First Sports
  • Fast and Factual
  • Between The Lines
  • Flashback
  • Live TV

Events

  • Raisina Dialogue
  • Independence Day
  • Champions Trophy
  • Delhi Elections 2025
  • Budget 2025
  • US Elections 2024
  • Firstpost Defence Summit
  • Home
  • Arts & Culture
  • Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: On the unusual, gonzo art of scriptwriting in an ever evolving scenario

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: On the unusual, gonzo art of scriptwriting in an ever evolving scenario

The Associated Press • April 14, 2021, 12:13:34 IST
Whatsapp Facebook Twitter

There are plenty of scenes scripted straightforwardly, but screenwriting for Borat also means finding ways to manipulate the real world, guessing how people will respond, and shoehorning those guerilla encounters into a coherent narrative.

Advertisement
Subscribe Join Us
Add as a preferred source on Google
Prefer
Firstpost
On
Google
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: On the unusual, gonzo art of scriptwriting in an ever evolving scenario

New York: Screenplay writing, usually a fairly solitary, uneventful process, is more of a full-contact sport for a movie like Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.

Work for the nine Oscar-nominated writers of  the Borat sequel began conventionally enough. Brainstorming, a draft, a table read. But as soon as shooting starts, there’s no telling what can happen, how people will react to Sacha Baron Cohen’s Kazakh alter-ego, or what strange circumstances might befall their protagonist.

As Borat hurtles through the world, a team of writers trails along, endlessly writing and rewriting for every evolving scenario. Take, for example, when Baron Cohen ended up in a five-day lockdown with two QAnon believers. Anthony Hines, a writer and producer on the film, would reach Baron Cohen by stealthily taking a ladder to Baron Cohen’s second-floor bedroom, like a Cyrano de Bergerac of comedy.

STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD

“It was quite sort of dark and dangerous,” says Hines, a longtime collaborator of Baron Cohen’s. “It was literally a matter of climbing up that ladder and poking your head into Borat’s bedroom window at 2 am and giving him feedback and giving him some ideas.”

More from Arts & Culture
Fashion Police | EXCLUSIVE! Lakmē Fashion Week X FDCI: GenNext Winners on revival of weaves, vocal for local & slow fashion Fashion Police | EXCLUSIVE! Lakmē Fashion Week X FDCI: GenNext Winners on revival of weaves, vocal for local & slow fashion Food Talk | How pairing wine with food is all about finding perfect harmony Food Talk | How pairing wine with food is all about finding perfect harmony

Like most things about Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, the film’s Academy Awards nomination for adapted screenplay is unusual. Seldom are the scripts to broad comedies nominated, but both Borat films have been. Its nine writers are the most ever nominated in the category. (When it  won at the Writer Guild Awards, Baron Cohen theorized it was because 60 percent of the guild worked on the movie.) And the film’s full title — Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan — is the longest ever for an Oscar nominee.

“When they read out the nomination and the title of the film, I think it will essentially feel like a filibuster,” Dan Mazer said on a recent Zoom with Hines and four other of the film’s writers, Peter Baynham, Dan Swimer, Jena Friedman and Nina Pedrad.

“If we win, it’s a massive boost the trophy manufacturing industry,” added Hines.

[caption id=“attachment_9526961” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] ![Sacha Baron Cohen in a scene from Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.](https://images.firstpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Borat_640.jpg) Sacha Baron Cohen in a scene from Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.[/caption]

You can read  a transcribed script of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, and it does make for a unique reading experience. Descriptions include EXT. MEL GIBSON SQUARE - DAY. But the movie’s final form gives you only a small window into the gonzo art of writing for Borat.

STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD

There are plenty of scenes scripted straightforwardly, but screenwriting for Borat also means finding ways to manipulate the real world, guessing how people will respond, and shoehorning those guerilla encounters into a coherent narrative. That adds up to, says Hines, “an extraordinary amount of writing — far, far more than a conventional movie.”

“There’s nine movies,” says Swimer.

A lot of what they do never comes near the screen, nor is it even designed to. To help lure Rudy Giuliani for  the film’s infamous hotel room scene, they created a fake documentary about the coronavirus called Keeping America Alive: How Trump Defeated COVID. After watching the tape, Giuliani’s office OK’ed the interview under the impression it was for that film.

“That’s a writing process all of its own. It’s like scripts within scripts,” says Hines. “We shot part of that documentary with other people who were not going to be in the movie like a sizzle reel with a voiceover going something like: ‘Where Trump saw an invisible enemy, the Democrats saw an invisible friend.’”

STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD

Sometimes — especially during the run-up to the 2020 election — real-life farce could seem like their handwork, too. Giuliani’s  Four Seasons Landscaping press conference, for instance.

“That was us as well,” says Baynham. “We wrote the Landscaping thing.”

Most of the writers are Borat veterans, many of them going back to Da Ali G Show. But on Subsequent Moviefilm, Baron Cohen (a credited writer, too, and a regular presence in the writing room) brought some fresh voices to Borat, including Friedman, Pedrad and Erica Rivinoja. Their input was key in mapping the journey of Borat’s daughter Tutar through American-style misogyny and Borat’s slow, strange transition to what might be called feminism.

