Jason Woliner directed Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat 2. In an interview with The Daily Beast’s The Last Laugh podcast he dished on what actually happened in the infamous Rudy Giuliani scene.
The movie was Jason Woliner’s first feature film. The Jewish director previously directed mostly television shows.
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Everyone knows by now all about what Rudy Giuliani did in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, even if they haven’t yet seen the movie. As with very one in Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat movies, Giuliani fell for the gag that he was being interviewed for a legitimate news service from Kazakhstan. The interview was conducted by Borat’s cousin Tutar Sagdiyev, who was played by the 24 year old Bulgarian actress Maria Bakalova.
Well to sum up, after the interview, which was conducted in a hotel suite, Giuliani and Bakalova went into the bedroom where he did a few questionable things before Borat himself burst in on them.
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So what really happened and how did it all come about?
Woliner told The Daily Beast that he could not believe what was happening as he was watching the feed which appeared on a monitor in a different location. “There were hidden cameras, obviously. So we’re unable to communicate with Maria,” he said. “But we’re just trying to text with Sacha to determine when is the right time to jump out.”
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So the director said that he felt like he was in one of those TV news shows where they set up a pedophile and burst in on him just as the guy comes into a house expecting a liaison with an underage girl.
“At a certain point it’s not funny anymore. It’s just a sting operation. So we’re texting with him (Cohen), we’re watching. So they’re doing this interview. He’s saying all these shocking things about COVID and all this racist stuff about Chinese people. And then we have the first beat of it when Sacha comes in as the boom guy and that’s step one.”
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On Rudy Giuliani’s physical contact with Maria Bakalova, Jason Woliner has no doubt that the former New York City mayor intended to try something sexual with the actress.
“And then it’s really as you see it. He’s touching her shoulder, he’s asking for her number. He sits on the bed, he touches her lower back,” said Woliner. “And every moment of that we were watching thinking, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”
“And then he lies down and he puts his hand down his pants. My jaw hit the floor. It was one of those moments you never forget”
Woliner does not buy Giuliani’s later explanation that he was just adjusting his shirt in his pants and says that this is simply implausible. “You know, I’ve been doing this for a long time. I’ve seen a lot of people get microphones applied and removed. I’ve never seen anyone have to lie on a bed and put their hands down their pants,” he said.
Jason Woliner also commented on how his awful appearance in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm irreparably harmed Rudy Giuliani’s credibility as a lawyer and as a part of Donald Trump’s attempts since the 2020 elections to overturn the results.
“If anything, that scene shows how easy it was to get Rudy. It’s hard to imagine a time where he had any credibility, two months later, but it may have helped undermine him or at least just taken the wind out of the sails of what they were hoping was an October surprise.”
