Dominic Sessa on Tony, Tough Love, and the Making of Anthony Bourdain

At 4 Kiley Court in Provincetown, a Northern Italian place was opened in 1953 by two local artists named Ciro Cozzi and Sal Del Deo. Sometime in the 1960s, a young man from Chattanooga turned up looking for work and got put on dishes. Ciro took him on and taught him the business. Larry Luster eventually bought the restaurant and still owns it to this day while his brother runs the kitchen.

About a decade after Luster started scraping plates, a 19-year-old from New Jersey took a summer job in the same building and found the thing he'd spend the rest of his life doing.

Ciro & Sal's is where Anthony Bourdain went from dishwasher to line cook. It turns up in Kitchen Confidential under an invented name, and in Tony, A24's film about that summer, the chef who takes him on is called Ciro (played by Antonio Banderas). The film is a story about a kid getting mentored in a Provincetown kitchen, shot in a town where that already happened to the man who owns the restaurant.

Directed by Matt Johnson, the Toronto filmmaker behind BlackBerry and Nirvanna the Band the Show, Tony covers the summer of 1975 and stops well short of the fame, the books, the television, and the friendships that would eventually make Bourdain a fixture in contemporary food and travel media. It opened certified fresh in the mid-90s on Rotten Tomatoes and took $349,000 from six screens in New York and Los Angeles, the strongest limited opening of the year.

Sessa, 23, went to Deerfield Academy on financial aid to play hockey, broke his femur before his first season and ended up in the theatre department instead. Alexander Payne's casting team found him there, The Holdovers followed, then a BAFTA nomination, then three years of turning things down.

Tony is the first film he's carried alone.

We got fifteen minutes with him.

Vanity Fair mentioned in one line that people in Provincetown still remembered Bourdain, then moved on. Who actually came up to you?

A lot of random people. Particularly people who worked at the restaurants we were shooting in. The owner of the Old Colony Tap—that bar feels like it's been there a hundred years—he specifically remembered Bourdain coming in when he was older. But a lot of people were just excited to tell you they'd interacted with him at all. They met him for five seconds and they wanted to tell us about it. You got a sense of how impactful he was on this small, magic island. It's not technically an island, but it feels like one.

We ate a lot at Ciro & Sal's. The guy who owns it now, Larry Luster, was a dishwasher there when Bourdain was working there. He told us a lot of wild stuff. Things we could never put in the movie, it was too graphic.

Matt's direction for the dish pit, going by the Guardian, was basically "Dom, go wash dishes, and Stavros and Leo are going to make fun of you." How much of what's on screen is written?

Once we got into the kitchen it felt like making a Matt Johnson movie. There were scripted lines, some version of Stavros making fun of me, but it was one page and I don't really say anything. Matt had the two camera operators go handheld with zoom lenses and told all of us we could go wherever we wanted in the kitchen. Don't worry about the frame. Say whatever. That was hours of it, over and over, with Matt calling out to the ops while we were rolling—get this, go over here, get this. It was chaotic as hell. I'm standing there thinking, what are we even making right now?

Matt and his editors are amazing, they were able to sift through it. There's probably a good hour of footage of Stavros talking shit.

And that's a thing a lot of cooks recognize. The teasing reads as aggression from outside, but there's something else underneath it.

That's just how Stavros is. When he met me he immediately started making fun of me. But someone like him isn't going to do that if he doesn't actually like you. With these types of people, if they don't talk to you at all, that means they don't like you.

It's also the thing the restaurant industry has spent a few years trying to get out of its system. Is the kitchen culture in this film something you can see the pros and cons of now, or is it a 1975 movie about 1975?