Bruno

The Independent has an article on Sacha Baron Cohen:

At the start of an interview, Brüno will normally offer champagne to his subject, and tell a couple of hideously bad jokes, often pegged to his nationality (though officially Austrian, he sometimes pretends to be German, figuring few people will be able to tell the difference). In the preamble, he will usually comment on a female guest’s clothes, and compliment male interviewees on their looks. This allows Baron Cohen to size up his interviewee, and work out how far they can be pushed. Then, he will typically manufacture a minor confusion, to take the interviewee out of their comfort zone. With Jordan, he was “running late”. During the Ron Paul interview, some of the TV crew’s lighting (deliberately) caught fire, meaning they had to be evacuated into a next-door hotel room.

Finally, Cohen’s production staff make sure every little detail of their back story adds up. To make Brüno, they created almost 30 phoney TV companies, with names that included “Rheinland Films” and “German Youth Television”. These were then quoted in correspondence with would-be interviewees.

Several of the firms had realistic websites touting “world-class facilities, and state-of-the-art equipment”. But of course, they only existed on paper. Each was registered to the same address: a metal mailbox at a postal facility on Sunset Boulevard. This many-layered technique meant big names were persuaded to unwittingly take part in Brüno, apparently including Harrison Ford and Paula Abdul, the American Idol judge, who was interviewed by Brüno at unfurnished apartment where – in a dark joke about US attitudes towards immigrants – he’d hired naked Hispanic day-labourers to get down on hands and knees to serve as tables and chairs.

The whole article is fascinating. And no matter what you think of his sense of humor you have to admit Cohen is an incredible physical comedian. Would you recognise him if he sat opposite you in a cafe out of character? Normally when an actor does an impersonation – Robin Williams, say – the comedy is that it’s Robin Williams in drag, or being a frenchman or a gay frenchman or whatever. Even with Peter Sellers we’re abstractly aware that Clare Quilty and Inspector Cloeseau are still Sellers.

But Bruno, Ali G and Borat really do seem like different people. Ali G’s insolent, slouching manner is nothing like Borat’s friendly yet awkward, uncomfortable presence.

It’s worth pointing out that Cohen’s first movie, Ali G was a disaster; Borat and Bruno were both directed by Larry Charles, who was a writer for Seinfeld and a writer/director for Curb Your Enthusiasm. From the article:

He recorded hundreds of hours of footage, during 100 days of filming. Then he edited it down to four or five hours of usable material. Then a two-hour cut was creamed off the top to create the film. It was a long and torturous process.

It seems as though Charles, and therefore Bruno is heavily influenced by Larry David’s grueling, perfectionist approach to comedy that turned Seinfeld and Enthusiasm into such masterpieces.