Sacha Baron Cohen Breaks Down 'Borat Subsequent Moviefilm's' Cake Scene

[borat speaks foreign language]

[tutar wretches]

[tutar speaks foreign language]

I love this thing.

[imitates previous foreign line of dialogue]

I don't know what it means,

but it's this great lower voice,

this brilliant performance from her.

All right.

Hello, my name is Sacha Baron Cohen,

and this is Notes on a Scene for

'Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe

to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation

of Kazakhstan'

Can you put message on it please?

Yes, sir.

The reason we came up with this scene was,

one of our brilliant writers, Jena Friedman,

who is this fantastic stand-up,

said, Okay, this is a movie about feminism,

and we want to explore some of the issues in that.

She said there are a bunch of places called

Pregnancy Crisis Centers, which are essentially,

they masquerade as Planned Parenthood places,

but in fact, the women will go in there

and they will be convinced,

or there will be an attempt to convince them

to keep the child.

We came up in the room with an idea that Tutar,

Borat's daughter, would swallow a tiny little

plastic figurine of a baby.

That would allow us in the room

to have this miscommunication.

Howdy-doody.

Hey, how are ya?

I would like purchase a cake.

Uh-huh.

Prodigious size.

Made of chocolate for my glorious lady, please.

So we came up with this reason,

that the reason he's going into a cake store

is to buy a chocolate cake for

Premier Nazarbayev, who's the leader of Kazakhstan.

What we have done though,

is we have produced this particular cupcake.

So there are cupcakes there,

but we have put a few on which we have these plastic babies.

This is a real cake salesperson.

Can you put a message on it please?

Yes sir, what would you like on this?

Jews.

Will not replace us.

Borat asks this question,

Can you just write 'Jews will not replace us'?

Which obviously, those of you who know,

was one of the things shouted

at the White Supremacist Rally in Charlottesville,

which was one of the reasons that I made this movie.

That and the Muslim Ban.

There were a couple of things that I thought,

Oh, I should probably not just...

be a bystander.

I asked the question,

there's always this moment with a bit of satire

where you don't know what they're gonna say.

So you've said Will you write this really racist thing

on the cake?

And obviously, you would hope that the person would go

No, I'm not going to write a racist phrase on the cake.

We don't edit that, so you hear that pause.

Jews.

Will not replace us.

This is always the thing with satire,

Are they going to agree to it, are they not?

Okay.

Okay, she does it.

I'm sure she's a very nice person,

but it's about the indifference to racism.

I remember shooting the first Borat movie

and after the first scene,

it was like this moment of realization where

These are real people who are moving the story forward.

They don't know they're in a movie.

They don't know that the things they say

are gonna change these fake characters' lives,

but they are real people who are changing the story.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

If we could bag that up please?

Okay, so here we go.

What we need now is Maria Bakalova

to notice the cupcake.

She's never been in this store before hand.

She's gotta now find the cupcake that our props person

has snuck into this store secretly.

Part of the set up for this movie,

and the reason that I was able to make it,

was Borat was famous,

how could I make another undercover movie?

The way to do it was, Borat goes in disguise.

He has a USA badge, Borat's proving that he is American.

It's a jean top, and it's got a jean tie here,

we had to make those specially.

Now this particular outfit was actually designed by

three-time Oscar winner Colleen Atwood.

Colleen cut up and created perhaps the first ever jean tie.

Thomas Kolarek was in charge of hair and make-up,

and we found that after doing a lot of tests,

if I was ginger, people were less likely to realize

that it was me.

Is there anything else I can help you with?

This is enough, thank you very much.

Are you sure?

Yes, that's it.

Okay, thank you.

[speaking foreign language]

So she is going to nag him.

And we had a lot of debates with Maria, you know,

How do you nag Borat?

We rehearsed this a bunch.

And this scene just comes after him

unconsciously dancing along with his daughter

at the State Fair.

We're telling the audience there at that point,

even though Borat doesn't know what's going on,

we're telling the audience

Oh, this is a movie about these two

falling in love with each other.

It's about these two.

You don't really realize it until that point.

One of the movies that actually we looked at for

when we were writing this was Brokeback Mountain.

Borat is a kind of latent father.

Deep down, he doesn't know it,

but he really loves his daughter.

And so this is the beginning of their relationship,

does he care about her enough to give her a cupcake?

She's speaking Bulgarian here, going

Please, please, please, please.

And I'm speaking in a bit of Hebrew mixed with Bulgarian,

I've got some Polish in there.

So we would always rehearse in English first

so we really understood what the other person was saying.

We would spend the night beforehand just

rehearsing the scene, making sure,

because we had one take.

