[This story contains minor spoilers for A24 movie Tony.]
Matt Johnson, the director behind A24’s Anthony Bourdain movie, Tony, didn’t know all that much about Anthony Bourdain. “I viewed him as just a kind of Gen X host who I had zero connection with,” says the filmmaker.
For the uninitiated, Bourdain is the chef-turned-writer-turned-media personality behind Parts Unknown and No Reservations, known for traveling, eating and poetically opining on far-flung cuisines and cultures, and introducing audiences to remote corners of the world from behind a pair of Persols. Since his death by suicide in 2018 at the age of 61, he has become a near saint-like figure for the online masses wanting to suck the marrow out of life or, at least, out of a medium-rare ribeye.
But, heading into production on Tony, Johnson didn’t care much about any of that.
Far from a cradle-to-grave retelling, Tony instead focuses on the least documented blip in an incredibly well-chronicled and perpetually dissected life. Johnson wasn’t even that interested in the man behind the myth; he wanted to show the boy before the man.
Johnson has carved out an interesting career for himself as a filmmaker. He broke out with comedy webseries Nirvana the Band the Show and followed this with indie features, including moon-landing mockumentary Operation Avalanche, the tech dramedy BlackBerry and most recently the throw-back feature Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie. Tony is at once a departure for Johnson — his first non-Canadian production and his first feature that he doesn’t star in — and deeply personal, inspired by his and star Dominic Sessa’s own adolescences.
Loosely drawn from a handful of chapters from Bourdain’s bestselling memoir Kitchen Confidential, Tony follows a young and particularly disaffected Bourdain (Sessa) during a summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he starts working in his first kitchen as a dishwasher. The kitchen itself is populated by a ragtag group of cooks (played by Leo Woodall and Stavros Halkias, among others) and is run by a pious chef (Antonio Banderas). Johnson and Miller are credited as writers along with Lou Howe and Todd Bartles, whose script landed on the 2024 Black List.
Johnson talked to THR about shucking oysters, landing the film’s stand-out cameo and showing audiences an approachable Bourdain.
How did Tony come your way?
After BlackBerry, I was getting inundated with real-life stories, whether it was tech stories or some crazy real-life article that was being turned into a movie. The reason I made BlackBerry was not because I particularly like that style of story. I was compelled by the characters. This was no different. I was pitched an Anthony Bourdain movie, which had a script, and I was completely and totally uninterested. Mostly because, not only did I not want to make another real-life story in that way, but I don’t know anything about Anthony Bourdain. Then I went to New York and I had heard that Dominic Sessa had just moved there, and I’d always wanted to meet with him because I’m very interested in him as an actor. I really loved him in The Holdovers. I went to lunch with him and my producer Matt Miller, and an hour into this lunch we had come up with what the Anthony Bourdain movie was going to be.
Was he already attached to play Anthony Bourdain?
No! We both knew about the project. Within an hour, we were like, “Okay, so we’re going to make the Anthony Bourdain movie.” Dom has a real gift for being emotionally exposed. You sit with him in real life, and it is not so different than those close-ups I put him in, where he’s staring at you, and he seems like the walking wounded. He seems vulnerable. I guess that’s the nicest way to put it, he seems vulnerable in a totally charming way.
What was it from that conversation with him that you ultimately wanted to put into a film?
I am always, at some level, trying to address an aspect of my own personality in my films. And I’ve never been able to do something that is really about how I viewed my adolescent development. I think we both thought this was a way for us to address the feeling of being a boy pretending to be a man, and the horrors that go with that. Like, maybe I can lie my way out of needing to become an adult, which I think is a universal fantasy. In the same way that children look at adults and they play at being an adult. And, now that I am an adult, I realize the cruel joke is that it never stops, so you better find a way to make peace with it lest you feel like a phony pretender for forever.
I have never been a boy pretending to be a man, but I do understand the feeling of chasing adulthood and pushing it away at the same time, and you see Tony really doing that in this movie.
Some of my favorite movies do this from the female point of view. I love the film Thirteen. I don’t want to mince words here: Women go through this in, I would argue, a much more traumatic way where they are forced into adulthood simply through the biological nature of turning into women. I love these films. I love them because these rites of passage that happen to all of us are at once idiosyncratically your own and totally universal. I’d always wanted to make one.
Dominic Sessa and Antonio Banderas
Seacia Pavao
A coming-of-age movie?
You know [coming-of-age] is such a soft way of saying: You get dragged through hell. There’s this great quote that was in the movie for a while, and I’m always trying to put it into a film, and it’s some old Roman leader who says the fates lead the willing to their destiny, and the unwilling they drag.
Even though you didn’t have a personal connection to him, ultimately, you all were making a movie about Anthony Bourdain. When you did agree to do the movie, what was the research you chose to do?
