Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Writing In The Moment and For The Moment
By Joe Neumaier
In 2006, Sacha Baron Cohen’s boundary-smashing, gut-busting blockbuster comedy Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan, became an audacious modern classic and a shorthand for the truth-and-character-based comedy alchemy Baron Cohen and his collaborators excel at. But Baron Cohen wasn’t done with the bumbling, inadvertently offensive interlocutor Borat Sagdiyev.... and Borat wasn’t done using satire to reveal America to itself. In October 2020, the release of BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM: DELIVERY OF PRODIGIOUS BRIBE TO AMERICAN REGIME FOR MAKE BENEFIT ONCE GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN faced even greater challenges than the original in bringing the creativity, diligence, and craft of Baron Cohen and the film’s behind-the-scenes team to the screen — and bringing it to an audience facing a divisive American presidential election, a very real threat to democracy, and the ongoing trauma of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic.
There are multiple themes and targets layered through the script for BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM, not to mention in the improvisations, honest in-the-moment interactions, and comedic set pieces. But all of these were fueled by Baron Cohen’s drive to make a crucial difference at a critical time. As the writers — Baron Cohen, Anthony Hines, Dan Swimer, Peter Baynham, Erica Rivinoja, Dan Mazer, Jena Friedman, and Lee Kern, working from a story by Baron Cohen, Hines, Swimer, and Nina Pedrad — set out to work on it and continued to write through challenges, the mission was always clear and the heart unalterable. “BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM was motivated purely by Donald Trump,” says Baron Cohen. “This film was conceived the day after the 2018 midterm elections. I felt American democracy was in danger, and I felt I couldn’t just be a bystander. I didn’t think for a moment that I could influence the Nov. 3 election. However, I felt like I had to do what I could to dissent. That’s why the entire crew and I took immense personal risks to make this movie — and to get it across, I brought Borat back, because he’s my most popular character, and I therefore hoped a lot of Americans would see it.”
“We wanted it to be the funniest movie of the last few years, and a great relief for people who had not laughed in the seven months before the film came out,” says Baron Cohen of BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM’s release in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. “But we really wanted it to be a powerful motivator to get people to vote.” Though Baron Cohen’s stable of characters is full of memorable and provocative creations — going back to his days on British TV in the 1990s and on Da Ali G Show, where he debuted both Borat and Austrian fashion reporter Brüno Gehard; through 2006’s Borat film, 2009’s Brüno film, 2012’s The Dictator, and Showtime’s series Who is America?, as well as his performances in the Oscar-winning films Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Hugo, and Les Misérables; in the acclaimed dramatic Netflix series The Spy; and his recently lauded turn as Abbie Hoffman in The Trial of the Chicago Seven — it was Borat who would be the perfect vehicle for these ideas crucial to the 2020 world. “I felt Borat was a slightly more extreme version of President Trump, but just slightly,” says Baron Cohen. “I’d say he’s perhaps 3 percent more misogynistic than Trump, 3 percent more supportive of white supremacists, and 3 percent more into caging children. The one area he was probably less supportive of than Trump was paying women for sex.” “But I felt politicians and social media were driving us apart,” he continues. “It’s what compelled me to give a speech at the Anti-Defamation league last year, and I wanted to be able to look at myself in the mirror after the election and know I had done everything that I could to stop what I saw as an authoritarian destroying American democracy.” Says director Jason Woliner (TV’s The Last Man on Earth, What We Do in the Shadows), “We had an outline that would evolve if we had an idea, and as the story changed, our writers were constantly working on new scenarios and set pieces and storylines.”
“During the whole process on this film, as with all of Sacha’s work, there’s a huge amount of preparation,” says co-screenwriter and executive producer Peter Baynham. “There’s a storyline, then a script develops, and every scene has a tremendous amount of writing in order to think about all of the possibilities: ‘What if this happens? What if that happens? What should Borat say then?’ There’s a tremendous amount of improvising, of course, but you have to prepare for anything that might happen.” Says co-screenwriter and producer Anthony Hines, “With Sacha, we’ll write an outline, and then a story, and then that becomes a conventional narrative script that in its final draft form is about 100 pages. Then we’ll do a conventional table read with actors, and hear it read out loud to see if the narrative parts do their job as a story, and we hear if it’s hitting the right emotional beats. After revisions and maybe two more table reads, we say, “Ok this works” — and then realize there is a tunnel at the end of the light, because the next time a version of the script will be spoken, it’ll actually involve a dentist or a conspiracy theorist who have no idea they’re in a movie! The fact is, you may end up with 30 percent of what you worked on, and it’ll be rewritten, revised, stuff will be thrown out, and you spend months going in one direction but then the film going another.”
The addition of a female point of view was essential from a comedic as well as political lens. “We enlisted some of the greatest female comedy writers working today,” says Baron Cohen. “We said we wanted this to be a movie that inspires women and has a feminist agenda, and they came onto the film and came up with many of the best scenes. And we continued to write every day while we were shooting — and then because of Coronavirus, we had to reconfigure the entire story.” Comedian, writer, and former Daily Show producer Jena Friedman says the addition of a female point of view in the multilayered satirical world Baron Cohen sets up around Borat was the ideal way to talk about issues America unfortunately often turns away from. “The women’s point of view was crucial to Sacha right from the start, and I was excited to delve into looking at how misogyny in America, in some ways, is just as bad as in many other countries,” says Friedman. “Women don’t have paid leave; around the country there are fake places that pretend to be abortion clinics that mislead women; there are taboos around our basic bodily functions; there’s still debutante ball culture, to name a few issues. I was excited about having a female character in the Borat world — there was so much material to mine from that.” “It was all a collaborative effort,” Friedman says. “I came in with my own ideas of what I wanted to go after, and Sacha curated it all, as the voices in the room all worked together.” “The scene at the “pregnancy crisis clinic” was important to me,” adds Friedman. “People don’t even really know that those places exist, how they give women wrong information about abortion and misrepresenting what they do. Showing how dangerous those places are, to me, is one of the most important things this movie can accomplish.” “We knew we had to have a focus on women’s issues in the era of Trump,” says Hines. “That was an early thing we latched onto —feminism and what women around the world, and in America, face every day.” “The story has to evolve with the times, and a big part of it was the idea of female empowerment,” says producer Monica Levinson. “Sacha wanted to make it about women's rights, and as a female producer, of course, I thought it was the right time for that. The biggest challenge was keeping our storyline as COVID hit, making sure we pivoted to include what was happening in the country and still staying on the path we wanted to be on. The movie is a testament to Sacha and his adaptability.”
How BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM did all of it — in the midst of pandemic lockdowns and stuck in the middle of right-wing rallies; at a high-security Trump-Pence event and a Georgia debutante ball; in a hotel room with a politician exposing his true self; and with several interviewees showing how kind people can be — is a story in itself.