HOLLYWOOD INSIDER

Sacha Baron Cohen strikes again in ‘Borat 2’ movie

Los Angeles — Who is scared of comedian-actor Sacha Baron Cohen?

A lot it seems, politicians especially, with the latest one being former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. He was caught in a very compromising situation with Borat’s daughter Tutar (ably played by Bulgarian actress Maria Bakalova) pretending to be a journalist interviewing Giuliani in a New York City hotel room in the actor’s sequel to the 2006 popular comedy.

Titled “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” the unstoppable Sacha, who reprised his Kazakh news reporter character Borat Sagdiyev, also crashes into one of Vice President Mike Pence’s rally in Maryland, in a conservative rally in Washington posing as a country singer cowboy-clown, among others.

Born in Hamersmith, London, the 49-year-old irrepressible actor who is also the writer-producer of the said mock-umentary comedy film talked to us recently.

Below are excerpts of our conversation with him:

We are living in very tough times and in a very strange world. What do you do to improve your wellness and what advice would you give to people to manage their emotional mindset?

I don’t think I am the person to give advice to anyone on managing anything. I’m friendly with a surfer who specializes in big waves and he once gave me a very good bit of advice, which is, when you are stressed to just breathe in and out through your nose. And a number of times in the movie I was quite stressed and it’s a good way to just lower your heart rate actually. So that’s what I’ve been doing, breathing. It’s all about breathing.

Was your heart palpitating because of some of your interactions with some people you featured in your film?

Well, I realize that to make a sequel to “Borat” which itself was a startling movie for cinema goers, that I would have to put myself in some deeply uncomfortable situations.

So I knew that during some of the scenes, my heart would start thumping and in fact on the one of the first days of filming, it was at the Richmond Gun Rally and there had been a threat that had been uncovered by a white supremacist group to conduct a mass shooting at the rally. The FBI had foiled it and I was going into a situation where I'd be wearing a t-shirt that was not fully supportive of the National Rifle Association and so, you know, I knew that as a result of that, actually it's the first time in my career I donned a bullet proof vest, which I wore for two of the scenes in the movie.

I've never done that before but there were so many semi-automatics that were present that even if somebody wasn't actively trying to hurt me, you could easily get accidentally hurt by a stray bullet.

Were you shocked at some of the anti-Semitism or bigotry or hatred that you encountered?

The first movie was more about exposing this unpleasant and ugly underbelly of America. This time around I realized that that underbelly has been exposed. It's overt since opinions that we would have put on screen back in 2006 are now being espoused by the President of America, so actually in this movie. part of my attempt was to show the humanity of some of the people that espouse these horrific views.

There are two conspiracy theorists that I spent five days living in character with and I wanted to show that they were human beings underneath it. All good people who had been fed lies through social media and through the Internet and had believed it.

The issue with the Internet is that it doesn't differentiate between factual information and conspiracy theories. They each are presented in the same way and actually conspiracy theories and lies spread faster on the Internet than truth. which is boring.

So, I wanted to show that in this incredibly divided country and increasingly divided world, there is actually common ground that there is humanity on the other side. I feel that there's increasing hostility between the sides. I wanted to demonstrate that there is commonality.

Giuliani said it was a fabrication. Could you tell us if they tried to stop this from being included in the film?

I would say he was concerned enough about the incident to call the police and the police actually raided the hotel room afterwards, which is generally you need a warrant to search a room. So he was clearly concerned enough at the time to call the police. I am not sure what he told them but they raided a hotel room and searched it.

Did he know you were Borat at the time?

I'll let him speak for himself. He gave a number of interviews afterwards.

I guess you knew it was going to blow up like this with the Rudy Giuliani stuff. But Rudy said he was framed because Hollywood hates him. What do you think of him and what do you think of his reaction?

I’d say that he said that he did nothing inappropriate, and I think this is a fascinating window into what the Trump regime deems as appropriate behavior with women. 

And I would say, listen, I don’t want to hurt the film and I really want people to see the film and what you see is what it is. In the past, I’ve never, ever given any interviews as Borat, as myself, partly because my desire is, I want people to take from the film whatever they want, and to come to their own conclusions.

It’s the same with the conspiracy theorists that I lived with. People will have their own opinions about, and their own moral judgements about every single person in the movie. Some of them will have moral judgements about me. And that’s fine. 

But I think I’m always reluctant to take away from the viewing experience. So, I would say that people should watch the movie and judge for themselves. I trust the audience and I believe in the audience.

Can you talk more about Maria Bakalova, the actress who played your daughter Tutar, and the one who pretended to be a journalist interviewing Rudy Giuliani?

We spent seven months searching the world for the perfect daughter for Borat and we auditioned hundreds of girls and actresses. So, we wanted someone believable enough to play Borat's daughter, to play somebody who had lived an incredibly primitive existence in our mythical version of Kazakhstan, but somebody who had the range to transform herself into a right-wing journalist.

We finally found this incredible actress Maria who had only recently left drama school and had done a couple of movies in Bulgaria but she was hilarious which is the most important thing because it's a comedy double act.

