Rather than taking Bourdain’s version at face value, Johnson set out to discover what lay between the truth and the way it’s told. While working on the script, co-written with longtime collaborator Matthew Miller and based on a screenplay by Todd Bartels and Lou Howe, he spent two months immersed in local life in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Bourdain spent three formative summers in the 1970s at what Kitchen Confidential calls a “honky-tonk fish restaurant.”
“The first-hand stories of the people who were there in the ’70s could never have been uncovered through reading,” Johnson says of what he learned from Provincetown residents. “Much of the dialogue and events in that kitchen were explained to me in detail by people who were there.” Of course, he’d known going in that history is often subjective. “Some people I spoke with gave an even more extreme account of his time there, while others accused it of being greatly exaggerated,” he says of the locals’ response to Bourdain’s lore.
“I don’t know if there’s a craziest thing [to fame],” Johnson says, while he and Tony star Sessa, 23, discussed the movie with PEOPLE recently. “It’s certainly a major adjustment for me because I think, like Dom, like to live a pretty private life. I live in Toronto with my friends. I have, now with Dom, maybe what, like, eight friends in the world? So it has been taking a lot of getting used to.”
“With Tony, I wanted to figure out how Bourdain became who he was, and the discovery of Provincetown was as much a surprise to me as it was to him,” says Johnson, 40.