Sacha Baron Cohen Interview: Talks Backlash and Ali G’s Resurrection

Sacha Baron Cohen insists on his new film, Ali G: Who am I?is the last guerrilla comedy of the genre that he will direct. He is categorical. No more Borat. No more Bruno. No more Ali G. It’s too hard, he says, too risky. He’s tired of tricking people into exposing their prejudices, and he’s even more tired of the death threats that periodically follow. There are easier ways to make money in this business, and one’s luck will eventually run out.

The problem with his statement, as passionate as it is, is that he has been making it for years. He regularly said he was done before participating in 2020 Borat sequel, which also earned him two Oscar nominations, and he was even more insistent afterward. And every time he says it, he believes it’s true. He wants it to be true, he tells me. So why are we here, I ask, discussing an Ali G revival?

“Because I’m terrified of the direction our society is going, and I can comment on that through my comedy,” he says. “I wanted to show extremism on both sides of the political spectrum and the danger of righteous violence.” There’s a level of seriousness that belies the 90-minute comedy film he directed, which features a dim-witted white rapper who speaks in Caribbean-British slang and a contraption that fires bullets from behind. Aware of this, he adds: “And obviously we wanted to make the funniest movie ever made.”

His longtime collaborators have other theories about his return. Anthony “Ant” Hines, who has worked with Baron Cohen since The 11 o’clock showwhere the character Ali G comes from, thinks his friend had missed the adrenaline rush, just like him. “It’s a visceral buzz you get from making a movie that way,” Hines says, “and nothing comes close to it.”

Dan Mazer, whose friendship with Baron Cohen dates back to high school in the U.K., wasn’t particularly surprised to get the call about Ali G, in part because they never stopped talking about the character. In fact, whenever they got together, they would often slip into Ali G’s voice, he said, and imagine the blatantly absurd things he would say or do in different situations.

“I also think you have to know that Sacha is the Michael Jordan of this kind of cinema,” explains Mazer. “And yeah, Michael Jordan went off and tried to play baseball, and you say, ‘OK, you’re a really good baseball player,’ but he’s not the Michael Jordan of baseball. And Sacha East the Michael Jordan of that, and to some extent, we all are. We invented this genre, and no one else has matched what we did.

Whatever the reason, Ali G is back, hitting theaters October 23 before landing on Amazon Prime Video shortly after. And like many other things Baron Cohen has done, it has already sparked a veritable cycle of meta-indignation, complete with a campaign to boycott the film. With every new trailer or PR stunt posted on social media come new accusations of outdated caricature and cultural appropriation – the latter of which is a central plot point of the film, in which Ali’s progressive nemesis G (also played by Baron Cohen) attempts to cancel him for these very reasons. Some in his camp have speculated that it was instead a coordinated attack by pro-Palestinians who criticize Baron Cohen’s past support for Israel. (Although he has remained silent on Israeli politics and the Gaza conflict in recent years, Baron Cohen is a prominent Jew who has sounded the alarm about rising anti-Semitism on social media, apparently telling TikTok executives in 2023 that what was happening on their platform was “creating the biggest anti-Semitic movement since the Nazis.”)

Colton Dunn, an Emmy-winning Ali G superfan and one of three black screenwriters hired for the film, is aware of the claims of cultural appropriation. “But we knew where we were coming from, and we addressed all of that in the film,” he says, “and deep down, Ash and the film want to defeat evil and hatred. That’s the intention behind it.” Still, the internet suggested the backlash had scared Amazon off. Courtenay Valenti, head of theatrical, streaming and cinema at Amazon MGM Studios, offers this: “We want to work with exceptional storytellers who have distinctive creative visions, and Sacha is exactly that. He has always been fearless in his comedy, with a unique ability to tap into the cultural conversation in ways that are both provocative and entertaining.”

Over cappuccinos in the garden of the Château Marmont, Baron Cohen vents about the growing negative reactions, his battles with the studios and the $3 million day that nearly derailed his film.

In 2021, you would have performed as Ali G at the Comedy Store in Australia. How long afterward did you explore the idea of ​​another film, and what did those early conversations involve?

During the pandemic, our family is moving to Australia, and when confined in Australia, you can’t leave where you are. My ex (Isla Fisher) is from Perth, so we applied to go there. She is rejected. I find out that you have to demonstrate that there is a financial benefit to Western Australia to be allowed entry. You have to contact the police. So I say, “Look, I’m doing a stand-up tour. It’s going to create 300 jobs. It’s going to bring tens of millions of dollars to Western Australia.” I obviously didn’t intend to do that. But then the police accept me. We spent 14 days in lockdown, and at the end, a police car comes, an inspector comes out and she says, “I’m in charge of your stand-up tour.”

So we had to do a standing tour.

I did it and the police were watching me. I ended up doing a 90-minute show, and what was interesting was that people really loved seeing Borat and Bruno, but when Ali G came out, there was a different response. It was like people believed he was real. There will be a lot of amateur psychology in this interview, but my observation was that because Ali G existed before me as a public figure – for five or six years I didn’t give an interview (as myself) – people thought Ali was real and so there was this different response to him. So, I was like, “Wait, is there a movie with this character?”

I came back to America at the end of 2021 and started talking about it with the team. We all thought that Ali on its own wouldn’t be a satirical film because it came from a bygone era – this relic from another era that ignores that it’s deeply problematic. But what if we introduced another character, an ultra-progressive extremist (also played by Baron Cohen) who is his rival and made it a thriller like The fugitive? We had in mind this sentence which says: “We have a cultural appropriator on the loose”, taken from this famous speech by The fugitive. It seemed funny to me.

In revisionist cinema history, you were done Da Ali G Show because you couldn’t come to an agreement financially with HBO. This made me wonder if there were any conversations or interest, on either side, to do more?

Oh yes. HBO wanted to continue. I said no because at that time, in Britain, I think a lot of comedians were snobbish about doing multiple seasons. So there was no expectation or desire to do 15 seasons – to do it the American way. I’m very friendly with Larry David and I’m jealous of him because he can do Sidewalk again and again. I probably would have had a much easier life if I had continued doing Da Ali G Show.

Ten years ago you said of this type of cinema: “It’s a young man’s game. You have to be willing to take a little risk, and my philosophy has always been, ‘Well, if something bad happens, I’m single and everyone will be fine if I end up in the hospital for two weeks.’ Now that I’m married and have kids, it’s harder to justify. So, did you find a way to do things differently, or did you just say “Fuck it”?

I’m never a cavalier. These films are dangerous to make, but we try to limit the risks and keep everyone safe. But even physically, they are incredibly demanding. So the final scene of this film is a continuous eight-hour scene that takes place across 12 locations. It’s a continuous shot. There are gunshots in it. There is a medical procedure. There are drones, there are explosions, and it takes place in the desert. On the way to filming, I ran into one of the big stunt guys and he said to me, “You’ll go to the hospital if you do this movie,” because I explained that I was wearing a prosthetic head in a big suit. He said: “You will be so dehydrated you will be in hospital for two weeks. »

You hear that and think what?

That I have to solve the problem. So I had an endurance specialist who does the Tour de France alongside me during the scene and he measured my weight. I think I had 11 liters of Pedialyte. And look, a number of people went to the hospital for dehydration, including the bodyguard. There were also dangers at the scene. One of the people grabbed a gun and almost did something very dangerous. These are definitely the hardest films to make, but I guess I did it because I’m afraid of this world of conspiracies and lies spread by social media and now AI. If we do not share these facts, democracies will collapse and we will not be able to have a tolerant society. And making people laugh is therapy.

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