The Borat Movie

[MacGuffin]

When the Borat movie was released last year you couldn't even count the number of publicity appearances that Sacha Baron Cohen made as Borat. Those appearances, along with creating a hysterical and powerful movie, turned Borat into a monstrous hit and a cultural phenomenon that crossed all lines of gender, race and politics. Much of the attention for the film was given, and rightly so, to Cohen but for most movies the director is always an essential element. Borat's director is Larry Charles previously best known for his writer/producer work on Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Entourage. Charles also directed another mop topped Jew named Bob Dylan in Masked and Anonymous. I got a chance to talk with Charles about creating the movie, the politics behind the scenes and how he got those people to say such outrageous things.

Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?

Larry Charles: I was supposed to edit today, actually. I took on a Kanye West pilot for HBO and I was supposed to edit today but the editor's not ready for me so I put that off. So I'm writing a treatment for a new movie that I was going to work on today and I'm supposed to review some footage for this Bill Maher documentary [called A Spiritual Journey] that I shot.

DRE:You are a busy man.

LC:I am very busy.

DRE:How is the Kanye West pilot?

LC:I think it's going to be really great. It's going to really surprise people. They have this very limited view of what the show will be. They think it's going to be like a reality show so they're really underestimating what we did. When they see it, they'll be really shocked.

DRE:People think it is going to be Kanye ranking on George W. Bush the whole show.

LC:Right, ranking on George Bush or acting like Flava Flav or whatever cliché that they have of every other young black man on TV. It's going to be hopefully dissected, deconstructed and reconstructed into something that they've never saw before.

DRE:Is it plot driven?

LC:It's hard to describe. Let me put it to you this way, when I made the Bob Dylan movie [Masked and Anonymous], I wanted to make a Bob Dylan movie that was like a Bob Dylan song. One with a lot of layers, that had a lot of poetry, that had a lot of surrealism and was ambiguous and hard to figure out, like a puzzle. So I wanted to make a show that was like Kanye's music. There's seriousness and humor at the same time. It's very dark. It's very language-oriented. It draws on a lot of different musical influences.

DRE:Is it a heightened Kanye, like Larry David on Curb [Your Enthusiasm]?

LC:Yes, people have a very limited image of who Kanye is and this will shatter, or at least expand that image and play with that image and mock that image all at the same time.

DRE:It must be a lot of fun.

LC:It's been a lot of fun. We did it on a very small budget very quickly but I also wanted that urgency to it. I had a good game plan and I think we accomplished our goal.

DRE:As for Borat, I read that they originally started with another director, so how did you get involved?

LC:They shot about two weeks with another director and it was a mess. Everyone was very unhappy so they shut the movie down. Now usually when they do that, it's pretty much the end of the movie, they write it off as an insurance thing or something. But for some reason, the people at Fox had a feeling that this could still be something. So they went out in search of somebody and my name had come up initially and then my name came up again. I sat down with Sacha [Baron Cohen] and the writers and we talked about what I would do differently and how I would change things and what I could bring to it and when I agreed to cut my hair, they said okay [laughs].

DRE:[laughs] It's hard to fool people with you looking the way you normally do.

LC:That's right. I couldn't pass as a normal person. I look like some type of Gandalf reject or something. So I cut my hair and put on a blazer and khakis and looked like a community college professor or something.

DRE:That's really funny.

LC:That was the thing they were most afraid to ask me actually. Creatively we were totally in sync and then Sacha finally said, "Can I ask you one more thing?" and I said, "Sure, whatever" and he said, "Would you ever possibly consider cutting your hair?" I said, "Of course. Come on, let's go shave my head. Whatever you need." He was very surprised I wasn't attached to it.

DRE:I didn't know that you came to direct the film in such a professional way, I figured you knew Sacha and he just asked you to do it.

LC:Well, I did know Sacha a little bit beforehand. We had met a couple of times previously and we expressed admiration for each other's work or whatever. But Sacha is not the person who does favors. He's very serious about the work and he wanted to marry the right person to the thing, especially since it fell apart the first time. He wanted to find somebody who would actually work. I don't know if he talked with anyone else or not. Once we talked, it seemed like it all fell together.

