Interview: Have a Good Trip’s Donick Cary Talks About Carrie Fisher and Anthony Bourdain Appearing in the Film

Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics is a surprisingly fun documentary in which a bunch of big-name celebrities … well, recount their experiences with drugs.

While I talked about a great many things with the filmmakers (mainly because I personally was geeking out talking with Donick Cary because of my love of Parks and Recreation), including how it surprised me (as well as both Cary and Rosenstein) that Sting was willing to share his story, seeing their footage of Carrie Fisher and Anthony Bourdain really did hit in a very special way.

The documentary was filmed over quite a few years, and it’s strange to now see both Fisher and Bourdain sharing stories when Fisher died in 2016 and Bourdain died in 2018.

The Mary Sue: I want to go on, but it was shocking when I looked up and saw Judd Nelson talking. I was like, “Wow, did not expect to see Judd Nelson in a documentary.”

Mike Rosenstein: Yeah, I think that’s what’s fun for people, too—that there’s such a variety of people in the movie that there’s something for everyone, and it’s also fun to be surprised about who will talk about it. You know? So some people are surprised that Sting is coming out and talking about this, and so yeah, we love that reaction.

TMS: When you guys were editing this first one, did you really want to make sure you kept in Anthony Bourdain and Carrie Fisher, since they have now both passed?

Donick Cary: It’s funny that it happens to be those two. We also just randomly interviewed one of the Ramones before they passed, Tommy Ramone, who also had a wonderful story about LSD and the punk scene in the ’70s, which you don’t ever think of as a place for that. But the cool thing about the two of them is they are very different storytellers. There’s a really interesting contrast. Anthony was such a polished, wonderful, presentable … like, he sat down and just told a story from beginning to end that was just epic.

Rosenstein: Yeah it was amazing.

Cary: And Carrie was somebody we sat down and we talked to for hours and hours and we never quite finished one story. It was all one big miss-mash of thousands of experiences all mixed together into one long life story. But, you know, both were heroes of mine. Carrie, I think, when we were editing, we all felt—like you were saying—was just a wonderful person to talk to, and these stories are so intimate because it is a taboo subject, but hers was particularly intimate because she brought us into her house, which was a reflection of how her brain worked. She let us look around and shared that, and then these stories are incredibly intimate because they are really people going, “Here is what my brain reveals when I use this tool or this drug that opens it up, and here’s what happened.”

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Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics is a wonderful film giving us a look into the world of psychedelics and what to do (and not to) with them, and you can check it out on Netflix now!

(image: Netflix)

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