Jason Woliner: Obviously it’s a movie that, because the first movie was so successful, that uniquely made it much more difficult to do a second movie because it depended on regular people not knowing who Borat was, not knowing that he was a comedy character, not knowing about Sacha [Baron Cohen] and his work and his comedy. But it was always something that kind of was rumbling. Would he ever do a sequel? I had met him a few times, we had some mutual friends. I worked with Nathan Fielder a bit and Nathan was friends with Sacha. Obviously, I was a huge fan of his, and he knew of me, but we didn’t know each other well.
I got an email asking if I would be interested in talking to him about his new movie and it didn’t say what it was or anything like that. And I said, “Yeah, of course.” They sent me a script and it was, you know, there are all these layers of secrecy and encryption. And it wasn’t really a script. It was really more of an outline. Some of it’s in script form, the more scripted scenes, the beginning and the end and the stuff with him and [Borat’s daughter] Tutar (Maria Bakalova). Within the first page, I was pretty sure he wasn’t doing a movie about a journalist from Guatemala named Sergio.
I remember reading it going, Oh, my god. Wow, he’s doing it. He’s finally doing it. And so I met with him and a few other people on the team. For whatever reason, I was feeling kind of very punchy that day, I was very straight with him. I was like, Look, you know, you made Borat, my favorite comedy. The expectations are going to be huge. It’s almost impossible to do a sequel that is going to live up to the expectations of what that would be. It was almost certainly going to be a disappointment. You have to do it completely in secret because, if people catch you doing it, you can’t keep doing it because people know you’re out there making a Borat movie, you have to figure out a way around that.
The [Donald] Trump era basically inspired him to bring this character back, and he found Trump’s America to be such an absurd, terrifying, cartoony place that, you know, it’s not unlike the fictional Kazakhstan of the Borat movie. It’s seeing those connections and then with the election it could, you know, potentially sway some people to go out and try to get rid of Trump, or maybe people who were kind of half-heartedly supporting him, maybe demoralize them to stay home. So there was that aim and then of course there was this whole idea of the daughter. And you could tell a story that actually could get audiences invested in it.
So it was very ambitious, he agreed with everything I said, and knew exactly how ambitious, how difficult, and nearly impossible it seemed. And I think we were like, Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s try to do something impossible.
Obviously coronavirus is such a large part of the film. How much of it was done before the world went into lockdown and everything changed from that perspective?
We set out to shoot a lot of the movie in order, for a number of reasons. For Sacha and Maria, it’s very good to kind of track that progress because we’re really trying to figure out the story that people would invest in and also track her character and how she comes to America and changes. In this movie, Borat changes, which doesn’t really happen in the first movie. And so there was that reason to shoot in order.