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.
“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
“Australia?” he says, visibly stoked. “I’m a huge Aussiephile. Australia means a lot to me because I’m Canadian and I grew up skiing and snowboarding, which means I grew up skiing and snowboarding with Australians. I love …” – he draws a name out of his memory – “… Civic Video. I love Chris Lilley. He’s a major influence on me, major, major. Peter Weir, I probably love him too much.”
“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.’”
“Don’t write where we’re eating,” Matt Johnson told me recently over a very tasty plate of chicken and naan.
It’s not that the 40-year-old writer-director doesn’t want to give some shine to one of his favourite local restaurants, which would not be a bad strategy considering he’s promoting a biopic about Anthony Bourdain, the two-fisted coming-of-age comedy “Tony,” shot on Cape Cod and starring Dominic Sessa as the late chef and gourmet media star.
“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?”
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