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.