That's why Maria, above everything, is an incredible actor.

I mean, she got all of these things in one take,

she got the emotion, the comedy.

Teenagers. [borat laughs]

Please, give it to me Daddy, give it to me.

Okay, Give it to me, give it to me.

Now, she is setting up lines here

that we are going to use later on

in the Pregnancy Crisis Center.

Just think about the bravery of her as well,

she's just come out of drama school,

she's put in this incredibly difficult acting challenge,

being in the real world,

often in quite dangerous situations.

Give it to me.

Okay, choose cake. Choose cake.

[tutar laughs]

Here they are, here are the cupcakes.

She's going to look.

I will regret this.

And he will regret it.

I want this one with the baby on it.

[Shop Assistant] Okay.

Okay, now in the editing here,

we go to close-up.

We have these incredible camera men and DPs,

Luke Geissbuhler.

Where they get the scene immediately.

So they know exactly what shots they need,

again, they've also got one go,

and they've got to get it right.

So for the audience to understand this joke,

they have to see clearly that there are babies

on top of cupcakes.

I want this one with the baby on it.

[Shop Assistant] Okay.

They have a lot of cream.

[tutar laughs]

This is our little secret.

I would not want the authorities to see.

I do not want the authorities to see.

The reason we've written that is so that

she can eat and swallow the baby in an alleyway,

which obviously you associate with, you know,

some casual one-night stand.

You know, and she's got nails here,

she's had her lips done.

And she's wearing make-up,

and this is a wig.

We're trying to convey, she is destroying herself,

she's changing herself completely.

And the reason she's doing it is

to be given to another man as property.

You know, in many parts of the world,

and throughout much of history,

girls and women were their father's property

until the day they became their husband's property,

and that still exists.

What's the benefit of having a writer's room

with men and women?

Well, I tell you what,

we never would have had a scene like this,

or even the menstruation dance,

if we didn't have women coming up with these concepts.

Borat, these kind of movies, Bruno,

we're dealing with taboos

and seeing where we can get comedy from them.

[borat speaks foreign language]

A police car pulled in here.

They were confused, you know, What are they doing?

And again, we're shooting this movie in secret.

No one knows we're shooting a movie.

The crucial thing was,

during the kind of year that we shot this,

no one could know,

so we couldn't get arrested,

we couldn't have anyone know that it was Borat,

and that there was a new Borat movie,

or the whole thing would have been ruined.

So the police car pulled in here,

tried to find out what was going on.

As they pulled in, I get in a Minivan and I disappear.

We wait for the police car to go.

Come back, do another take,

then the police car came back again.

I'm continually leaving.

[tutar speaks foreign language]

And here we go, we find a place with a dumpster,

that's why we chose this location.

[tutar and borat speak foreign language]

We need her to swallow this baby.

So she needs to, in the performance, get so carried away

that this baby gets lodged in her throat.

And it has to be so badly stuck

that he takes her to a doctor.

This particular cupcake has a marzipan inedible baby,

you know, so that she doesn't actually swallow it.

We didn't kill a co-star.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.

[tutar wretches]

[borat speaks foreign language]

[tutar speaks foreign language]

I love this thing.

[quotes previous line of dialogue]

We kept on saying this,

me and my co-writer Ant Hines,

after we kept on going

[quotes previous line of dialogue]

I don't know what it means,

but it's this great lower voice,

this brilliant performance from her.

And again, look at these eyebrows.

So the make-up is not great here.

It's going to get a lot better towards

the end of the movie.

But this is her doing her make-up.

[borat and tutar speak in a foreign language]

I actually say Ma kara? in Hebrew,

which means What happened?

But we changed the...

Translation of that.

[borat speaks in foreign language]

[upbeat east european music]

Okay, here is the beginning of the comic set-up.

The audience know one thing,

the other person, the room, does not.

I have a baby inside me.

[Pastor] Mm-hm.

And I want to take it out of me.

Okay, so this is a pastor.

And he's slightly masquerading, you know.

You see there, there's an ultrasound.

There's the impression here that it's a medical office,

well, it isn't.

And he's kind of pretending to be a doctor,

but he's actually a pastor.

Right.

She want it out now please.

Right, I can't do-

This is our classic shot,

for all those budding comedy directors here,

which is, we either have the two-shot or the three-shot,

where in our comedy, because it's set in the real world,

we wanna have as few cuts as possible,

we wanna play the master shot.

It's kind of the original way

that comedy was shot on movies.

so this, you know, the classic two-shot or the three-shot,

and you wanna see as many eyes as possible.

