{"id":989034,"date":"2026-08-08T13:44:32","date_gmt":"2026-08-08T13:44:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/989034\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T13:44:32","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T13:44:32","slug":"tony-director-matt-johnson-on-anthony-bourdain-eric-ripert-cameo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/989034\/","title":{"rendered":"Tony Director Matt Johnson on Anthony Bourdain, Eric Ripert Cameo"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t[This story contains minor<\/strong> spoilers for A24 movie Tony<\/a>.<\/strong>]<\/p>\n

\n\tMatt Johnson, the director behind A24\u2019s Anthony Bourdain<\/a> movie, Tony, didn\u2019t know all that much about Anthony Bourdain. \u201cI viewed him as just a kind of Gen X host who I had zero connection with,\u201d says the filmmaker. <\/p>\n

\n\tFor 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut, heading into production on Tony, Johnson didn\u2019t care much about any of that. <\/p>\n

\n\tFar 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\u2019t even that interested in the man behind the myth; he wanted to show the boy before the man.<\/p>\n

\n\tJohnson 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 \u2014 his first non-Canadian production and his first feature that he doesn\u2019t star in \u2014 and deeply personal, inspired by his and star Dominic Sessa<\/a>\u2019s own adolescences.<\/p>\n

\n\tLoosely drawn from a handful of chapters from Bourdain\u2019s 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<\/a>). Johnson and Miller are credited as writers along with Lou Howe and Todd Bartles, whose script landed on the 2024 Black List.<\/p>\n

\n\tJohnson talked to THR about shucking oysters, landing the film\u2019s stand-out cameo and showing audiences an approachable Bourdain.<\/p>\n

\n\tHow did Tony come your way?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tAfter 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\u2019t know anything about Anthony Bourdain. Then I went to New York and I had heard that Dominic Sessa had just moved there, and I\u2019d always wanted to meet with him because I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tWas he already attached to play Anthony Bourdain?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tNo! We both knew about the project. Within an hour, we were like, \u201cOkay, so we\u2019re going to make the Anthony Bourdain movie.\u201d 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\u2019s staring at you, and he seems like the walking wounded. He seems vulnerable. I guess that\u2019s the nicest way to put it, he seems vulnerable in a totally charming way.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat was it from that conversation with him that you ultimately wanted to put into a film?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tI am always, at some level, trying to address an aspect of my own personality in my films. And I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tI 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tSome of my favorite movies do this from the female point of view. I love the film Thirteen. I don\u2019t 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\u2019d always wanted to make one.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tDominic Sessa and Antonio Banderas<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSeacia Pavao<\/p>\n

\n\tA coming-of-age movie?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tYou know [coming-of-age] is such a soft way of saying: You get dragged through hell. There\u2019s this great quote that was in the movie for a while, and I\u2019m always trying to put it into a film, and it\u2019s some old Roman leader who says the fates lead the willing to their destiny, and the unwilling they drag.<\/p>\n

\n\tEven though you didn\u2019t 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?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tAs soon as Dom and I agreed that we had enough shared historical similarities, we basically invited Anthony Bourdain\u2019s [auto]biography to the table and formed the conspiracy, which was: Where in this guy\u2019s 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\u2026 I won\u2019t 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\u2019s why you see such a focus on the role models and such a focus on things that actually won\u2019t happen to Anthony Bourdain until he\u2019s quite a bit older. Antonio Banderas, although I think a lot of people will think he\u2019s playing a character named Dmitri from Kitchen Confidential, who Anthony Bourdain met in Provincetown, he\u2019s actually playing something much closer to his first boss in New York, somebody he refers to as \u201cBigfoot.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn this film, you have Antonio\u2019s 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?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tI did not view this as a food movie at all. I viewed food \u2014 and I think Bourdain would admit the same thing if you were to press him \u2014 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\u2019s legacy is: I\u2019m going to look at the community, the culture, and the people, and the food is a byproduct of that. You\u2019re not tuning in to watch my TV show because I\u2019m going to show you the nicest, most beautifully plated food. There\u2019s other TV shows for you to watch [if that\u2019s what you want]. I view food as a medium of exchange. That\u2019s how I wanted to approach the food. You\u2019re in a kitchen with a bunch of men, and really nobody\u2019s paying attention. The reason you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tYou 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tAnd 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\u2019s trying to solve the problems of his own adolescence. A lot of people think that it\u2019s 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\u2019re picking a lock. Almost, miraculously, it opens. I know that there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tDid you learn how to shuck an oyster for this?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tI 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tHow did the cameo from Eric Ripert come about?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tI realized that we had a role where I thought that this is the one place where we could actually have somebody from Bourdain\u2019s 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\u2019s sitting across from him, saying, \u201cAll [you]\u2019ve ever done is worked in one kitchen washing dishes.\u201d And when faced with that, Tony goes, \u201cYeah, that\u2019s true.\u201d Whereas at the beginning of the film, Tony would have had a huge story about how great he was. And Ripert says, \u201cWell, at least he\u2019s honest.\u201d I thought, okay, let\u2019s have somebody who really does love Bourdain be the person who reaches his hand out and says, \u201cCome with me.\u201d 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, \u201cWait a minute. That\u2019s not Anthony Bourdain.\u201d This movie\u2019s a gate that opens up and says, \u201cHere he is!\u201d It was just the perfect person to have reach his hand out to take him into that new section of his life<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile you all didn\u2019t 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tI would add it is very specific to each person. <\/p>\n

\n\tRight. Is that something you all are thinking about now that the film is hitting theaters?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tI love the movie All the President\u2019s Men, but it\u2019s not lost on me that the second that movie came out, that became the official story. That\u2019s 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\u2019t 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, \u201cAnthony Bourdain was different to me,\u201d I would say that they\u2019re right. That\u2019s great that they get to own an adult Anthony Bourdain. What we\u2019re trying to do is give everybody who has feelings about Anthony Bourdain the sense that he was not always such. And that\u2019s 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 \u00e9lan with everything he does that we look at and go \u2018God, why can\u2019t I be like that?\u2019 And the truth is, he couldn\u2019t be like that, too.<\/p>\n

\n\tTony is in theaters in limited release Aug 7 and wide release Aug 21.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis interview has been edited and condensed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[This story contains minor spoilers for A24 movie Tony.] Matt Johnson, the director behind A24\u2019s Anthony Bourdain movie,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":989035,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[33],"tags":[28960,396614,185,396615,171,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-989034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-anthony-bourdain","tag-antonio-banderas","tag-celebrities","tag-dominic-sessa","tag-entertainment","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117060192853487948","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/989034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=989034"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/989034\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/989035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=989034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=989034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=989034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}