Before the best-selling books, the hit TV shows, and the voice that defined a generation—before Anthony Bourdain became Anthony Bourdain—there was the summer of 1975. In the picturesque beachside enclave of Provincetown, on Massachusetts’ idyllic Cape Cod, a lanky teenager from New Jersey discovers the first taste of the man he would become…
From director Matt Johnson comes the raucous and electric origin story of one of the most beloved icons of the modern era. Restless, reckless, overconfident, and hungry for something he couldn’t yet name, Tony offers an unexpected glimpse at the culinary legend before the world knew his name—and before Bourdain discovered the passion, purpose, and mentorship that would shape the rest of his life.
With Tony, I wanted to figure out how Bourdain became who he was, and the discovery of Provincetown was as much a surprise to me as it was to him,” says Johnson, who lived in the seaside enclave while writing the film’s script. “It’s as far a place as you can go without leaving America—the very end of the road.”
A Slice of Life
Anthony Bourdain spent much of his life searching. Through kitchens, books, television and travel, he moved through the world with relentless curiosity, searching for flavors, stories, people and experiences that might reveal something essential about life itself. To audiences around the world, Bourdain became more than a chef, best-selling author, or television host. He became a guide, a provocateur, a poet of appetite and alienation, and a storyteller who seemed uniquely capable of finding intimacy and humanity anywhere he went.
But long before he became Anthony Bourdain, he was simply Tony.
Set during a formative summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1975, Tony explores the experiences,
relationships, ambitions and contradictions that helped shape the man Bourdain would eventually become. Rather than compressing an entire life into a conventional cradleto-grave biopic, the film instead focuses on a singular pocket of time, a brief but transformative chapter in which a young man searching for identity first discovers the intoxicating possibilities of food, work, friendship, romance, rebellion, and reinvention.
For director Matt Johnson, that approach became the film’s central organising principle. “It’s a coming-of-age story about somebody we all think that we know, but nobody knows from this specific period of his life,” says Johnson. “The concept for the film is taking a single, formative summer of Anthony Bourdain’s youth and expanding on a lot of the mythology that people know about him, which originated out of this one little pocket of time.”
That encapsulating idea liberated the filmmaker from the expectations that often accompany biographical storytelling.
Tony is not interested in summarizing Bourdain’s life, nor in presenting a definitive explanation of the man. Instead, the film approaches the culinary icon as a young person still in the process of forming – insecure, ambitious, intelligent, wounded, hungry and deeply uncertain about his future. The result is a
film less concerned with mythology than with the formation of mythology.
Though inspired by real events and rooted in Bourdain’s own recollections, Tony deliberately resists becoming a museum piece or a catalog of biographical milestones. Instead, the film seeks emotional truth, attempting to understand the insecurities, appetites, relationships and formative experiences that crystalized into the public persona readers and audiences came to know.
“The only Anthony Bourdain that we’ll ever know is the one that he allowed us to know through what he wrote and what he created on camera for television,” Johnson says. “This story is about the private side that led to that very public life.”
Finding the Story
Co-screenwriters Todd Bartels and Lou Howe were longtime admirers of Bourdain before they began developing the screenplay. Both were drawn not only to his work as a culinary figure, but to his voice and its distinctive blend of humour, intelligence, empathy, cynicism, curiosity and vulnerability, which made his writing feel intensely personal.
“This guy totally captured what a kitchen is in all of its dirtiness, insanity and joy,” Bartels says of his first reading of Kitchen Confidential as a teenager working in restaurant kitchens himself. “On the page he is unbelievably talented—so fun, so electric, so detailed.”
Lou Howe recalls being captivated by Bourdain’s writing long before his television career transformed him into a global celebrity. “He has such a natural voice and you can hear him in your head while reading his work,” Howe says. “I also connected with his empathy and curiosity as a writer—the way he connects with people so naturally in his own right.”
From the earliest stages of development, the writers knew they did not want to tell a conventional biographical story.
Their desire to tell an origin story led them to Provincetown, where Bourdain spent his last summer before college washing dishes in the kitchen of a seafood restaurant.
All three writers, including Matt Johnson, spent time there absorbing the distinct vibes of the Cape Cod beachside enclave, where generations of writers, outsiders, and vacationers have sought creative refuge.
As they researched further into Bourdain’s life, the writers came to view Provincetown not merely as a backdrop, but as the emotional and thematic heart of the story. “It became clear that Provincetown summer was really a formative time of Bourdain’s life and we could dig deep into that origin and
create a microcosm of the rest of his life,” Howe says.
By the time Johnson got involved with the project, Howe and Bartels had already established the broad emotional framework of the story. But the director’s arrival fundamentally reshaped the film’s perspective. Best known for projects that blur documentary immediacy with narrative storytelling, Johnson was initially less interested in Anthony Bourdain the celebrity than Anthony Bourdain the unfinished young man.
The Man Behind the Icon
Though Anthony Bourdain’s later life and tragic death inevitably hovers in the cultural memory, the filmmakers behind Tony made a conscious decision not to allow the film to become defined by retrospective tragedy.
“We wanted to make a hopeful movie,” Johnson insists. That decision shaped the emotional tone of the entire project. Rather than reduce Bourdain’s life to its ending, Tony reconnects audiences with the qualities that made him resonate so deeply in the first place: curiosity, humor, insecurity, generosity, empathy, hunger, contradiction, and relentless longing.
Matt Johnson is a filmmaker based in Toronto, Canada. He is the writer, director, and star of THE DIRTIES (2013), OPERATION AVALANCHE (2016), BLACKBERRY (2023) and NIRVANNA THE BAND THE SHOW THE MOVIE (2026) which was based on his cultclassic TV series NIRVANNA THE BAND THE SHOW (2017-19) that he co-created with Jay McCarrol. Matt’s next film, TONY is an A24 production and tells the story of a
young Anthony Bourdain. Matt continues to develop several exciting projects for film and TV under his production company Zapruder Films.
Matthew Miller (Writer, Producer) is the co-founder and President of Zapruder Films in Toronto. Past projects include the feature films THE DIRTIES (2013), OPERATION AVALANCHE (2016), BLACKBERRY (2023), NIRVANNA THE BAND THE SHOW THE MOVIE (2026), MILE END KICKS (2026) and TONY (2026)
Screenwriters Todd Bartels and Lou Howe have been friends for 25 years, starting in high school, through their time at Harvard, and now in LA. They have been writing together for the last five years.
Their latest feature collaboration, Tony is released by A24, with Star Thrower producing. Todd and Lou are currently adapting the well-known true crime podcast MURDER 101 at Amazon Studios with Jon Watts attached to direct and produce. Additionally, their other projects in development include an adaptation of the video game METAL GEAR SOLID for Sony, a feature about the origin of MTV with Davis Entertainment and Live Nation producing, and an original feature idea about a young Jacqueline Bouvier and her whirlwind romance with JFK. While at Harvard, Todd studied Buddhism and Hinduism and performed in the Hasty Pudding Show. He received an MFA from the NYU Graduate Acting Program. In addition to screenwriting, Lou is also a director. His debut film, Gabriel was released by Oscilloscope. He is a graduate of Harvard and the MFA Directing program at the AFI Conservatory