So here we go, one, two, three,

a bit of Borat's second one here,

four, five, and a tiny bit of his eye there.

So that's kind of the perfect two or three-shot,

where we can really get a sense

of what everyone's thinking in one go.

And again, the performance here and what's funny about it,

and there's nothing less funny than explaining

why a joke is funny,

is they're so flippant, you know,

they're talking about about it like

Can we get it out?

Why not?

What you say, take it out? Yes.

You end that life. That life will die.

It already dead, it not living.

No, it is living right now, it has a-

Why? This big.

It has a heartbeat right now.

I don't think so.

It is a living, breathing life.

He doesn't know yet that these two are related,

so he's just doing the standard thing,

we're pretty sure he's going to do this.

When we first wrote the screenplay,

we wrote a 90-page version of the movie

and we wrote the real people's parts

with what we felt they would say.

Obviously, in the real world,

we don't know what they're going to say.

I don't think he's breathing.

We can show you that it's breathing.

It hurt my stomach.

[Pastor] Mm-hmm.

And it will hurt my asshole.

This was something that Jena Friedman felt

was really important to say.

It's painful.

Right? I want it out.

You know, it's this big, right,

so it's clear that it's within the amount of weeks where,

you know, most societies would see

it's reasonable to take it out.

And it's hurting her, she's in pain.

Why on Earth can't she have it out?

She's chosen to have an abortion.

And it will hurt my asshole.

Mm-hmm.

So When it comes out it will hurt my asshole.

When you're saying a line like that, Asshole,

there's a fear that the person will walk out the room.

I had never explained my process to anyone.

In fact, it's slightly embarrassing

even talking about it now.

But Maria had to know how to do these things.

And so for the first time ever,

I was verbalizing these techniques that I had been using.

I hadn't even realized that they were techniques,

but I'd go Oh yeah,

you know, what you need to do when they're suspicious,

is really look into their eyes deeper,

and also just go deeper into the character.

And that's a kind of weird thing to explain,

but you almost, you feel it physically when you go

deeper into the character.

It can tear it.

Right.

I feel bad because I was the one who put the baby in her.

[slaps hand]

You don't need to feel bad.

I was just trying to give my daughter pleasure and-

Bingo. Daughter, here is the bombshell.

How long is it gonna take him to react?

Next thing I know there is a baby-

For the satire to work,

we need to posit the question,

How extreme are these clinics?

Would they still pressure a young 15 year old girl

to have a baby, even if it was incest?

Next thing I know, there is a baby inside her.

Mm-hm.

You keep calling her your daughter.

Yes.

Okay.

Is he your father?

Yes.

Okay, great performance.

Like, Yes, what's the big deal?

And it's this kind of casual nature of

Yeah, it's incestuous.

You know?

In his mind he believes that this couple, they're like

Yeah, I have sex with my father, what's the big deal?

This is your daughter?

Yes.

Again, he's asked it three times now.

You keep mentioning your daughter.

There's like, three mentions.

He doesn't want to psychologically deal with this question,

what's he got to do?

I wanted to give my daughter-

And we're trying to keep as much of the reality of it

as possible.

So the real...

We're imagining what they're thinking.

A treat.

I understand, I don't need to hear any-

She was-

I don't need to hear anymore of that, I understand-

She just had to-

I want to get this line out, I'm gonna get this line out,

I know I've got a good gag here.

Would you not give it to her?

I understand.

Listen, it really, that is not important right now.

That's not important right now.

Why is it not important right now?

The fact that it's incest, and she's 15 years old.

How can that not be important right now.

So this is quite a shocking thing to say.

When he treat me,

he said This will be our little secret.

This will be our little secret.

So we know, remember beforehand,

we've set up this joke.

Yes, this is why I do it behind the dumpster,

so no one can see.

Now that you know that I am her father,

can we take it out now please?

God is the one who creates life,

and God doesn't make accidents.

The difference between Borat and a normal comedy,

is normally in a normal comedy,

you end on what we call the blow,

which is the biggest gag.

Here, we're ending on something that's complete satire.

So we end with that bit of satire.

That's the kind of unusual thing of

the way this movie is cut

as opposed to a normal comedy movie.

We finished filming...

Pretty close to the release, the movie.

We finished filming,

then three weeks later we delivered the movie.

Probably one of the fastest post-productions

in cinematic history.

Well, I don't know if that's true,

but I may as well claim that, why not?

I know that we are officially the longest title

ever nominated for an Oscar.

After this movie...

Yeah, I don't know if I'm traumatized,

but I definitely don't want to go out

and shoot another one of these movies ever again.

They're too hard, as you can see.