“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.
The film is backed by the pop-culturally ubiquitous U.S. distributor A24, which has been a fertile breeding ground for brand-name post-millennial auteurs, including Greta Gerwig, Barry Jenkins and the Safdie brothers. “Tony,” which opens in Canada on Aug. 14, represents Johnson’s first American-shot and -produced feature — a symbol of reaching beyond his home turf.
“My perspective was, what an opportunity to go outside the cave and try to bring something back,” Johnson said. “I hope that’s what’s happened.”
Johnson, who’s shooting another project in Toronto this summer, has been thinking about his relationship to home these days, as well as to privacy. Two decades of continuously playing a stylized version of himself on camera (in such films as “The Dirties,” “Operation Avalanche” and “Matt and Mara”) and in public has imperiled the anonymity that used to be his secret weapon.
“I’m really an introvert,” he said. The sentiment sounds sincere even if it doesn’t fully square with the open secret of his success. Observe Johnson in public enough times and you’ll see he has the ability to turn on that proverbial “it” factor, without visibly flipping a switch.
Case in point: later that evening, migrating toward the sold-out repertory screening of “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” for which he has agreed to give what must be his zillionth in-person introduction, alongside co-star Jay McCarrol, Johnson tries to keep his head — sans trademark fedora — down.
No such luck. He’s quickly spotted on the sidewalk and mobbed by fans, a few of whom have clearly been on the lookout.
With the practiced gratitude of somebody who’s gotten used to getting recognized, Johnson stops and lingers, smiles and poses, obliges. Onstage at the Revue Cinema, clowning in front of the crowd, he doesn’t exactly give off introvert vibes, although I do notice how quickly he manages to duck out the side as the lights go down.
Canadian movies invade America
In a year when a number of Canadian films have penetrated the American market, including Sophy Romvari’s “Blue Heron” and Chandler Levack’s “Mile End Kicks,” “Nirvanna” — a self-reflexive time-travel comedy that scrupulously recreates both Toronto circa 2008 and the contemporaneous, microbudget esthetics of its guerrilla-style YouTube predecessor — is the most populist example. The $5 million it’s scared up at the North American box office suggests the scope and loyalty of Johnson’s cult of personality. The title of a recent profile in New York magazine summed it up nicely: “Matt Johnson Crosses the Border.”
When I bring up the pattern of new Canadian films, his own included, getting significant recognition or validation in the U.S. — and the premise that this visibility means they’re somehow “breaking containment” — Johnson has a good line ready. “I don’t think Americans think in terms of containment,” he offered. “With them, it’s in terms of disease.”
There was a sense, earlier this year, among those in the know, that “Tony” was displaying symptoms of a troubled production, and that a filmmaker used to cultivating chaos with a close group of friends — chief among them, his “BlackBerry” co-writer and producer Matt Miller — was bumping up against the requirements of a mainstream production.
“I was never comfortable, not even once,” said Johnson, who arrived on set with Miller, but none of their other usual Toronto-based collaborators. “We were with a huge crew of people who have collectively won multiple Oscars, and they have ways of doing things that we wouldn’t. There were all of these people whose names I didn’t know.”
Johnson wound up developing very close relationships with the actors and cloistering himself with them in a way that felt more like they were doing a play. “It was a defence mechanism for me,” he continued, “because I didn’t totally understand the machinery. I didn’t have an ease of communication in that environment.”
Honouring Bourdain’s legacy
“Tony” may have been challenging to make, but it’s easy to watch: a smooth, engaging and deceptively conventional piece of entertainment that bypasses the pitfalls of hagiography by focusing solely on its namesake’s lobster-salad days in the mid-1970s.
The plot line derives from a series of chapters in Bourdain’s bestselling 2000 memoir, “Kitchen Confidential”: The 19-year-old Tony arrives in the tourist town of Provincetown, Mass., as a wannabe Hemingway with an aptitude for cooking and not much else; the heart he wears bleeding on his sleeve doesn’t conceal the chip on his shoulder.
“He’s an angry young man who’s sort of churning around in the eddy of pubescence,” said Johnson. The casting of the attractively rumpled and preternaturally charismatic Sessa — who broke out as a self-destructive overachiever in the 2023 campus comedy “The Holdovers” — gives the movie its gravitas. “He resembles the silhouette enough,” said Johnson, speaking literally and metaphorically of his star’s anti-heroic magnetism. “That was a lucky break.”
Johnson knows that Bourdain’s legacy is hallowed terrain, as well as potentially contested territory. “We’re getting into the danger zone now,” he laughed when asked about the legal hurdles involved in putting a famous life onscreen. “I dealt directly with the (Bourdain) estate, both in terms of bringing them on board for the film and their feedback.” When asked which was more fun — the bringing them on board or the feedback — Johnson put on a poker face: “It’s always great getting to know somebody.”
Whose story is it?
There’s more to this one-liner than it might appear. Far from a long-gestating dream project, “Tony” was a movie Johnson had to be convinced to make.
“At first, I didn’t have a lot of interest or understanding of (Bourdain), so I turned (the project) down,” he said. “I went to have lunch with Dom, and I asked him to tell me about his life, and every single thing he said was, beat for beat, things I had experienced or felt — whether it was stuff about my mother, or struggling to find role models.
“He’s a hockey player and a movie star, and in many ways, we have nothing in common, but I felt like I really understood him. And so I said, ‘Dom, why don’t we make this movie about us?’”
Certainly, there’s something about Sessa’s shaggy, ne’er-do-well act here that evokes Johnson’s own caustically ingratiating performances. If you squint, the early scenes of “Tony” — which show Bourdain falling under the influence of a cocky fellow restaurant employee, played by Leo Woodall — echo the slacker hijinks of “Nirvanna,” minus the mockumentary style.
“It seems to be the mission of my life to try to figure out how (role) modelling and especially homosocial relationships can lead to growth, both positively and negatively,” Johnson said, noting the similarities between “Tony” and “BlackBerry,” another docudrama structured around a pair of mismatched pals.
“I thought, ‘Wait a minute, here I go again,’” he said. “There’s this cultural property about which I basically know nothing, and I have my own pet interests, and I wonder if I can take the matching puzzle pieces — that’s not right, maybe take the entangled atoms between them and Bourdain’s life, which mirror the things Dom and I seem to be interested in.
“I’m trying to do an autobiography in the same way I always am.”
