My Dinner with Andre (1981) on Netflix
PG19811h 50mBiographyComedyDrama
Wally, a playwright and actor, dreads dinner with Andre, the friend he has dodged since Andre quit directing and went traveling. At Café des Artistes in Manhattan, Andre talks and Wally argues.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb7.6/1031,239 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes93%
Trailer
Plot summary
Andre, a theater director, walked away from his career in 1975 amidst a midlife crisis and spent years traveling the world. Now he sits down to dinner at Café des Artistes in Manhattan with Wally, a playwright and actor who has been avoiding him. Andre does most of the talking. He tells of working in a Polish forest with his mentor Jerzy Grotowski, of a trip to the Sahara while attempting a play from The Little Prince, and of a stay at the Findhorn commune in Scotland. Those years, Andre says, brought him out of a rut. Wally replies that most people cannot live that way, that he has had to think more about money than art, and that he takes pleasure in ordinary things. Andre warns that comfort can be dangerous.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about My Dinner with Andre (1981)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- While Shawn and Gregory were trying to find a director, Gregory took a phone call he first assumed was a prank, from French director Louis Malle, who had read the screenplay and wanted to direct or produce the film; Malle then worked with them to cut an hour from the three-hour script.
- My Dinner with Andre was filmed over two weeks in December 1980 in Richmond, Virginia, in the then-vacant Jefferson Hotel, on a set designed to resemble the Café des Artistes in New York City.
- Critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel praised the film heavily on their TV show Sneak Previews, and producers later told Ebert their support helped keep the movie running in theaters for a full year; Ebert named it the best film of 1981.
- In a 2009 interview with filmmaker Noah Baumbach, Shawn said of the version of himself in the film that he wanted to destroy that guy he played, to kill that side of himself by making the film, "because that guy is totally motivated by fear".
- Shawn's longtime partner in real life is the writer Deborah Eisenberg, who had not yet published anything at the time of the film; she appears early on as a dark-haired diner Wally sees while waiting for Andre at the bar.
- Andre refers to his wife "Chiquita" throughout the film; Gregory's real wife was a documentary filmmaker whose credits include three films about Gregory's mentor Jerzy Grotowski, the theater figure Andre and Wally discuss on screen.
