GQ: A lot of people have a parasocial relationship with Anthony Bourdain, and the very idea of a biopic about him makes them nervous. How did you contend with that built-in level of expectation when making this film?

Matt Johnson: One of Dom’s and my real secrets, that we didn’t even know was a tool for us, was that neither of us had literally any baggage around this guy. I mean, zero. I don’t want this term to come off as cynical or negative, but we both had a strident lack of interest in Anthony Bourdain. He wasn’t a role model to either of us. And because we didn’t view him as a role model, it let us look at the character as somebody who could be influenced by other men.

Because that’s something that Dom and I were both very, very interested in. Him coming from hockey and me coming from a kind of summer camp Ontario culture where a lot of what he and I credited to the way that we were had to do with role models, specifically slightly older guys that we would be hanging out with. And it was that that we sort of centered the movie around. We were like, “Okay, so who were this guy’s role models? How can we interrogate that together in ways that feel honest to us?” We formed the whole movie around that central idea: Everybody has a notion of Anthony Bourdain. But why don’t you and I try to figure out why he is the way that he is? Because we both believed, really, that you owe so much of your personality and who you are to your role models and the people who you look up to, for better or worse.

Prior to that, though, having not had much familiarity with Bourdain, how did you land on this as a story that you wanted to tell?

I get pitched different projects all the time, and like many things in Hollywood, because I’d made Blackberry, I was getting inundated with real-life stories, biographies—specifically tech biographies, biographies of companies, movies that were in the same space as Blackberry. Take something real and do it in whatever my style is. And so this was one of those projects, and I was totally uninterested. I said no to this in the same way I had said no to two or three dozen other similarly situated projects.

Dom and I were meeting just to see if there was a project we could do together. We were together for two hours, maybe more. But my producer and co-writer, Matt Miller, was also there, and we left that lunch being like, “Oh, well, this Bourdain project can be the project that I wanted to do with Dom. We can mold it around this idea.”

So by the first time you met Dom, had you read the Provincetown chapters in Kitchen Confidential that inspired the movie?

I only knew the story superficially, that he had started this way. The thing that I was attracted to was the idea that this guy did not initially want to be a chef. So I knew that much, and it was then that I was like, “Okay, I should really take this guy’s life seriously.” And from there, I went and basically read everything. I didn’t watch all of his TV shows, because I was less interested in the adult persona and much more about what he said about his own life. And I read some really, really great books. I read an amazing unofficial biography that I found hugely interesting. It’s by a guy named Charles Leerhsen, and it’s called Down and Out in Paradise. It’s a bit pop in the sense that it is trying to be scandalous in a way, but what this guy had that I couldn’t find anywhere else was tons of interviews with the people who were around when Bourdain was young.