Writing for ‘Borat’ a bit of gonzo art

Project combined guerrilla scenes into full narrative

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 Oscarnominated 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.

“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 a.m. and giving him feedback and giving him some ideas.”

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,” Hines said.

You can read a transcribed script of “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” and it does make for a unique reading experience. But the movie’s final form gives you only a small window into the gonzo art of writing for Borat.

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.’”

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?’”

In case of leak, scripts were written in code. Borat’s name never appeared in the pages.