You could make an entire movie from leftover scenes that didn’t make it into Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. Even if you stopped to think about the number of interviews Sacha Baron Cohen must do in character that don’t turn out well, he must have hours of deleted scenes that were meant for the movie, but didn’t meet the standard he needed for the finished cut. And then there are some scenes that end abruptly, and we as the audience have to be wondering, “How the hell did Cohen get out of that jam?”
One such scene in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm involves the lead character getting up on stage at a gun rally and leading the crowd in a song he wrote, as a fake character named Country Steve, titled The Wuhan Flu. For a while, Borat’s ruse works. But while appearing on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Cohen went on to explain that his cover got blown during that show, and the armed crowd rioted and stormed the stage. The way that he describes it:
The problem was that some of the militia groups that were in this rally had been antagonizing the Black Lives Matter protests (in the same area). And as revenge, the Black Lives Matter protest were coming over to confront them. I didn’t know anything about this. And they had sent some of their members, Black Lives Matter protestors, to go undercover at the rally. So I was going undercover, and so were they! They were there as spotters to see what’s going on, because there were a bunch of Black Lives Matter protestors coming down the road, (toward) this confrontation. And then they see me on stage and everyone’s singing along, and one of them went ‘Oh my god, it’s Sacha Baron Cohen!’ He starts laughing, and tells the other one. Word got out that it was me, and then the organizers and a lot of people in the crowd got very angry. They tried to storm the stage. Luckily for me I had hired the security. So it took them a while to actually storm the stage.
Sacha Baron Cohen went on to explain that he knows for sure one member of the country audience reached for a gun that he had, and that Cohen’s security guard stopped him by whispering, “It’s not worth it, man.” As if to prove how disruptive “Country Steve’s” appearance was, Cohen brought footage to Stephen Colbert’s show, and around the seven-minute mark, you can see how the actor and satirist had to barricade himself in his trailer as the angry, manipulated crowd tried to power their way in.
I feel like Sacha Baron Cohen can keep the momentum going on Borat Subsequent Moviefilm in the next few weeks by releasing more footage about how this movie was pieced together. Amazon Prime got a boost from the initial Rudy Giuliani controversy stemming from the movie. But as more people see it, they will want to learn more about how this irregular movie was made.
Have you seen Borat Subsequent Moviefilm yet? What did you think? Hit the comments below and let us know.
