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Despite being only four days out from his wedding and just eight days before starting to shoot his next movie, Canadian director Matt Johnson looked decidedly relaxed last week.
He rolled up to Toronto’s Revue Cinema in a T-shirt and sweatpants to talk to CBC News about Tony, the buzzed-about biopic focused on the early years of world-renowned chef and TV personality Anthony Bourdain’s life.
And although Bourdain was a beloved public figure, lionized after his tragic death in 2018, Johnson seemed at ease about telling his story.
“I had basically no attachment to the persona or the reputation of this guy,” Johnson said.
In fact, he said he never intended to make a film about Bourdain, the line cook-turned-executive chef who became a bestselling author and travel documentarian behind the series Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, which ran for 12 seasons.
That changed, Johnson said, after he met actor Dominic Sessa, who takes on the titular role in the movie.
“[Sessa] had the same perspective on issues … specifically around role models and pretending to be an adult and lying … just like almost simple, basic things,” Johnson said. “And it occurred to me that this was a great opportunity for he and I to explore these things together.”
In his new film Tony, Canadian filmmaker Matt Johnson had to grapple with the portrayal of the wildly loved and admired chef and author Anthony Bourdain. Here is how he dealt with the pressure of capturing such an idolized figure.
Film mines stories from Kitchen Confidential
Sessa, 23, was cast as the lead, and Johnson began working on the script, which takes stories from Bourdain’s young life — outlined in his book Kitchen Confidential — and condenses them into the story of one summer in Provincetown, Mass., the first summer Bourdain ever worked as a chef.
At first, neither the director nor the lead actor were very familiar with Bourdain’s body of work. In Sessa’s case, Johnson said he wanted to keep it that way.
“Like, I told Dom to not even prepare, because Bourdain himself shows up in Provincetown not thinking he’s going to become a world-famous chef. Like, he doesn’t. He’s, in some ways, intimidated and afraid. And so I wanted to keep Dom as close to that as I possibly could.”
Focusing on the young Tony helped Johnson avoid some of the pressure to recreate the older, more established Anthony Bourdain whom so many people feel they knew.
“There are fans of his that view him really as a dead saint,” the director said. “Right away that tells you, OK, be really careful because it means certain people’s expectations of this terrestrial man are going to be well beyond what an actual person can be on camera.”
So instead, Kitchen Confidential offered plot points in a narrative about the summer Bourdain learned to cook, and it was filled with the issues young men of that age grapple with.
“Complicated parts of his childhood, his relationship with his mom, his relationship with his peers and how he viewed himself entering the adult world,” Johnson said.
How do you choose what time of an icon’s life to capture on screen in a biopic? Canadian filmmaker Matt Johnson explains how he settled on a summer in Provincetown, Mass., to tell the story of chef and author Anthony Bourdain.
It took the focus off Bourdain’s life and legacy, he said, and made his story more useful to the people who idolize him.
“Dom and I really … felt as though we almost had a conspiracy with Anthony Bourdain, the three of us.”
Tony is screening in theatres across Canada on Friday, Aug. 14.
