The gonzo art of writing for 'Borat Subsequent Moviefilm'

Screenplay writing, usually a fairly solitary, uneventful process, is more of a full-contact sport for a movie like “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.”

Work for the nine Oscar-nominated writers of the “Borat” sequel began conventionally enough. Brainstorming, a draft, a table read. But as soon as shooting starts, there’s no telling what can happen, how people will react to Sacha Baron Cohen’s Kazakh alter-ego, or what strange circumstances might befall their protagonist.

As Borat hurtles through the world, a team of writers trails along, endlessly writing and rewriting for every evolving scenario. Take, for example, when Baron Cohen ended up in a five-day lockdown with two QAnon believers. Anthony Hines, a writer and producer on the film, would reach Baron Cohen by stealthily taking a ladder to Baron Cohen’s second-floor bedroom, like a Cyrano de Bergerac of comedy.

This image released by Amazon Studios shows Maria Bakalova, left, and Sacha Baron Cohen in a scene from "Borat Subsequent Moviefilm." .(Amazon Studios via AP)

“It was quite sort of dark and dangerous,” says Hines, a longtime collaborator of Baron Cohen's. “It was literally a matter of climbing up that ladder and poking your head into Borat’s bedroom window at 2 a.m. and giving him feedback and giving him some ideas.”

Like most things about “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” the film’s Academy Awards nomination for adapted screenplay is unusual. Seldom are the scripts to broad comedies nominated, but both “Borat” films have been. Its nine writers are the most ever nominated in the category. (When it won at the Writer Guild Awards, Baron Cohen theorized it was because 60% of the guild worked on the movie.) And the film’s full title — “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” — is the longest ever for an Oscar nominee.

“When they read out the nomination and the title of the film, I think it will essentially feel like a filibuster,” Dan Mazer said on a recent Zoom with Hines and four other of the film’s writers, Peter Baynham, Dan Swimer, Jena Friedman and Nina Pedrad.

This image released by Amazon Studios shows Sacha Baron Cohen in a scene from "Borat Subsequent Moviefilm." (Amazon Studios via AP)

“If we win, it’s a massive boost the trophy manufacturing industry,” added Hines.

You can read a transcribed script of “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” and it does make for a unique reading experience. Descriptions include “EXT. MEL GIBSON SQUARE - DAY.” But the movie’s final form gives you only a small window into the gonzo art of writing for Borat.

There are plenty of scenes scripted straightforwardly, but screenwriting for Borat also means finding ways to manipulate the real world, guessing how people will respond, and shoehorning those guerilla encounters into a coherent narrative. That adds up to, says Hines, “an extraordinary amount of writing — far, far more than a conventional movie.”

“There’s nine movies,” says Swimer.

A lot of what they do never comes near the screen, nor is it even designed to. To help lure Rudy Giuliani for the film’s infamous hotel room scene, they created a fake documentary about the coronavirus called “Keeping America Alive: How Trump Defeated COVID.” After watching the tape, Giuliani’s office OK’ed the interview under the impression it was for that film.

“That’s a writing process all of its own. It’s like scripts within scripts,” says Hines. “We shot part of that documentary with other people who were not going to be in the movie like a sizzle reel with a voiceover going something like: ‘Where Trump saw an invisible enemy, the Democrats saw an invisible friend.’”

Sometimes — especially during the run-up to the 2020 election — real-life farce could seem like their handwork, too. Giuliani’s Four Seasons Landscaping press conference, for instance.

“That was us as well,” says Baynham. “We wrote the Landscaping thing.”

Most of the writers are Borat veterans, many of them going back to “Da Ali G Show.” But on “Subsequent Moviefilm,” Baron Cohen (a credited writer, too, and a regular presence in the writing room) brought some fresh voices to Borat, including Friedman, Pedrad and Erica Rivinoja. Their input was key in mapping the journey of Borat's daughter Tutar through American-style misogyny and Borat’s slow, strange transition to what might be called feminism.

But because “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” was made in secret, just joining the project was disorienting.

“I didn’t really even know what the movie was,” says Pedrad (“Saturday Night Live”). “I go, locked in a room, read the script. A couple pages in, I’m like: ‘This sounds a lot like ... no. Is it?’”

In case of leak, scripts were written in code. Borat’s name never appeared in the pages. “One minute, he was Sergio from Guatemala, then he was Apu from Armenia,” says Hines. By the end, the names were all jumbled up. Johnny the Monkey was identified as Jeremy the Horse.

Friedman, a “Daily Show” veteran, was responsible for the scene set in a “pregnancy crisis center.” There, Pastor Jonathan Bright, led to believe that Tutar is pregnant by her father, still argues against abortion.

“I can’t believe we got that scene in a major motion picture,” says Friedman. “I remember there was a discussion like, ‘Do you think we’ll really be able to get a pastor be OK with incest?’ Just knowing what I know from those places, I was like, ‘Absolutely, yes.’”

The writers will play out some scenes with actors beforehand to get a sense of likely responses to Borat. But they also encounter plenty of people who say things that couldn’t possibly be prepared for. If Borat holds up a mirror to American society, the reflection is often unpredictable and disquieting.

That includes the plastic surgeon, Dr. Charles Wallace, visited by Borat and Tutar who frankly tells them that he would he would want to sleep with Tutar if Borat wasn't there. The moment still astounds Mazer.

“It’s a really interesting dilemma we go through because the more extreme it is, the less people believe that it’s real,” he says. “You just go: How do people like that actually exist? And they do, and we find them, and it’s more common than you would imagine.”

Their plans are frequently upended. The pandemic, itself, caused a massive rewrite. Sometimes people get wind that it’s Baron Cohen in disguise. For the scene with Tutar at a Republican women’s event, Borat was removed at the last moment after producers overheard something. In the first “Borat” film, a Civil War reenactment scene was scrubbed when one of the reenactors’ sons spotted Baron Cohen.