DRE:From what I had heard, [the first director of Borat] Todd Phillips kept getting scared when they were shooting and turning off the camera. I don't know if that's true or not.

LC:I don't know if that's true either. I was not there. I never really heard stories like that.

DRE:Did they know that you were a guy who would do anything for the joke or the idea and that's why you guys connected?

LC:They knew I had a fearlessness in my aesthetic. Once they met me, they saw I was somebody who was not going to be afraid to walk into the line of fire. That I was willing to lead the troops into battle. I think that combination of things was what Sacha was looking for.

DRE:When Sacha was Borat, were you always there with the cameraman or with the camera?

LC:Yes, always.

DRE:From what I could tell you're not an actor, so how did you play this guy leading around this Kazakhstani guy?

LC:Well actually I am a great actor. Part of being a great actor is being real and I was able to really convey the sincerity and genuineness of what we were doing to people and almost create a state for people where they were comfortable with the idea. Then once that was set up, anything could happen within that constructed reality. We constructed a reality where this man from Kazakhstan just got here and you can't make any assumptions about what he knows. He's never been in a hotel, he's never been on an elevator. In the middle of it sometimes, people would come out of the trance a little bit and say, "Is this real? Is this real?" and I would say, "Yes, it's totally real." But what I wouldn't say that it wasn't necessarily the reality that they thought it was, but it is real. I had to be able to convey that with sincerity. I never considered what we were doing as fooling anybody. What I felt we were doing was tapping into people's ego and vanity. The only people who agreed to do the movie were people who felt that they belonged in a movie, deserved to be in a movie, they had something to contribute to a movie, that they would look good in a movie. You can't make people do anything they don't want to. If you go to see a hypnotist in a nightclub and he has people getting up and dancing like a chicken, afterwards if you talk to those people, they'll tell you, "I never felt like I had to dance like a chicken. I wanted to dance like a chicken." It's a similar psychological effect as the movie. People are eager to please, to look good on camera, to come off well on camera, to cooperate and sometimes they had a superior attitude towards him. Sometimes they were very patient towards him but whatever they truly were would emerge on film eventually.

DRE:I got the DVD and watched the extras and one of the deleted scenes is Borat with the woman at the dog pound. I respect that woman so much because she said, "I don't like you. You're not going to eat my dogs. Goodbye."

LC:Right, she has her line in the sand. A lot of scenes in the movie come to that point. Even scenes that are in the movie, usually come to that point where some line is crossed and the police are called. But yeah that woman at the dog pound had that line in the sand. Some people have the line in the sand before you get through the whole scene, some people have the line in the sand before you do the scene, some people never have a line in the sand. The luck part of the movie is, who's going to wind up participating and who's not.

DRE:Does Borat draw the line in the sand or is it the people themselves that put the line there?

LC:We don't put any line in the sand at all. We want people to take it as far as humanly possible. If you don't want to come along for this ride, you are going to be forced, on camera, to draw your line in the sand. People under those conditions will pick that up. For instance, as the scene would unravel, we would be told by the person, "Okay, I want you to stop" and we'd go, "It's okay, we think it's going great. Don't worry." Then ten minutes would go by and they would say, "No, I really want you to stop or I'm going to call the police." We would say "No, come on, everything's fine. You don't have to call the police." "No, that's it, I want to call the police." "All right if you have to call the police...." "I'm telling you, I'm going to call the police." We would get an extra half hour of filming while that person was psychologically preparing themselves to call the police. Then when they would call the police, we would be on some dirt road in the middle of South Carolina where the police are an hour away. So even once they were unhappy and thinking about calling for help, usually I could still roll like a hour and a half of film before we had to confront the police. So the line in the sand is not something people are comfortable with. They don't want to have to draw that line in the sand. So they put it off and they put it off and in the meantime, you're still filming.

DRE:As you very well know, experienced film directors and TV producers have little tricks they have to get actors to do what they want. Sometimes their trick is just yelling at them. Since you've done so much work did those tricks come into play when you were trying to get people to react to Borat?

LC:I usually didn't need to do anything to get people to react to Borat. Sacha was able to do that part himself. What I did was prepare them to react to Borat and then if they over-reacted to Borat, to talk them off the ledge and get them back into the scene. If they got upset and wanted to pull off the microphone, that's when I would step in to calm them down, assure them everything was going well and that the interview is really great. So that was part of my job on the movie.

