My Dinner with Andre


My Dinner with Andre is a 1981 American comedy-drama film directed by Louis Malle, and written by and starring Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn. The actors play fictionalized versions of themselves sharing a conversation at Café des Artistes in Manhattan. The film's dialogue covers topics such as experimental theatre, the nature of theatre, and the nature of life, and contrasts Wally's modest humanism with Andre's spiritual experiences.

Structure

Andre Gregory is the focus of the first hour of the film, when he describes some of his experiences since giving up his career as a theatre director in 1975. These include working with his friend, director Jerzy Grotowski, and a group of Polish actors in a forest in Poland, his visit to Findhorn in Scotland, and his trip to the Sahara to try to create a play based on The Little Prince by Saint-Exupéry. He worked with a group in a small piece of performance art on Long Island, which resulted in Andre's being buried alive on Halloween night.
The rest of the film is a conversation as Wally Shawn tries to argue that living life as Andre has done for the past five years is simply not possible for most people. He relates ordinary pleasures, like having a cup of coffee. Andre responds that what passes for normal life in New York in the late 1970s, is more akin to living in a dream than it is to real life. The movie ends without a clear resolution to the conflict in worldviews articulated by the two men. Wally reminisces during a taxi ride about his childhood and mentions that when he arrives at home, he tells his girlfriend Debbie about his dinner with Andre. Erik Satie's Gymnopédie No. 1 plays in the background.

Cast

The idea for the film arose from Gregory's effort to work with a biographer on his life story, and Shawn's simultaneously coming up with an idea for a story about two people having a conversation. Gregory and Shawn, who had become friends through theatre work, decided to collaborate on the project. They agreed that it should be filmed rather than produced as a play. Although the film was based on events in the actors' lives, Shawn and Gregory denied that they were playing themselves. They said that if they remade the film, they would swap the two characters to prove their point. In an interview with Noah Baumbach in 2009, Shawn said:
The screenplay went through numerous developmental changes in location; in the final version, it was set during a dinner at a restaurant. While Shawn was trying to find someone to direct the film, he received a phone call from French director Louis Malle. He had read a copy of the screenplay via a mutual friend and insisted that he work on the project, saying he wanted to direct, produce the film, or work on it in any capacity. Shawn initially thought that the call was a prank, due to Malle's stature in film. Malle later suggested that the dinner setup would not work, based on a rehearsal where Gregory was talking while eating. Shawn argued throughout screenplay development for more scenes, which would have resulted in a three-hour film. Malle won many script cuts, but lost two arguments over scenes that were kept in the film.
My Dinner with Andre was filmed in the Jefferson Hotel, which was then vacant, in Richmond, Virginia. Lloyd Kaufman was the production manager on the film, and Troma Entertainment provided production support. The filming was done over a period of two weeks, and edited to appear as if occurring in real time. The set was created to look like the iconic Café des Artistes in New York City.

Reception

Review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes rated it 91% "fresh" based on 23 reviews with average rating of 7.3 out of 10. Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel gave high praise to the film on Sneak Previews; the producers told Ebert that their praise helped keep the film in theaters for a year. Ebert chose it as the best film of the year, and both he and Siskel would later rank it as the fifth-best and fourth-best film, respectively, of the entire 1980s. In 1999, Ebert added it to his Great Movies essay series. He said, "Someone asked me the other day if I could name a movie that was entirely devoid of clichés. I thought for a moment, and then answered, My Dinner with Andre." The Boston Society of Film Critics Awards ranked it as the "Best American Film" in 1982, and awarded Gregory and Shawn its prize for Best Screenplay. Metacritic rated it 83% "universal acclaim" based on 15 reviews.

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