Story Time with André Gregory

A new documentary profile of a great raconteur, titled André Gregory: Before and After Dinner anddirected by Cindy Kleine, opens today at New York’s Film Forum. In it, Gregory delves into his past, including his fraught relationship with his parents, and talks about the making of My Dinner with André, the Louis Malle film that introduced Gregory and his longtime friend Wallace Shawn to the larger world in the form of a nearly two-hour conversation about life, work, and acting. The film was an art-house hit, and its success certainly in part lies in Gregory’s ability to make rarefied subject matter (experimental theater and perfomance art, for example) accessible with his engaging storytelling skills. Here’s one of our favorite moments from the film, a tour de force of tale-spinning in which Gregory provides terror and catharsis all in the span of four minutes.