DRE:[Borat co-writer/producer] Dan Mazer had a show last year called Dog Bites Man, which also combined improv with a story. One of the actors on that show was Zach Galifianakis. I interviewed Zach and he said there were times when he just couldn't take it. He would start crying during scenes. What do you have to have in order to do what Sacha and you guys did?

LC:First of all, Sacha is a visionary. He's trying to accomplish something in the bigger picture. Such as, in order for Communism to succeed or for Communism to fall, or for Democracy to succeed or fall, small people are going to be stepped on along the way unfortunately. That's how history works. Sacha has a global vision of his work, which I share. So on that level, if you are in the way of our artistic pursuit, then you may be run over. But by the same token, I believe that no one was forced to do anything in the movie. Everything that's in the movie, people chose to do by their volition. If you film long enough, peoples' true sentiments, their true personality, their true feelings, their true political stances, will eventually emerge. I used to showrun on sitcoms and in the first couple of meetings with the staff of writers I found that all of them wanted to come off a certain way within the meeting. This one wants to be the silent one, this one wants to be the funny one, this one wants to be the cool one. After a couple of weeks in a room together, your real personality will start to emerge, whatever that might be. The same thing happens in these scenes. People at first want to be polite or they want to be witty or they want to be erudite. But eventually whatever they really are comes out.

DRE:Borat works on at least two levels. On one level it's a very intelligent comedy with all these overtones. On the other hand, it could be a dirtier version of a movie that Lorne Michaels might produce or something like that.

LC:There's a great comic tradition of the very intellectual and yet vulgar comedy going back to [François] Rabelais, Lenny Bruce or Jonathan Swift. Thomas Pynchon is like that today. There's tremendous humor on all different levels, puns, subtle humor, behavioral humor, character humor, conceptual humor, satire, broad satire, physical humor, political humor. All of those things can coexist and there is a comic tradition of it.

DRE:It's interesting because all those guys you mentioned were, in their time, loved by nearly everyone but now they are loved by a portion of the population that feels a bit elitist. But Borat seems to cross through all those lines. Is that because it's a movie?

LC:Borat tapped into some type of zeitgeist of the moment and had this incredible populous success. Borat stands alone in the sense that it's not really a studio movie in a traditional sense and it's not really an independent movie in the traditional sense. It was a phenomenon that transcended itself. It wasn't just a movie anymore. People quote it. People do impressions of Borat. There are all these different levels permeating the consciousness of the culture through the movie. The movie is a very open-ended movie also. There's the theatrical version, but there's also many, many possible versions of the movie also. So the whole definition of what is a movie is thrown into question by this. The fact that it had this popular success brings a lot more people into the tent. But I think that where intellectuals were initially very supportive of it, the more popular it got, the more the intellectual people started to back away from it and started all the backlash about the process and all that stuff. I think that's the nature of mass appeal. Had it stayed a small movie and made $18 million, it probably would be lauded as the most important film of the decade. But because of this popularity, it was shunted into a different category. That's very prejudicial but there's nothing I can do about that.

DRE:One of the stars of The 40 Year Old Virgin, Seth Rogen, gave me the best definition of improv I ever heard. He said, "My friends say stuff that's funnier than anything I've ever heard in a movie, so why don't we just put my friends in there?"

LC:[laughs] But he has a lot of funny friends, of course. I don't know if that would be true if you went down to the gas station and just turned on the camera. But in our case, sometimes it was.

DRE:But what do you think of that definition?

LC:I think the key is the way Larry David has pioneered it and Sacha does this too, that is to create really funny concepts. There's more writing involved in great improv than people give credit for. In both the case of Sacha and Larry David, there are tremendous amounts of writing and thinking and conceptualizing before the improv is done. So you have a great idea and a great arc and a great structure for that improv so all people have to do is be natural under those conditions and you'll have great scene. So to me it's not so much about the quip or the wisecrack or the funny joke, it's about a funny situation and then having everybody act totally honestly in that situation. That will get gold every time.

DRE:On some messageboard Patton Oswalt wrote that there was a writer's room on Borat.

