In 1975, one summer proved a transportive experience for a then 19-year-old, \u201cspoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive, and thoughtless\u201d Anthony Bourdain, as the late author and food connoisseur wrote in his 2000 nonfiction book \u201cKitchen Confidential.\u201d<\/p>\n
He was talking about the time circa his first summer spent in Provincetown, arriving on the beachy tip of Cape Cod. He cut his teeth working there in several of the seaside community\u2019s now-storied restaurants, including the Lobster Pot, a local and tourist favorite whose menu today boasts overstuffed lobster rolls and aromatic bouillabaisse. Bourdain was also a fixture circa the opening of the nearby (and famed) Italian destination, Ciro & Sal\u2019s, which took him under their wing.<\/p>\n
The archetypal ground-shifting, ass-kicking, endless summer like the ones Bourdain had in his early years also became a creatively fertile time period for director\/co-writer Matt Johnson (\u201cBlackBerry,\u201d \u201cNirvanna the Band the Show the Movie\u201d) to explore, and to make the subject of his upcoming slice-of-true-life movie, \u201cTony,\u201d<\/a> out August 7 from A24.<\/p>\n The film stars \u201cThe Holdovers\u201d breakout Dominic Sessa as the young Bourdain<\/a>, here freshly out of his teenage years, opposite a cast including Antonio Banderas as the Ciro & Sals restaurateur who hired Bourdain, with Stavros Halkias and \u201cTuner\u201d and \u201cWhite Lotus\u201d fave Leo Woodall<\/a> as restaurant workers who bandied with the budding chef.<\/p>\n Little is known about the forthcoming nostalgic portrayal of Bourdain beyond the initial trailer, but at the 2026 Provincetown International Film Festival<\/a>, Johnson, Sessa, and Woodall sat down for a friendly, wide-ranging conversation about \u201cTony,\u201d as moderated by Sundance leader (and IndieWire co-founder!) Eugene Hernandez. Fittingly for a film about a foodie such as Bourdain, the cast, director, and audience headed downcoast for a lively beachside clambake outside the cozily rustic Provincetown Inn.<\/p>\n The panel included two first-look clips at the film that showed Bourdain (Sessa) arriving in P-Town on the same ferry everyone in the room (unless they were on Cape Code, of course) took to get to the festival. Another showed Sessa and Woodall working behind the scenes in a bustling kitchen. (Johnson and the filmmakers are currently putting the finishing touches on the movie in post-production.)<\/p>\n \u2018Tony\u2019Seacia Pavao<\/p>\n \u201cWe were remarking how wonderful it is to be in Provincetown and not have to be making a movie,\u201d Johnson said. \u201cI had moved here for, I think I lived here for two months when I was putting this screenplay together, but it was really, really off-season \u2026 it was the dark times. I think I got here the end of February.\u201d<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t the first time in Provincetown for any of the gang, as \u201cTony\u201d filmed on location last summer. \u201cIt was the most cooperative city I\u2019ve ever filmed a movie with in my life. I mean that sincerely. Come to Toronto!,\u201d Johnson laughed.<\/p>\n Adapting \u201cKitchen Confidential\u201d with co-writers Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels, and Lou Howe, Johnson said that \u201cTony\u201d condenses three years of Bourdain\u2019s life into one summer, \u201cnot just the first summer that Tony came here in between years at [Vassar], but it also talks about when he came here the next summer \u2026 and another summer after that. \u2026 All of his writing is self-report, so it\u2019s like he says what\u2019s going on with him, which is something that [I\u2019m] so interested in as a filmmaker. This is him, in some ways, looking up and looking down at his own history, this is what\u2019s important to me, and skipping all kinds of things. \u2026 I\u2019m always interested in that from a journalistic point of view, like, what are you willing to tell us actually happened combined \u2026 with talking to other people who were there and getting their version of what actually happened. [It] really gives you a sense that Bourdain is both lionizing and minimizing lots of things that happened to him.\u201d<\/p>\n Sessa, who steps into the role of a real-life person for the first time onscreen, said, \u201cI always was weary about doing a biopic or portraying a real person, and what was really attractive about this was the level of agency I had with it. There\u2019s no footage to work off of [Bourdain] at the time. It was helpful reading his writing and watching \u2018Parts Unknown,\u2019 etc., just to get a general vibe and energy. There were like four or five pictures of him \u2026 which were kind of my main reference.\u201d<\/p>\n Dominic Sessa at the Provincetown International Film Festival and A24\u2019s \u2018Tony\u2019 eventTimothy O\u2019Connell<\/p>\n Johnson added, \u201cDom\u2019s from New Jersey, not far from where Bourdain grew up. There were so many things that were just so connected. \u2026 I didn\u2019t want him to do a lot of research. I didn\u2019t want him to do an impression. \u2026 So much of what he is is already naturally there. I didn\u2019t want him to be conscious of \u2018OK, I need to do this, I need to pronounce things like this.\u2019 I didn\u2019t want him to turn into somebody who was crafting a performance. I wanted him to be himself.\u201d<\/p>\n As for Woodall, he appears so at ease in a restaurant environment that Hernandez asked if he had any kitchen experience. \u201cNo, I didn\u2019t have any \u2026 but I was very excited to learn how to shuck oysters, and that\u2019s basically all I do. It\u2019s not easy, especially when you get cocky, and throw the towel away and don\u2019t even look at the oyster because I did impale my hand on, like, day four,\u201d Woodall said. \u201cSal, the guy I play, it was a combination of fun and kind of terrifying, the way that we shot this and the way that Matt works; he wants us to take off our safety belts and just go for it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTony\u201d shot in P-Town for only five days of the 25-day shoot, and Woodall said, \u201cHonestly, one week in P-Town for me nearly stole my soul,\u201d to laughter from the audience. \u201cIt\u2019s probably good that I got out of here.\u201d<\/p>\n Filmmaker Johnson is entering into promo duties on \u201cTony\u201d on the heels of \u201cNirvanna the Band the Show the Movie\u201d (at Neon) becoming one of this year\u2019s most acclaimed films. 2023\u2019s \u201cBlackBerry,\u201d a loose dramatization of the history of the once-trendy phone, was also among the most revered films of that year. We\u2019re keen to see how he and his actors take on one of our contemporary culture\u2019s most venerated \u2014 and soulful \u2014 figures, and one that, ask anybody, everyone misses.<\/p>\n Watch the full Provincetown International Film Festival panel below. \u201cTony\u201d drops in theaters starting August 7 from A24.<\/p>\n Sign up for Indiewire’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In 1975, one summer proved a transportive experience for a then 19-year-old, \u201cspoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive, and thoughtless\u201d Anthony Bourdain, as the late author and food connoisseur wrote in his 2000 nonfiction book \u201cKitchen Confidential.\u201d He was talking about the time circa his first summer spent in Provincetown, arriving on the beachy tip of Cape […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2463077,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[359421,390815,484495,368438,339516,382468,376114],"class_list":["post-2463076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-anthony-bourdain","tag-dominic-sessa","tag-kitchen-confidential","tag-leo-woodall","tag-matt-johnson","tag-provincetown","tag-tony"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Inside-\u2018Tony-the-A24-Movie-About-the-Provincetown-Summers-That.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2463076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2463076"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2463076\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2463078,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2463076\/revisions\/2463078"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2463077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2463076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2463076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2463076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/span><\/div>\n
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