Three decades on, "My Dinner With Andre" remains a succulent piece of filmmaking.
The ultimate talkie has lost none of the charm, mystery and wisdom that turned it into an indie hit back in 1981.
Somehow, the film about two intellectuals talking in a New York restaurant became a cultural sensation -- this in the time of "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark."
Success came in part because the new breed of celebrity movie critics sang the praises of "My Dinner With Andre," transforming it from arthouse fare to a popcorn movie for smart people. Everyone knew the title, at least, as it became a national catchphrase that year.
The Criterion Collection has revived "My Dinner with Andre"
in a fine double-disc edition. The main extras are new video interviews with the two "stars," the theatrical director Andre Gregory and the actor/writer/director Wallace Shawn.
in a fine double-disc edition. The main extras are new video interviews with the two "stars," the theatrical director Andre Gregory and the actor/writer/director Wallace Shawn. The men talk separately this time around, chronicling the development of the script and film, and expanding upon their ongoing working relationship and friendship. The interviews are ably conducted by "Andre" fan Noah Baumbach ("The Squid and the Whale"), who was something like 12 when the movie came out.
Gregory is up first. The theater director tells how he gave "Wally" his first break after reading the writer's plays, which no one else liked. The movie came out of their conversations, casual at first, then quite deliberate: The men spent six months taping their talks before Shawn wrote the script.
"I had a real need to tell my story," says Gregory, whose real-life success had allowed him to travel the world in search of Self.
"I would go to parties and I would tell these stories (about my adventures) to entertain people. I think subconsciously I was rehearsing a movie."
Part of the teaching was that it was possible to find yourself through extraordinary experience -- in one case, Andre underwent a simulated burial of himself.
"If you like the movie, it's waking you up," Gregory says. "Which is one of the intentions of the movie."
Expectations for the project were low, Gregory says, even after the successful French director Louis Malle signed on. "Nobody but our friends and loved ones would go see it. That was clear."
Still, Gregory saw "Andre" as an epic of sorts: "Because we're storytellers, the movie is as big as 'Lawrence of Arabia' or 'Cleopatra.' When the audience hears the Gregory character's tales, "they go to Tibet (and the Sahara, Poland, Scotland)." The film is "activating the imagination" of what that would be like.
Shawn marvels today at how the film's director put up with his artistic temperament, back when Shawn was a failed playwright. Shawn's original script for "Andre" ran over three hours, and none of it could be cut, he argued.
Shawn says of the late Malle's direction: "He captured things in me that I didn't know I was revealing ... I can't watch the movie (because of this). ... It's a little bit too heartbreaking."
The two Americans had to sell Malle on the idea of shooting "My Dinner With Andre" as a dinner table conversation. Other original concepts for the film included having the characters be talking heads on TV, two prisoners in Alcatraz, gay lovers or maybe strangers on a train. Before Malles' death they briefly toyed with the idea of reuniting the two characters in their golden years, talking about nothing but sex.
Shawn's character spends much of the film munching quail while listening to Andre go on and on about his explorations, visions, philosophies and fears. In the final reel, the listener mans up and mounts a defense of what it is like to be a regular guy, satisfied with commonplace pleasures.
In reality, Shawn says, he agreed with Andre, not his own fearful bourgeois character. "I wanted to kill that side of myself by making the movie." The two stars are "very seriously different" than the characters, he adds.
(Shawn, of course, has since gone on to fame as a character actor; the guy was so overused in the '80s and '90s that I pined for Wallace Shawn warning labels on the endless indie pics in which he appeared.)
The Criterion DVD of "My Dinner With Andre" also includes an archival BBC profile of director Louis Malles, titled "My Dinner With Louis." Malle's remarkable French films are richly represented in the Criterion Collection.
So how does the real Andre feel about the quality of talk in the new century? "When I go to restaurants now and listen to the conversation around me, it's horrifying."