LC:Not when I was there. I think during the initial phase of it, Patton and some of those people came in and tried to help out. Frankly, I don't know what contributions they made. The lines between the screenplay, the direction and the acting all got blurred. There are contributions from a lot of people, and of course, massive contributions from people who didn't even realize they were in the movie. So what is a screenplay under those conditions? But people did make contributions to it that I wasn't aware of until later on when they all wanted to grab credit for the screenplay.

DRE:Well for example, the scene where Borat goes for a driving lesson, you Sacha and everyone else knows that Borat is going to be driving. So did people come up with things for Borat to say beforehand?

LC:Yes, there was some stuff. You might start the day with a document that has a version of the scene but he's just getting that the morning that we're about to shoot. So it's not like he could memorize that. Also the other person has to cooperate on some level and that's going to take the scene to a whole other place, so you have to be open for that. But what you do have is a starting point and a structure. We knew that Borat would ask a few of these funny questions and get some funny answers, but we had to have this person fire him or give him the dog or whatever it was in order to move the story forward. The idea was that you would start with a structure and something to accomplish in that scene and you had to accomplish that thing in the scene before you could move on to the next scene. If we didn't accomplish it, we had to go someplace else and do it again.

DRE:There was an article in The New York Times a couple months ago about Sarah Silverman. One of the things the article said was that since Sarah is white and liberal and much of her audience is white and liberal, she is just preaching to the choir and that she does safe humor in the veil of dangerous humor. Did that idea ever cross anyone's minds when making Borat?

LC:Well when people write articles, they will take stances and they're going to find angles and hooks to write articles about. I don't agree with that about Sarah at all. I think Sarah is one of the most courageous comedians and voices and I've worked with her a lot. She, like Sacha and Larry, has a very unique and original voice. I don't think she's trying to preach to the choir, I think she may be limited in the only thing she could reach because she couldn't get a show on before. I'm happy to see that her one-woman show was made into a movie. I'm happy to see she's got a TV series, which is very distinctive and original. So I don't agree with that assessment to begin with. As far as preaching to the choir, for myself or the people I work with, and I would include Sarah in this, I think it's a much more instinctive process than it is given credit for. There's not as much calculation and contrivance in thinking about what effect this will have, we're just following our instincts because there's no right or wrong. So you hope you make more good decisions than bad and hope that the X factor works in your favor. The X factor is the part that people don't want to admit about this because of the egos involved. You always hope you are lucky. With Borat we tried really hard to make a good movie, we were committed to making a good movie, but everybody who goes out to make a movie, tries to make a great movie. In this case, for some reason, every decision that we made happened to work out. It's like you hit that first domino and all the dominoes fell the right way. If one domino falls the wrong way, you know everything can get fucked up. People don't like the movie, they don't like the ending, they don't come to the theater, it doesn't get released in enough theaters, whatever it is, there are a million decisions that have to go right for a movie to have success like Borat. In this case it did. I can't take credit for that. I accept that there is an X factor that I have no control over.

DRE:You had a great quote when you talked about directing Masked and Anonymous. You said that your main direction to Bob Dylan was "Just be." That seems to be a line that has been working for you for a very long time.

LC:It's just like being in a relationship. Your relationship is doomed if you want the other person to change. The key to the relationship is accepting what the other person is. With Larry David and Sacha and Bob Dylan, I want them. I'm accepting them for who they are and I want the best version of them now to come out now on film. That's my goal as a director with good actors like that. I'm not asking them to abandon who they are. I'm asking them to deepen and expand who they are.

DRE:How did you come to that idea?

LC:There are a lot of factors that led to that. I'm allergic to a certain level of contrivance. I'm looking for something that's honest and that strips away a lot of things. I'm also a big fan of [John] Cassavetes and [Robert] Altman and [Roberto] Rossellini and [Pier Paolo] Pasolini. I like that sense of documentary reality that you get in a lot of those movies. I think you get a deeper, more dimensional portrait when you work with an actor that way, rather than try to push them into a hole that they don't feel comfortable in.

DRE:I've talked to a lot of great comedy people over the years and I find when I ask them the question "Does anything offend you?" They tell me what offends and it usually has to do with something personal to them like "It is because my kid has a disease so I don't like jokes about kids" or "My grandparents are dead or old" or something. So if something affects you personally, can you still make jokes about it?

