This interview was also published as individual clips on the CBC website.:
Canadian filmmaker Matt Johnson on working in the U.S.
How Dominic Sessa inspired Matt Johnson to make ‘Tony’
Just Matt Page 1 of 4
Matt does the final Q&A about Tony at Cineplex Scotiabank Theatre on Sunday, August 16 2026.
Matt bikes over during his lunch break from filming Journalism 101 to answer some questions about Tony at Cineplex Varsity on Saturday, August 15 2026.
“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.”
“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.
“It’s a coming-of-age story about somebody we all think we know, but nobody knows from this specific period of his life.