Louis Malle

My Dinner with André

My Dinner with André

In this captivating and philosophical film directed by Louis Malle, actor and playwright Wallace Shawn sits down with his friend the theater director André Gregory at a restaurant on New York’s Upper West Side, and the pair proceed through an alternately whimsical and despairing confessional about love, death, money, and all the superstition in between. Playing variations on their own New York–honed personas, Shawn and Gregory, who also cowrote 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.

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Film Info

  • United States
  • 1981
  • 111 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.66:1
  • English
  • Spine #479

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

  • High-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • Interview from 2009 with actor-writers 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
  • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
  • PLUS: An essay by critic Amy Taubin and the prefaces written by Gregory and Shawn for the 1981 publication of the film’s screenplay

    New cover by Neil Kellerhouse

Purchase Options

Collector's Sets

Collector's Set

André Gregory & Wallace Shawn: 3 Films

André Gregory & Wallace Shawn: 3 Films

Blu-ray Box Set

3 Discs

$79.96

Collector's Set

André Gregory & Wallace Shawn: 3 Films

André Gregory & Wallace Shawn: 3 Films

DVD Box Set

5 Discs

$79.96

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

  • High-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • Interview from 2009 with actor-writers 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
  • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
  • PLUS: An essay by critic Amy Taubin and the prefaces written by Gregory and Shawn for the 1981 publication of the film’s screenplay

    New cover by Neil Kellerhouse
My Dinner with André
Cast
Wallace Shawn
Wally
André Gregory
André
Jean Lenauer
Waiter
Credits
Director
Louis Malle
Screenplay
Wallace Shawn
Screenplay
André Gregory
Produced by
George W. George
Produced by
Beverly Karp
Director of photography
Jeri Sopanen
Production designer
David Mitchell
Editor
Suzanne Baron
Sound
Jean-Claude Laureux
Music
Allen Shawn

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Explore

Louis Malle

Director

Louis Malle
Louis Malle

Crime dramas, comedies, romances, tragedies, fantasies, documentaries, and, of course, coming-of-age stories­—director Louis Malle did it all. This most unpredictable and eclectic of filmmakers enriched cinema over a nearly forty-year career that took him from Jacques Cousteau’s watery depths (his first film was the Cousteau-codirected Oscar winner The Silent World) to the peripheries of the French New Wave (Zazie dans le métro, The Fire Within) to the vanguard of American moviemaking (My Dinner with André). Malle had an intellectually curious nature that led him to approach film from a variety of angles; he was as comfortable making minimalist works like the wordless Humain trop humain and the talky André as phantasmagorical ones like Black Moon. He is probably best known, though, for his deeply personal films about the terrors and confusions of childhood, such as Murmur of the Heart and Au revoir les enfants. Perhaps not as well-known is his parallel career as a master of the nonfiction form—one of his many documentary achievements was the seven-part Phantom India, which would be a stunning career centerpiece for anyone else; for this director, it was simply a fascinating side project. Malle died in 1995, shortly after directing his final film, the typically experimental Vanya on 42nd Street.

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