As soon as Dom and I agreed that we had enough shared historical similarities, we basically invited Anthony Bourdain’s [auto]biography to the table and formed the conspiracy, which was: Where in this guy’s extensively catalogued life did all three of us line up? We just set out to make the movie about those exact moments that we felt we had… I won’t say an opinion on, but at the very least, felt curious about investigating our own pasts through his. It was really a Venn diagram between our three lives and what overlapped, and that’s why you see such a focus on the role models and such a focus on things that actually won’t happen to Anthony Bourdain until he’s quite a bit older. Antonio Banderas, although I think a lot of people will think he’s playing a character named Dmitri from Kitchen Confidential, who Anthony Bourdain met in Provincetown, he’s actually playing something much closer to his first boss in New York, somebody he refers to as “Bigfoot.” We were trying to find as much as we could in a 10-year period of his life, basically 15 to 25, and the story we pushed Dom through is where we felt like we had some experience in those things.
In this film, you have Antonio’s chef character boiling down seawater to make salt and making ketchup from scratch. He is taking ownership over all aspects of his food in a very intentional way. How did you approach portraying food onscreen?
I did not view this as a food movie at all. I viewed food — and I think Bourdain would admit the same thing if you were to press him — as the gateway to a kind of old-world camaraderie. The food is the excuse to look at a person eye-to-eye and form a relationship. So much of Bourdain’s legacy is: I’m going to look at the community, the culture, and the people, and the food is a byproduct of that. You’re not tuning in to watch my TV show because I’m going to show you the nicest, most beautifully plated food. There’s other TV shows for you to watch [if that’s what you want]. I view food as a medium of exchange. That’s how I wanted to approach the food. You’re in a kitchen with a bunch of men, and really nobody’s paying attention. The reason you’re here is that we get to fuck with each other, and we have a culture in here that we really appreciate. This movie is about food as a means to socialization.
You have Tony really struggling to shuck oysters in this movie, and my theater had this visceral reaction like it was a scene in a horror film.
And for that scene we shot a lot more, and I actually cut it out. Dom is shucking that oyster in the same way that he’s trying to solve the problems of his own adolescence. A lot of people think that it’s about how hard you can push the blade into the socket of the shell, and that is the exact wrong thing. If you do that, you wind up with a major injury. All you do is set the knife against the notch and kind of wiggle it as though you’re picking a lock. Almost, miraculously, it opens. I know that there’s probably an appetite for that oyster knife to go right through his hand and for him to like run screaming out into the ocean, but cooler heads prevailed.
Did you learn how to shuck an oyster for this?
I taught myself in preparation for this movie. I am no master, but if there was an oyster in my hand, I could do it. Leo [Woodall] is amazing at it. Leo came to Provincetown and did, like, full days with a professional oyster shucker.
How did the cameo from Eric Ripert come about?
I realized that we had a role where I thought that this is the one place where we could actually have somebody from Bourdain’s real life appear and basically accept him into adulthood. [In the scene] Ripert is reading the letter from Antonio Banderas that talks about Tony as a hard worker, but his only experience is washing dishes. And Ripert kind of laughs in his face because here Tony is at the Culinary Institute of America, and he’s sitting across from him, saying, “All [you]’ve ever done is worked in one kitchen washing dishes.” And when faced with that, Tony goes, “Yeah, that’s true.” Whereas at the beginning of the film, Tony would have had a huge story about how great he was. And Ripert says, “Well, at least he’s honest.” I thought, okay, let’s have somebody who really does love Bourdain be the person who reaches his hand out and says, “Come with me.” Like, now you get to be yourself. I am sure when Ripert watches this film, he is going to watch it with a curious look, like, “Wait a minute. That’s not Anthony Bourdain.” This movie’s a gate that opens up and says, “Here he is!” It was just the perfect person to have reach his hand out to take him into that new section of his life
While you all didn’t have a connection to Bourdain heading into this movie, Tony is going up in front of audiences that have a very real, emotional connection to Anthony Bourdain.
I would add it is very specific to each person.
Right. Is that something you all are thinking about now that the film is hitting theaters?
I love the movie All the President’s Men, but it’s not lost on me that the second that movie came out, that became the official story. That’s what happened in Watergate: I saw the movie and Robert Redford said so! I know that I certainly went through it with BlackBerry, where now people believe that my bizarre personal version of a tech company in Canada in the 1990s is what really happened. Even though me and everybody who was truly there knows that it wasn’t anywhere close. Because Dom and I approached [Tony] from a place of what seemed true to our universal adolescent experience, I hope that people can feel that same thing. The only answer that I can give people who say, “Anthony Bourdain was different to me,” I would say that they’re right. That’s great that they get to own an adult Anthony Bourdain. What we’re trying to do is give everybody who has feelings about Anthony Bourdain the sense that he was not always such. And that’s a hopeful message, not a negative one. How exciting is the character of Spider-Man if he was never a nerdy teenager named Peter Parker? We can think about Anthony Bourdain as a flawed, insecure, less verbally fluent person, so that we have somewhere to go ourselves. Because Anthony Bourdain is as invincible as a Clorox bottle. He seems totally untouchable. He has this natural élan with everything he does that we look at and go ‘God, why can’t I be like that?’ And the truth is, he couldn’t be like that, too.
Tony is in theaters in limited release Aug 7 and wide release Aug 21.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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