"My Dinner With Andre"—Now 30 Years Old—Was a Great Cinematic Experiment that Wasn’t Suppose to Work

Thirty years ago, playwright-actor Wally Shawn sat down for dinner with Andre Gregory, the New York theatre director, and cinematic history was made. It was a “talkie” shot on low-budget 16mm film that no one—except the filmmakers—believed in.

That included most of the family and friends of Shawn and Gregory. But after a tense six weeks of poor box office and scathing reviews by mainstream media outlets, the then new TV critics—Siskel and Ebert—gave My Dinner with Andre a thumbs-up. At that moment, the film’s box office took off.

The two old friends and theatrical colleagues watched their work at the Walter Reade Theatre at Lincoln Center this week for the first time in a decade. It was part of a tribute to the life of the late Louis Malle, who directed the film. After the screening, both men marveled at how much the world had changed in the past 30 years.

 

The project was proposed by Shawn, who wanted to tell the story in a TV film of Andre’s fantastical journey of enlightenment to Poland at the invitation of Jerzy Grotowski. The pair met for weeks—talking into a tape recorder—as Gregory told the tale and Shawn reacted. They then took the transcripts and edited a narrative, which they later performed in segments before live audiences and on videotape.

“We would never had embarked on this movie if we had known what we learned five to ten years later,” Shawn recalled. “If someone brought me something like this today and asked my advice, I would say it is impossible. If I had known anything, I would have thought it was impossible then. But neither of us knew much about movies. So we had a kind of confidence that was absurd!”

 

French director Louis Malle signed on and the film was made in an old abandoned hotel in Richmond, Virginia. It was in the dead of winter and to turn on the heat would have required heating the entire hotel. That was too expensive. So the two men filmed the entire movie in the hotel’s restaurant wrapped in electric blankets.

They knew their parts so well, the film was shot angle by angle, rather than in sequence. “We knew the script so well we were like trained monkeys,” Shawn recalled.

 

Gregory said playing himself was difficult. “It was confusing almost to the point of my going nuts,” he recalled. “In the rehearsal, I came up with the idea of using four voices. There was Andre with a Peter Brooks voice, there was Andre ‘the spiritual used car salesmen,’ there was Andre the ‘off-the-wall’ rich kid and there was the truthful Andre.”

Malle gave Gregory only only one significant direction in the film—speak faster. “It was the same direction given by director John Huston to his father, Walter Huston, in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which won Walter an Oscar. You see Walter Huston, like myself, was a theatre actor. This was a crucial direction. When I spoke faster, I created this character who was a maniacal, egotistical, narcissistic son of a bitch. I didn’t have time to act. Louis realized that the camera is so close that you see what is in the eyes. You don’t have to do so much.”

 

What did the two performers think had changed in the culture since making the movie? “In the film, we don’t talk directly about American politics,” noted Shawn. “We almost would have had to when Ronald Reagan became president.  We both saw television come in. When we were boys there was no television. I missed television until I was about eight years old. The whole idea of people living in a trance and a fantasy world is far less discussed by younger people today than by us.”

Gregory, who at 75 is older than Shawn, grew up on radio drama. “You could say in certain ways that My Dinner with Andre is a radio drama,” he said. “In one place, the Andre character talks about ‘preserving the culture.’ Of course, that’s a passive culture that tells you what to think, what to feel and what to look at. If you go to see a movie like Titanic, it doesn’t leave anything open to your imagination. As audience members, you don’t need to do any work. 

“This film, like certain radio dramas, actually encourages you to think and to feel,” he continued. “It’s a bit like Lawrence of Arabia because the audience has to feel the forest. If you go see Atlantic City, which is the film Malle made just before this, it’s tragic to see the culture crumbling. Old buildings collapsing—an old world film. I was staggered tonight by the people mentioned in the film. We remembered in the 1970s when there would be lines around the block to get into a new Fellini movie or Antonioni movie. An active culture was more alive back then.”

 

Gregory recalled that when his father was 83 they had a discussion about fascism. “My father said if he was younger he would leave America. I asked why? He said because both political parties have become so corrupt that it can only lead to fascism. So, from my point of view, fascism was an ongoing concern. Wally’s play, The Designated Mourner, predicted Bush 10 years before he stole the presidency.”

Shawn recalled being surprised to see in the film that he wasn’t as complacent back then as he had remembered. “I suppose I have become a committed leftist who is much, much more upset about the way things are than I was at that time. I am more a believer in political activism and more aware of the role that bourgeoisie Americans play in torturing and oppressing the poor people who want the world to change. In the film, there’s a dim sense of somebody awakening to that.”

 

Gregory added: “The Andre character said something about ‘global totalitarian Capitalism.’ I used to not mind Capitalism so much. I grew up in the upper middle class and was privileged to have a comfortable life. I think Capitalism—starting with Reagan, who I think was a radical revolutionary—has become absolutely obscene. I have much darker feelings about this country. On the other hand, I’m a much happier person. I adore my wife, Cindy, a very fine filmmaker. I wouldn’t walk further than the local cigar store I’m having such a good time at home. So I sort have become the Wally character.”