#532 - Wallace Shawn and Annie Baker on My Dinner With André

Film at Lincoln Center Podcast

This week we’re excited to present a conversation between My Dinner with André lead actor Wallace Shawn and Janet Planet filmmaker Annie Baker. When Dan Talbot, the pioneering distributor and exhibitor of international art films, read playwrights Wallace Shawn and André Gregory’s script for My Dinner with André, he was so excited about the project that he helped director Louis Malle procure production funding from Gaumont. The concept was to depict an encounter between the two writers, playing fictionalized versions of themselves, as they discuss mortality, money, despair, and love over a meal at an Upper West Side restaurant—according to Gregory, Malle’s one direction was to “talk faster.” By turns entertaining, confessional, funny, and moving, suffused with melancholy and joy alike, the film became a sensation at the art house upon its release, playing to packed theaters for a solid year, and went on to endure as a perennial favorite on the home video circuit. Now please enjoy the conversation between Annie Baker and Wallace Shawn.