But remarkably frequently, the writers say, Baron Cohen finds a way to make happen the ridiculous scenarios they dream up — scenes they think can’t possibly be pulled off. Sometimes they’re watching along by a live video link. Sometimes they’re hidden among a crowd, as Hines was while an overalls-clad Cohen performed as “Country Steve” at a pro-gun rally. Or they might be anxiously waiting for word in the writers’ room.

“We’ll be sitting there nervously going, ‘How many of our jokes made it in? How did the scene go?’ The amount of times we’ll get a text back saying, ‘We did it. We got X to happen. We got Y to happen,’” says Mazer, shaking his head. “It’s like a bank job. It’s like a celebration. You just go, ’I can’t believe that happened. How did he get to it? I never in my wildest dreams imagined this crazy thing that we wrote ended up manifesting.'"

Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP

NEW YORK (AP) — Reviving a campaign pledge, President Donald Trump wants a one-year, 10% cap on credit card interest rates, a move that could save Americans tens of billions of dollars but drew immediate opposition from an industry that has been in his corner.

Trump was not clear in his social media post Friday night whether a cap might take effect through executive action or legislation, though one Republican senator said he had spoken with the president and would work on a bill with his “full support.” Trump said he hoped it would be in place Jan. 20, one year after he took office.

Strong opposition is certain from Wall Street in addition to the credit card companies, which donated heavily to his 2024 campaign and have supported Trump's second-term agenda. Banks are making the argument that such a plan would most hurt poor people, at a time of economic concern, by curtailing or eliminating credit lines, driving them to high-cost alternatives like payday loans or pawnshops.

“We will no longer let the American Public be ripped off by Credit Card Companies that are charging Interest Rates of 20 to 30%,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

Researchers who studied Trump’s campaign pledge after it was first announced found that Americans would save roughly $100 billion in interest a year if credit card rates were capped at 10%. The same researchers found that while the credit card industry would take a major hit, it would still be profitable, although credit card rewards and other perks might be scaled back.

About 195 million people in the United States had credit cards in 2024 and were assessed $160 billion in interest charges, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau says. Americans are now carrying more credit card debt than ever, to the tune of about $1.23 trillion, according to figures from the New York Federal Reserve for the third quarter last year.

Further, Americans are paying, on average, between 19.65% and 21.5% in interest on credit cards according to the Federal Reserve and other industry tracking sources. That has come down in the past year as the central bank lowered benchmark rates, but is near the highs since federal regulators started tracking credit card rates in the mid-1990s. That’s significantly higher than a decade ago, when the average credit card interest rate was roughly 12%.

The Republican administration has proved particularly friendly until now to the credit card industry.

Capital One got little resistance from the White House when it finalized its purchase and merger with Discover Financial in early 2025, a deal that created the nation’s largest credit card company. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is largely tasked with going after credit card companies for alleged wrongdoing, has been largely nonfunctional since Trump took office.

In a joint statement, the banking industry was opposed to Trump's proposal.

“If enacted, this cap would only drive consumers toward less regulated, more costly alternatives," the American Bankers Association and allied groups said.

Bank lobbyists have long argued that lowering interest rates on their credit card products would require the banks to lend less to high-risk borrowers. When Congress enacted a cap on the fee that stores pay large banks when customers use a debit card, banks responded by removing all rewards and perks from those cards. Debit card rewards only recently have trickled back into consumers' hands. For example, United Airlines now has a debit card that gives miles with purchases.

The U.S. already places interest rate caps on some financial products and for some demographics. The Military Lending Act makes it illegal to charge active-duty service members more than 36% for any financial product. The national regulator for credit unions has capped interest rates on credit union credit cards at 18%.

Credit card companies earn three streams of revenue from their products: fees charged to merchants, fees charged to customers and the interest charged on balances. The argument from some researchers and left-leaning policymakers is that the banks earn enough revenue from merchants to keep them profitable if interest rates were capped.

"A 10% credit card interest cap would save Americans $100 billion a year without causing massive account closures, as banks claim. That’s because the few large banks that dominate the credit card market are making absolutely massive profits on customers at all income levels," said Brian Shearer, director of competition and regulatory policy at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, who wrote the research on the industry's impact of Trump's proposal last year.

There are some historic examples that interest rate caps do cut off the less creditworthy to financial products because banks are not able to price risk correctly. Arkansas has a strictly enforced interest rate cap of 17% and evidence points to the poor and less creditworthy being cut out of consumer credit markets in the state. Shearer's research showed that an interest rate cap of 10% would likely result in banks lending less to those with credit scores below 600.

The White House did not respond to questions about how the president seeks to cap the rate or whether he has spoken with credit card companies about the idea.

Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., who said he talked with Trump on Friday night, said the effort is meant to “lower costs for American families and to reign in greedy credit card companies who have been ripping off hardworking Americans for too long."

Legislation in both the House and the Senate would do what Trump is seeking.

Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., released a plan in February that would immediately cap interest rates at 10% for five years, hoping to use Trump’s campaign promise to build momentum for their measure.

Hours before Trump's post, Sanders said that the president, rather than working to cap interest rates, had taken steps to deregulate big banks that allowed them to charge much higher credit card fees.

Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., have proposed similar legislation. Ocasio-Cortez is a frequent political target of Trump, while Luna is a close ally of the president.

Seung Min Kim reported from West Palm Beach, Fla.

President Donald Trump arrives on Air Force One at Palm Beach International Airport, Friday, Jan. 9, 2025, in West Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

FILE - Visa and Mastercard credit cards are shown in Buffalo Grove, Ill., Feb. 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh, File)