^{Antonio Banderas and director Matt Johnson on set    
All photos by Seacia Pavao/Courtesy of A24
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The Making of Tony

by Rebecca M. Alvin

Any person’s life can be told in fragments that tell only one truth while millions of other truths coexist in that person’s totality. And so the prospect of a biopic about Anthony Bourdain required a multitude of decisions about which part of the subject to portray. When screenwriters Todd Bartels and Lou Howe wrote the original script for Tony, they decided to focus on Bourdain’s origin story—how he went from just a guy who wanted to be a writer a la Hunter S. Thompson to the chef, travel writer, and host of television shows Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown and No Reservations, not to mention author of nearly a dozen books. 

Both writers had been fans of Bourdain with connections to the Cape. They knew right away they wanted to set the film in Provincetown, where Bourdain got his start working in kitchens, and came for a research trip about three years ago. “We kind of fell in love with the place. And, we knew our setting and our general story, that it was Tony as a young fuck-up, trying to find his way and stumbling into this kitchen job,” says Howe.

In real life, Bourdain arrived in Provincetown for the first time in the summer of 1973, at the age of 17. He would return for two additional summers, and all three are detailed in chapters of Kitchen Confidential titled “Food is Sex,” “Food is Pain,” and “The Return of Mal Carne.” But while these firsthand accounts informed the writing, the film Tony was never meant to be a film version of the chapters in a book. Instead, the writers, along with director Matt Johnson and Dominic Sessa, who plays the young Bourdain, wanted to frame the story as one about the coming of age of a troubled young writer who found himself through his adventures in a Provincetown restaurant kitchen during just one summer, and emerged as a man with some sort of direction in his life, one that led him to the Culinary Institute of America, and eventually, international fame.

“People were, I think, aware of his bad boy, Lower East Side kitchen days in the 1980s. And we wanted to find something that was a little more unexpected and unknown about someone who people knew a lot about
or who was was a pretty public figure,” says Bartels.

“We spent a lot of time in the Old Colony Tap on our first research trip—and every trip after—and we met this wonderful bartender, Jill, who had been around in the ‘70s… And something about her version of [that time] really clicked for us,” Howe says.

Likewise, director Matt Johnson, who had never been to Provincetown before this, came and lived here for about a month in February of 2025 and talked to as many people as he could about Bourdain. He says there are many nods to the stories he heard in the finished film and he is particularly indebted to Larry Luster, owner of Ciro & Sal’s, who worked in town in that time period and whose stories informed the way the guys talk and relate to each other in the kitchen environment.

Johnson and Sessa say they were not particularly familiar with Bourdain and that allowed them to play a little bit and find who he was for them, rather than conforming to some public persona we think we knew. The fact that it was Bourdain in the 1970s, before he was famous, also opened it up for Sessa.

Sessa says the biopics he’s enjoyed are ones in which you get lost in the performances and in this one, he says,. “There’s moments… where you are reminded of like, oh, this is Anthony Bourdain’s story. And it surprises you.”

Johnson agrees. The story is more than a retelling of an episode in Anthony Bourdain’s particular life; it resonates with similar experiences he and Sessa have had in their own lives. “What really we’re trying to get at is what transforms a boy into a man. What is the thing that happens that moves you from a place of lying to create status into giving up all the facades that you had as a young person and instead admitting, ‘I’m a nobody’…Why is it that that happened to me? Why did that happen to Dom? Why did that happen to Anthony Bourdain almost identically?” Johnson says.

Bourdain, who died by suicide in 2018 had already been the subject of an excellent documentary directed by Morgan Neville, Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain in 2021 and of course, his death impacted his legacy. But that’s not the story Bartels and Howe wanted to tell, and it’s never referenced in Tony. “It’s almost a cottage industry about his death and the end of his life” says Howe. “We kind of wanted to remind everyone about his life and why they loved him in the first place.”

The film, which was co-produced by Bourdain’s longtime literary agent Kimberly Witherspoon and also approved by the Bourdain Estate, gives us a story that could be about a lot of people. In the summer of 1975, the 19-year-old Bourdain follows a girl he’s interested in to Provincetown, and soon finds himself at the mercy of a Portuguese chef (played by Antonio Banderas) and his motley kitchen crew at a restaurant called the Dreadnaught, which in real life was the old Flagship. While Bourdain’s writing overflows with his enthusiasm for the food and cooking techniques themselves, Tony is more focused on the machismo, swagger, and community of kitchens—especially in the time period of the 1970s. It was shot on location in Provincetown last year and it’s a delight to see such a specific, unique town on screen. The kitchen scenes were shot at the restaurant, Gina’s by the Sea in Dennis, and some other scenes in Hyannis and Plymouth, so this is very much a Cape Cod production, with Provincetown at its center.

“For shooting a movie, it was unlike anything. I mean, the places feel like movie sets sometimes because they’re so old and well preserved and, you know, I think it’s just a testament to the people in New England generally, but especially here that, you know, they really respect the history of this place and they do everything to make it feel as it did,” Sessa marvels. “We had to shoot here because it looks like it’s, you know, 1975 —the Old Colony Tap, the Lobster Pot, all of these iconic places that are the way that they were, it just makes the movie is a hundred times better because of that.”

He adds with a laugh, “Coming here, it was like a party. I mean, we were working, but we were able to like, jump in the ocean after we wrapped or in the morning before we started filming.  And I think being here [first] got us through to the end, I think. It boosted the morale of everyone.”

Tony opens at Waters Edge Cinema, Whalers Wharf, 237 Commercial St., 2nd Fl., Provincetown and across the Cape on Friday, August 21. For showtimes, tickets, and information call 508.487.FILM or visit ptownfilm.org/cinema.