The Real Reason The Anthony Bourdain Documentary Is Called Roadrunner

If you were making the ultimate Anthony Bourdain documentary, what would you call it? Maybe "Heart of Darkness," given how Bourdain was inspired by the Joseph Conrad novel? Too dark, probably. Bourdain documentarian Morgan Neville had called his earlier film about Fred Rogers "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" — but Bourdain wasn't one for lyrical catchphrases. So Neville called his Bourdain movie "Roadrunner," which may not have been the marketing department's first choice. (That said, good luck if you want to Google "Roadrunner" these days to learn about the desert bird or the Looney Tunes character.)

The title does make sense, and the movie explains how. Bourdain, of course, was always on the road. The documentary shows him in airports, train stations, cabs — even a boat in a river in Conrad's Congo. In one scene from "Roadrunner," Bourdain's longtime director Tom Vitale says the trip to the Democratic Republic of the Congo was the most dangerous of all.

Another "Parts Unknown" director, Mo Fallon, explained the strange logic of this unlikely destination. "When you get really deep into travel," Fallon says, "I think there is an itch that you want to scratch that is out on the edge of that envelope, where chaos rules, because it strips away all of the functional artifice of how we go through our life. It leaves you with just the sensory experience." The trip to the Congo, more than anyplace else, proved Bourdain wasn't running toward anything. He was running from something.