She was courageous and most importantly we actually ran through a couple of scenes in England and during one of them, which was the break-up scene between Borat and his daughter, she almost brought tears to my eyes.

That's why I immediately knew that she was the one because I wanted this movie to be emotional. I wanted it to be a family movie about a father from a primitive society where women are not respected who finally grows to appreciate and respect and love his daughter.

How did you contact those two conservative guys and how did you set up living with them?

This was the most challenging movie that I’ve ever made, because I was taking my most famous character — a character known worldwide — and trying to make a movie with real people. I assumed that it would be impossible to do. 

Then two years ago, I was invited on Jimmy Kimmel’s show, to do something on the day of the Midterm Elections. I had actually been approached to do something with Kanye West and the plan was that I would do a sketch with Kanye West where me and Kanye would pretend that we had been planning for him to infiltrate the White House and for him to infiltrate Donald Trump and that everything that he had done for the previous year was merely a plan that both of us had done, including wearing the MAGA hat. He had never wanted to do any of it at all.

However, I called up Kanye and he wanted to get the approval of the President. I said that’s not possible. 

Therefore, I had to come up with a new sketch in a rush for Jimmy Kimmel. I called a friend of mine, Chris Rock, to ask advice, and he said well why don’t you do Borat? I said how can I do Borat, I’m going to shoot this tomorrow, I haven’t done Borat for 12 years. He said just do it.

So, in a mad panic that night I managed to find a costume, managed to get a fake mustache, managed to get some field producers to interview people, managed to contact the original writing team of Borat, and the next day we met and we went out to film. 

And at the end of the day. I realized wow, Borat is the perfect character for Trump, because really Borat is a slightly more extreme version of Trump. They are both misogynistic, they are both racist, they both support anti-Semites. They cannot care less about democracy, they both hold very old-world views, and they’re both laughable characters.

So, I realized by talking to some Trump supporters as Borat, I could actually get them to reveal how far they were willing to go because what is publicly said by the President and some of his supporters is so extreme, I thought how do you satirize that? By using Borat, you can let them really reveal how much further they are willing to go.

So when it came to the gun rally in Washington State and getting a crowd of people to agree to slice up journalists like the Saudis do, what I wanted to reveal again was that we are on a precipice, where we can see the edge of democracy and after that, we fall into the abyss of autocracy, where it’s not just verbal attacks on journalists like yourself, it’s physical attacks and it’s the autocracies fight, free speech.

They imprison those who are challenging them, and the number one of those are journalists. So as a member of a journalistic association, I know you feel under threat, increasingly threatened, and so I brought out my own fake news journalist to make America laugh and make the world laugh, but to try occasionally to show the danger that lies ahead in the next few weeks.

How do you feel at the end of the day? Do you astound yourself at being able to do the women’s clinic, the debutante ball? How is your adrenaline at the end of the day?How do you get away with those things?

The cameras are almost always visible. People are agreeing to be on television. So that’s the main way we do it is people want to be on television.

In terms of the adrenaline, these are exhausting days. You’re getting up at four or five in the morning and you’re finishing the shoot day and then going and writing and producing, so you are surviving on and off for a year on four- or five-hours sleep. 

You have the challenge of trying to prepare for your character, which is what most actors do and remembering your lines. There are obviously a lot more lines in “Borat” than for any other movie, because you need to be fully prepared for any question that anyone may ask you. 

So, when you’re an actor, you’re preparing for maybe two or three pages of dialogue in a day.  As Borat, you are preparing for a hundred pages of dialogue within a day. So, the character itself has to be fully three-dimensional, there can’t be any chinks in the armor where somebody realizes that they are talking to a real person. 

So that means my preparation is everything from knowing everything about this mythical country that we have invented, to knowing everything about my family, Borat’s family, everything about his friends, everything about his acquaintances, everything about everyone in Government in this mythical version of Kazakhstan.

Then I even do things like — I make sure my smell is so abhorrent, that people are aware that they are in the presence of somebody who is from a different civilization.  So, it’s very, very hard for people to be around me, because the smell is so repulsive. 

And everything about me, from down to the underwear is authentic. Everything in my wallet, everything that it’s possible that if somebody took out every pocket on me at any point, it would be completely consistent in keeping in character.  So, the idea is to create a fully believable character that it’s impossible to see through.

I must say this was my hardest ever acting challenge. In one scene, I stayed in character for about a hundred and twenty-five hours. I slept as Borat in Borat’s pajamas, and I lived in a house with two guys. I realized that to really get to know them, to really expose their humanity and to really have the movie progress and get the plot points that we needed, I had to be with them for five days. In a variety of locations, because I went with them in the end to that gun rally. 

So that was the deepest I had ever been in character. I remember on the second night, locking the door of my bedroom and walking around trying to find my toothbrush. I was walking in this very clumsy way and after about ten minutes, I couldn’t find my toothbrush. I realized I was still Borat. I didn’t get out of the character, and I was by myself. Then I remember I had to mentally tell myself you are not this guy.

— LA, GMA News