Anthony Bourdain compared a restaurant kitchen to a pirate ship, a “dysfunctional, mercenary lot” of misfits embracing chaos with an outlaw spirit, adrenaline, and camaraderie. It’s an analogy that could also apply to the characters in “Tony” director Matt Johnson’s films, and to his approach to making them.
“Every single movie I’ve made has basically been about a bunch of young men making a movie,” said Johnson, this week’s guest on the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “Whether that’s the kitchen at the Flagship (‘Tony’), or it is the engineers at Research In Motion (‘BlackBerry’), or Matt and Owen in ‘The Dirties,’ or our CIA crew embedded at NASA in ‘Operation Avalanche,’ or Matt and Jay trying to get a show at the Rivoli (‘Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie’), I’m constantly just reliving the feeling of being in film school, trying to figure out how to create myself and become an adult.”
The self-effacing director, who recently turned 40 and made two of the best-reviewed films of the year, added, “And until I have some new experiences, I’m afraid that’s all you’re going to get from me.”
Johnson’s previous films were made by, and starred, Johnson and his friends, shooting in a run-and-gun pseudodocumentary style that left room for near-constant improv and story reinvention as his merry band roamed Toronto stealing shots and creating mischief — Johnson, for legal reasons, still can’t discuss how they sneaked into CN Tower in “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie,” telling IndieWire, “I’ll just say the number one thing that gets bank robbers caught is they can’t help but brag about it.”
“When I’m making ‘Nirvanna the Band the Show,’ I can really take whatever time I need to explore any nook and cranny of that story that I want, to a fault,” said Johnson. “I can pursue ideas that come up on set right to the end. We can create entirely new storylines from moments of improv, or from me meeting somebody on the street. We can chase down the story with that production model as if we’re detectives on the trail of a serial killer, and every single clue we get leads us closer. And here [on ‘Tony’] it really was quite the opposite.”
As both a storyteller and filmmaker, Johnson’s first American movie, “Tony,” was a decidedly different production experience. That guerrilla filmmaking approach would be impossible on a period film rooted in the performance of its young star, Dominic Sessa, as a 20-year-old Bourdain during the summer the future chef, author, and TV personality spent working in a Cape Cod kitchen. Johnson explained he and cinematographer Michael Bauman were reaching for a filmmaking style that mirrored the way Bourdain wrote, “like a storybook where the pages just turn.”
“I was trying to challenge myself to just tell a story using only acting and writing, it’s something I’d never done before,” said Johnson. “It was a real shedding of what normally makes me comfortable… and the struggle was that for the first time I was really locked into what we had planned, and that makes me sound so amateur, rightfully.”
Johnson admitted he sometimes felt lost shooting “Tony,” where pivoting the pirate ship five degrees was “impossible, let alone inconvenient.” He credits the Paul Thomas Anderson alum, Bauman (“my best friend as we made this film”), with patiently guiding him as he expanded his directorial palette, yet he still couldn’t escape feeling “trapped.”
“I bet you other filmmakers will tell you the same thing: When they go write a scene, bring in the actors, shoot the scene, and they get it perfect, exactly the way that they had planned, that’s a failure. And that’s how I feel,” said Johnson. “My feeling is that the script and the plan is just your springboard for you to then discover something alive and out of control on the day. And every single movie I’ve ever made, the things that work in the film are the things that were mistakes, accidents that happened in a way that I can’t control.”
Finding that balance is a work in progress for Johnson. He’s become close to Josh Safdie — the two, it was recently revealed, are collaborating on a comedy about the TSA — who offered some helpful insight. “He said to me, ‘My job is to transfer enthusiasm from myself to the other people making this movie,’ and my God, if I don’t see it the exact same way and didn’t have those same words to frame it.”
Johnson feels a sense of kinship with Safdie — they both make films about ambitious young men reaching beyond their grasp — as well as a deep admiration, calling the “Marty Supreme” director “the best young filmmaker in the world,” whose “way of telling kinetic stories nobody else is able to match.” He’s also become a keen observer of how Safdie has maintained his unique approach to filmmaking even as the scale of his productions has expanded over the years.
Observed Johnson, “[That Josh has] been able to preserve that which animates his production process, I think comes from the fact that he started with nothing and very slowly built that thing and apparatus around him in New York, a place that he knows like the back of his hand, and is always working with the same people and slowly, slowly, slowly building the castle brick by brick around him.”
Johnson may need to study how Safdie transferred that apparatus around larger-scale productions. The director is developing “Magic: The Gathering” — based on the popular collectible card game he himself was obsessed with growing up — as a potential studio trilogy. Vulture recently reported Johnson would be inheriting aspects of the “Dune” production apparatus, as Denis Villeneuve’s trilogy concludes.
Johnson, ever aware of his strengths and weaknesses, admits: “I’m not a technician. I actually don’t come to filmmaking from the point of view of someone who has images in his head that wants to create them. That’s not what draws me to movies.” Before adding, “It’s not like now that I’ve made [‘Tony’] I want to make a movie 10 times that size.”
As the “Tony” director acknowledged, he’ll never be a film student again, making films with a handful of friends; the key will be continuing his career-long experiment of how to maintain that same spirit.
A24 expands “Tony” nationwide on Friday, August 21.
To hear Matt Johnson’s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
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