LC:Yes, I can because I can be offended and hurt by many different things. But I feel that there is an angle to approach any subject to make it funny. I think that both Larry David and Sacha have made their careers doing that. They can take any subject and find the angle or the hook to make it funny for anybody, to make it palpable on some level, whether it's masturbation or the Holocaust. There's a way to laugh at it without exploiting it in some way. So I can be offended by it but still feel that the idea is more important than my feelings. On Borat and even on Curb to some degree, I will examine everyday both philosophically and metaphysically how far I am willing to go, what my line in the sand is, how I feel about it, how I can proceed and do the best job I can under those conditions. I spend a lot of time examining my behavior and examining what I'm doing, so I can justify for myself what I'm doing and feel okay about it. To feel like there's some greater good that I'm working on. Whether it's offending another person or offending myself, if I feel there's some greater good, then I can push forward with it.

DRE:You worked on Seinfeld for many years and the famous tagline it has was "a show about nothing," which was never true. It is a show about everything. But Borat seemed to combine the idea of a show about everything with real world stuff. Do you see Borat as a culmination of the work you've been doing over the years?

LC:I guess I feel all the stuff I've done over these past few years is connected. I see connections in terms of subject matter, themes and work process even. That's another very important point of this; I work to create an environment in which everyone is invested in the end product. We're on this journey together and I can't offer you money but I can offer this life-changing experience if you hop on the ship and take a ride with us. Like the Merry Pranksters, we're going to go around the country, make trouble and film it. So that part of it is very connected to me and I'm always looking for that type of experience.

[MacGuffin]

Borat's Glorious Guide to the U.S. and A.

Nice! Finally, a travel guide that will tell you where the number-four prostitute in Kazakhstan lives.

Random House imprint Flying Dolphin Press announced Wednesday that it has inked a deal with Sacha Baron Cohen's alter ego, Borat Sagdyev, to produce a book containing advice for Westerners planning to visit the bogus journalist's native country as well as handy tips for Kazakhs heading to the U.S. and A.

The illustrated hardcover tome will have two titles, each containing at least several real words: Borat: Touristic Guidings To Minor Nation of U.S. and A. and Borat: Touristic Guidings To Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.

"There is one and only Borat and we are honored to have him join our pantheon of international writers," Flying Dolphin publisher Suzanne Herz said in a statement.

Perhaps print will make the best medium for Borat's comeback, now that the blockbuster Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan has made his one of the most recognizable mustachioed faces since Magnum P.I.

While there was talk of a sequel at one point, it was always unclear just how the running gag that Borat's hi-jinks rely on would play out once his film, which was made for about $18 million and grossed more than $260 million worldwide, hit U.S. theaters.

It's true, audiences never forget a memorable face—especially when that face has been shoved between a fat guy's legs during a nude wrestling sequence.

Instead, yet another of Cohen's creations from his Emmy-nominated HBO series Da Ali G Show, the flamboyant fashion reporter Brüno, will supposedly be making his big-screen debut sometime in the next year or so, with Universal Pictures snapping up the rights to the character last October for a reported $42.5 million.

Since winning a Golden Globe for his Borat performance and stealing the show with his graphic acceptance speech, Cohen has been busy filming Tim Burton's adaptation of Sweeney Todd opposite Johnny Depp's Demon Barber of Fleet Street and reprising his vocal role as Julien, king of the lemurs, in Madagascar 2.

[MacGuffin]

"Borat" Sued Yet Again
New Yorker claims street scene caused public ridicule, humiliation
Source: The Smoking Gun

