When we were in the edit, rather than dwell on the difficulties, Tony wanted to end on a positive story how everyday people had toppled this awful megalomaniacal dictator, Muammar Gaddafi. We travelled there in 2013, shortly after the revolution. Our Libya trip for Parts Unknown was probably one of the most stressful and difficult. In the toughest of situations, we were always laughing.
But, our executive producer was a vegetarian and I'm not the most adventurous eater-which Tony did eventually discover-and he didn't dislike us as a result. The typical vegetarian, in his mind, was someone who lived a bland existence. For example to some degree he really did not like vegetarians and vegans, but the reason was that he viewed it as not being open to new experiences. Everything Tony said came from a place of truth. And he was always so funny too, even when he was delivering an insult or harsh feedback. It was because he was always pushing the show and pushing us. Tony's mercurial temper probably caused my hair to go a little greyer a little prematurely, but he was never, or very rarely, mercurial or tough for the sake of it. You would not sleep much for the week and a half we were shooting out in the field. Tony always desperately wanted to get it right, and any time he saw things weren't going well, he could be very opinionated about that. I had to send a camera man in a van about 150 miles into the interior of Mozambique to get some footage we could use for that piece of writing. It was 4,000 miles away from where we were. In Mozambique in 2012, just as we had one day of filming left, Tony handed me this beautifully written paragraph of voice over about our drive to Mozambique Island. Sometimes he would have changed his mind about some aspect and forgotten to pass the note on, and over the years, he did get into the habit of almost believing that he just had to think something and we would know it, because we had been working together for so long. We would discuss the scene and he would-like a hard hitting investigative journalist-grill me on the person he was meeting, the scene and what we were hoping to get out of it.
Which wasn't at all what it was he was just kind of a shy person. I guess he thought it made him look out of touch. I thought that was very funny, but when I told him many years later, he didn't love that story. I knocked on the door and Tony opened it, but before I was able to say anything, he just took the tape and closed the door in my face. The first time I delivered it, I was very nervous. I was a tape logger and once or twice during that period I had to bring a VHS rough cut of an episode to Tony's apartment. I started working on Anthony Bourdain's first show, A Cook's Tour, a couple of months after graduating from college in 2002.