The big centerpiece in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm wasn’t just big — it made headline news. The scene comes towards the end, with our antihero’s 15-year-old daughter Tutar (played by Maria Bakalova) scoring an interview with the president’s personal attorney and former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani — one that soon goes south, to put it mildly. But they almost screwed it up, star Sacha Baron Cohen told Stephen Colbert on A Late Show Monday night.
So what happened? Well, they almost had nothing to shoot it with. The scene finds Giuliani having a bit too much fun in a one-on-one with Tutar, who has rebranded herself as a fawning member of rightwing media. The shocking part isn’t when Giuliani tells her that China created COVID-19; it’s when the two relocate to the hotel bedroom, where he gets a little grabby and even unbuckles his trousers, putting his hands down his pants. It’s genuinely shocking, but again, we almost didn’t have a chance to see it.
Baron Cohen was hiding in the closet, set to film the encounter surreptitiously. “The interview starts and I switch on the phone and there’s only 3% battery and I go, ‘Hold on we’ve got Rudy Giuliani, we’ve got the president’s lawyer, we’ve got this scene,” Baron Cohen told Colbert. “This is the climax of the movie and no one thought it might be worth charging the phone?”
The only way he was able to get through it, he revealed, was by switching to Airplane Mode, using the remainder of the battery’s juice to film the encounter that has become infamous.
Baron Cohen also used the time to address Giuliani’s response to the scene, which he’s claimed was simply him removing a microphone unit, which was in his pants. “Well he said that he did nothing inappropriate and my feeling is that if he sees that as appropriate, heaven knows what he’s intended to do with other women in hotel rooms with a glass of whisky in his hand,” Baron Cohen charged.
What’s more, Baron Cohen also fired back at Trump, who over the weekend claimed he’d grown wise to an attempt to prank him fifteen years prior, then called him a “creep.” The president’s story was incredibly vague, but Baron Cohen filled in some details, saying he’d done it in the guise of Ali G, his breakthrough character. What’s more, he said Trump wasn’t as on top of it as he claimed.
“I remember Donald Trump look at me and I was wearing a sweatsuit or something…his face dropped, he was immediately furious that he was going to have speak to someone from a lower class,” Baron Cohen recalled. He was quick to end the interview, 60 Minutes-style. “He made his excuses and left,” he recalled. “He completely believed that Ali G. was real.”
You can watch the full interview above, and you can watch the film — full title: The Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan — on Amazon Prime now.
(Via Deadline)