A New York businessman who is seen being chased down Fifth Avenue by comedian Sacha Baron Cohen in the film "Borat," is suing over his unwitting bit role in the hit comedy, claiming that his civil rights have been violated. Jeffrey Lemerond, 31, claims in a U.S. District Court complaint that the film depicts him "fleeing in apparent terror" from Borat, the phony Kazakh reporter portrayed by Cohen. In his June 1 lawsuit, Lemerond notes that he was screaming "go away" at Cohen, who was seeking a hug from the rattled stranger. While Lemerond used the alias "John Doe" when filing the federal lawsuit, he listed his real name in a nearly identical state court lawsuit that was filed--and then immediately withdrawn--in January. Unlike the federal action, which only names Twentieth Century Fox, the movie's distributor, as a defendant, the aborted New York State Supreme Court action listed Cohen, director Larry Charles, and producer Jay Roach as defendants. Lemerond alleges that Twentieth Century Fox unjustly enriched itself through the unauthorized use of his image. He also claims to have suffered "public ridicule, degradation, and humiliation" as a result of his brief appearance in the film. Footage of Cohen chasing Lemerond was first seen in the movie's trailer, though Lemerond's face had been pixelated from view. However, the film company did not "scramble Plaintiff's face in the film itself." Lemerond's complaint does not specify monetary damages, though it does note that "Borat" has grossed in excess of $320 million in movie ticket and DVD sales. Lemerond, a Dartmouth College graduate, has previously worked as a financial analyst The Carlyle Group and J.P. Morgan & Co.

[MacGuffin]

Another unwitting "Borat" cast member files lawsuit

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The creators of the hit film "Borat" were sued again on Tuesday, this time by a driving instructor seen in the comedy admonishing the fake Kazakh reporter for yelling insults at other drivers.

Michael Psenicska was duped into participating in the film after it was described to him as a "documentary about the integration of foreign people into the American way of life," he said in a lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court.

The suit named British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, who plays the title role, One America Productions and Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., a unit of News Corp. It also named Todd Lewis, a representative of One America who is listed in other lawsuits as Todd Lewis Schulman.

Psenicska said he was paid $500 in cash to give Borat a driving lesson. He described the experience as "surreal," saying Cohen drove erratically down residential streets, drank alcohol and yelled to a female pedestrian he would pay her $10 for "sexy time."

The lawsuit seeks $400,000 in actual damages and additional punitive damages for misleading Psenicska and for emotional harm he continues to suffer. Psenicska said if he had known the true nature of the film, he never would have participated.

The comedy has grossed $270 million plus more than $60 million in DVD sales, the lawsuit said.

A spokesman for Twentieth Century Fox was not available for comment but the company has responded to previous lawsuits involving "Borat" by saying free-speech law protects films and literary works that are "matters of interest to the public."

"Borat" has been sued at least four times already.

In June, a man seen in the film running away from Borat down the streets of New York City sued Twentieth Century Fox in federal court in Manhattan.

In February, a judge threw out a lawsuit brought in Los Angeles Superior Court by two college fraternity members shown guzzling alcohol and making racist remarks. They claimed the scenes tarnished their reputations.

Last year, two residents of a Romanian village sued Twentieth Century Fox for $30 million, claiming the film wrongly depicted them as rapists, abortionists, prostitutes and thieves. Scenes depicting Borat in Kazakhstan were filmed in Romania.

A South Carolina man also sued over a deleted scene.

[ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ]

I bought a ticket to see a documentary about Borat and his culture, but was horrified to find out that it was in fact -- a satire!

Who do I sue?

[MacGuffin]

Report: Baron Cohen offing Borat, Ali G

Borat is dead. Sacha Baron Cohen tells The Daily Telegraph that he's retiring the clueless Kazakh journalist, as well as his alter ego, aspiring rapper Ali G.

"When I was being Ali G and Borat I was in character sometimes 14 hours a day and I came to love them, so admitting I am never going to play them again is quite a sad thing," the 36-year-old actor-comedian says in the British newspaper's Friday edition.

"It is like saying goodbye to a loved one. It is hard, and the problem with success, although it's fantastic, is that every new person who sees the Borat movie is one less person I `get' with Borat again, so it's a kind of self-defeating form, really."

Baron Cohen brought Borat Sagdiyev — an anti-Semitic buffoon in search of Pamela Anderson — to the masses last year with his smash comedy, "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan." He first introduced the character on "Da Ali G Show," which was carried in the U.S. on HBO.

"It's much easier for me to be in character and it's a lot more fun," he says. "If I'd done the entire promotional campaign for (the `Borat' movie) as myself it wouldn't have developed in the same way."

Baron Cohen — not Borat — can be seen as a singing barber in Tim Burton's "Sweeney Todd," co-starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter.

His spokesman, Matt Labov, did not immediately return phone and e-mail messages by The Associated Press seeking comment on the "deaths" of Borat and Ali G.