But because Borat Subsequent Moviefilm was made in secret, just joining the project was disorienting.

“I didn’t really even know what the movie was,” says Pedrad (Saturday Night Live). “I go, locked in a room, read the script. A couple pages in, I’m like: ‘This sounds a lot like … no. Is it?’”

STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD

In case of leak, scripts were written in code. Borat’s name never appeared in the pages. “One minute, he was Sergio from Guatemala, then he was Apu from Armenia,” says Hines. By the end, the names were all jumbled up. Johnny the Monkey was identified as Jeremy the Horse.

Friedman, a Daily Show veteran, was responsible for the scene set in a “pregnancy crisis center.” There, Pastor Jonathan Bright, led to believe that Tutar is pregnant by her father, still argues against abortion.

“I can’t believe we got that scene in a major motion picture,” says Friedman. “I remember there was a discussion like, ‘Do you think we’ll really be able to get a pastor be OK with incest?’ Just knowing what I know from those places, I was like, ‘Absolutely, yes.’”

The writers will play out some scenes with actors beforehand to get a sense of likely responses to Borat. But they also encounter plenty of people who say things that couldn’t possibly be prepared for. If Borat holds up a mirror to American society, the reflection is often unpredictable and disquieting.

STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD

That includes the plastic surgeon, Dr. Charles Wallace, visited by Borat and Tutar who frankly tells them that he would he would want to sleep with Tutar if Borat wasn’t there. The moment still astounds Mazer.

“It’s a really interesting dilemma we go through because the more extreme it is, the less people believe that it’s real,” he says. “You just go: How do people like that actually exist? And they do, and we find them, and it’s more common than you would imagine.”

Their plans are frequently upended. The pandemic, itself, caused a massive rewrite. Sometimes people get wind that it’s Baron Cohen in disguise. For the scene with Tutar at a Republican women’s event, Borat was removed at the last moment after producers overheard something. In the first “Borat” film, a Civil War reenactment scene was scrubbed when one of the reenactors’ sons spotted Baron Cohen.

But remarkably frequently, the writers say, Baron Cohen finds a way to make happen the ridiculous scenarios they dream up — scenes they think can’t possibly be pulled off. Sometimes they’re watching along by a live video link. Sometimes they’re hidden among a crowd, as Hines was while an overalls-clad Cohen performed as ‘Country Steve’ at a pro-gun rally. Or they might be anxiously waiting for word in the writers’ room.

STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD

“We’ll be sitting there nervously going, ‘How many of our jokes made it in? How did the scene go?’ The amount of times we’ll get a text back saying, ‘We did it. We got X to happen. We got Y to happen,’” says Mazer, shaking his head. “It’s like a bank job. It’s like a celebration. You just go, ’I can’t believe that happened. How did he get to it? I never in my wildest dreams imagined this crazy thing that we wrote ended up manifesting.’”

Tags
Oscar Sacha Baron Cohen Rudy Giuliani FWeekend coronavirus COVID 19 pandemic Borat Subsequent Moviefilm Academy Awards 2021 Writer Guild Awards
End of Article
Latest News
Find us on YouTube
Subscribe
End of Article

Top Stories

Charlie Kirk, shot dead in Utah, once said gun deaths are 'worth it' to save Second Amendment

Charlie Kirk, shot dead in Utah, once said gun deaths are 'worth it' to save Second Amendment

From governance to tourism, how Gen-Z protests have damaged Nepal

From governance to tourism, how Gen-Z protests have damaged Nepal

Did Russia deliberately send drones into Poland’s airspace?

Did Russia deliberately send drones into Poland’s airspace?

Netanyahu ‘killed any hope’ for Israeli hostages: Qatar PM after Doha strike

Netanyahu ‘killed any hope’ for Israeli hostages: Qatar PM after Doha strike

Charlie Kirk, shot dead in Utah, once said gun deaths are 'worth it' to save Second Amendment

Charlie Kirk, shot dead in Utah, once said gun deaths are 'worth it' to save Second Amendment

From governance to tourism, how Gen-Z protests have damaged Nepal

From governance to tourism, how Gen-Z protests have damaged Nepal

Did Russia deliberately send drones into Poland’s airspace?

Did Russia deliberately send drones into Poland’s airspace?

Netanyahu ‘killed any hope’ for Israeli hostages: Qatar PM after Doha strike

Netanyahu ‘killed any hope’ for Israeli hostages: Qatar PM after Doha strike

Top Shows

Vantage Firstpost America Firstpost Africa First Sports
Latest News About Firstpost
Most Searched Categories
  • Web Stories
  • World
  • India
  • Explainers
  • Opinion
  • Sports
  • Cricket
  • Tech/Auto
  • Entertainment
  • IPL 2025
NETWORK18 SITES
  • News18
  • Money Control
  • CNBC TV18
  • Forbes India
  • Advertise with us
  • Sitemap
Firstpost Logo

is on YouTube

Subscribe Now

Copyright @ 2024. Firstpost - All Rights Reserved

About Us Contact Us Privacy Policy Cookie Policy Terms Of Use
Home Video Shorts Live TV