I see that Criterion is bringing out Louis Malle’s “My Dinner with Andre” on June 23rd. That’s a cause for rejoicing.
I happened to be working at New Yorker Films when that film was in production, and as my boss, Dan Talbot, had a long-standing personal and professional relationship with Louis Malle, I got to read the script. I recognized it as an extraordinary piece of writing, but I told Dan that it was a terrible idea for a film. “This would be an award-winning off-Broadway play,” I said. “Why on earth does Louis want to film it?” 
I wasn’t a complete philistine. I loved Rohmer’s “My Night at Maud’s” and I knew that you could make something very exciting and cinematic out of a conversation. But that was Jean-Louis Trintignant who’s interested in a kind of boring blonde woman, spending the night talking to the hot Francoise Fabian. Even in a Rohmer movie, you could always hope they would drop the Pascal and get down to business, but this was two guys chatting in a restaurant and they weren’t even gay. The words were fascinating, but they didn’t fly off the page like when I finally heard them out loud. Or more likely, as I’ve thought many times since, I read them, but I didn’t read them.
I saw “My Dinner with Andre” for the first time at the New York Film Festival. If you’ve seen it—and if you haven’t, do!—you know how mesmerizing it is. But because it was so good, I had trouble getting into it at first. I was somewhere else, punishing myself for not understanding its potential in advance. What a colossal dope I’d been! But even as I beat myself up, it was impossible to resist the film’s power, or Andre Gregory’s hallucinatory bassoon voice. Once I was able to listen, it hit me: he was actually talking right to where my mind was at that very instant. I wasn’t present in that theatre--I was back in my apartment, 
reading the script, maybe eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with the TV on in the next room. He was telling me that I wasn’t alive, or at least not as alive as I could be, and he was explaining why. Of course, by telling me that I didn’t have a full awareness of life, he was imbuing me with one right then and there.
People say that film, unlike theatre, is fixed. It’s not different if you see it on Wednesday instead of Saturday. I disagree. Each film changes as you change. Sometimes you see a film and it’s perfect for the place in time that you’re in at that moment. Years later, you can watch it and it might not have the same impact. For me, that night, my film was “My Dinner with Andre.”
If you know the movie, then you remember the ending, you can see Wally Shawn in that cab; you remember the Satie music; you remember how it made you feel. Lots of movies can leave you weeping, but “My Dinner with Andre” leaves you looking at the world a lot differently than when you entered the theatre. I remember the exact spot where I shook hands with Louis afterwards, right next to a certain door where people were spilling out into the lobby. He had that “really?” look that filmmakers often have when their films have just had their first major screening, so delighted that people liked it.
“My Dinner with Andre” moved down the street from Alice Tully into our (New Yorker’s) theatre, the Lincoln Plaza, where, despite great reviews, it didn’t do much business. Nowadays, Dan Talbot would pull “My Dinner with Andre” out of the Lincoln Plaza in a week or two, but those were different times. After a month or so, “My Dinner With Andre” started to do a little more business, then a bit little more, a little bit more, until it was a hit, and played for a year.
I doubt many people would argue with me if I say that “My Dinner with Andre” has become recognized as a classic.
