dominic sessa
“People have expectations of me now that I’m an adult… but I don’t think anybody realizes that when I was young, I was an insecure, extremely scared boy and I wish I could show people that because in my own movies, I always portray myself as almost invincible,”
[Matt] continued, “I’m as invincible as a Clorox bottle when it comes to social situations, but that’s not the way I actually am. Here was an opportunity to show the way that I actually was, the way that Dominic [Sessa] actually was, and what we’re trying to maybe explore is that Anthony Bourdain also was not the invincible social adult that we all knew.”
“My feeling is that when he’s in his 40s, he is trying to portray himself, I won’t say in the best possible light, but as the character that he thinks that either people want to see or that he’s creating. … And then I think as he gets older, he’s given another opportunity to look at the same period, but now through the eyes of somebody who’s a success. And it’s very different when you are self-mythologizing as a 39, 40-year-old man who hasn’t made it, who’s basically a nobody, versus when, … basically, there’s nobody more famous in the world of chef, author, world traveller,” Johnson told Yahoo Canada.
Alternate YouTube tile: Matt Johnson & Dominic Sessa Break Down TONY & Their Most Iconic Scenes
“Within 30 minutes, I was like, ‘Dom, we’re going to make this movie about Anthony Bourdain.’ It was us getting excited about exactly the things you see in the movie,” Johnson recalls. “A young man lying to create status. What’s it like to have all your self-worth tied up in how women see you. The power of homosocial relationships as a developmental tool. And then my job was to bring Bourdain into this conspiracy and read everything that he’d written and go, ‘Okay, let’s see where you agree with us.’”
Over lunch, Johnson and Sessa talk about depicting a globally admired figure on screen, what his story can teach us about both mentorship and self-discovery, and how it inspired their own close-knit friendship.
Director Matt Johnson Didn’t Understand the Anthony Bourdain Hype When He Signed on for A24’s ‘Tony’
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.