Description
In Louis Malle’s captivating and philosophical My Dinner with André, actor and playwright Wallace Shawn sits down with friend and theater director André Gregory at an Upper West Side restaurant, and the two proceed into an alternately whimsical and despairing confessional on love, death, money, and all the superstition in between. Playing variations on their own New York–honed personas, Shawn and Gregory, who also wrote the screenplay, dive in with introspective, intellectual gusto, and Malle captures it all with a delicate, artful detachment. A fascinating freeze-frame of cosmopolitan culture, My Dinner with André remains a unique work in cinema history.
Special Features
- High-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- Interview from 2009 with actors and cowriters André Gregory and Wallace Shawn, conducted by their friend the filmmaker Noah Baumbach
- “My Dinner with Louis,” a 1982 episode of the BBC program Arena in which Shawn interviews director Louis Malle
- PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Amy Taubin and the prefaces written by Gregory and Shawn for the 1981 publication of the film’s screenplay