role models
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.
“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.’”
“For about five, six years, I had been dealing with the notion of people in Toronto meeting me in the street, walking down Ossington, Roncesvalles or whatever, and having an idea of who I am because of what I am like on television, so to speak. Having to really deal with the idea that people have a different idea of me than what I really am,” he explains. “Am I gonna be the person that people view me as, or is that fraudulent, in a way?”
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.
“In the past 12 hours since the premiere, I’ve had endless conversations with people asking me what is real and what isn’t,” says Johnson. “The best answer that I can give is that the things people think we faked we really did, and the things that people haven’t even thought of, we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on VFX to make it look like it happened. Now, at the CN Tower, we’re playing all kinds of tricks. … It would have been international news otherwise.”