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.

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

Current

André, Wally, and Fran
André, Wally, and Fran
For our release of A Master Builder, Jonathan Demme’s film of André Gregory and Wallace Shawn’s Henrik Ibsen adaptation, we turned to writer and New York culture maven Fran Lebowitz, a friend of Gregory and Shawn’s, to talk to the theater and …
My Dinner with André: Long, Strange Trips
My Dinner with André: Long, Strange Trips

Taking the form of a casual conversation, Louis Malle’s film about transformative experiences is an outgrowth of its writer-stars’ experimental theater days.

By Amy Taubin

Celine Song’s Top 10
Celine Song’s Top 10

The director of Past Lives shares a list of favorite films, many of which reflect her background in theater and her interest in the smallness of human life in the face of time and history.

Jenni Olson’s Top 10
Jenni Olson’s Top 10

Jenni Olson is an acclaimed filmmaker, writer, archivist, LGBT film historian, and online pioneer.

Story Time with André Gregory
Story Time with André Gregory
A new documentary profile of a great raconteur, titled André Gregory: Before and After Dinner and directed by Cindy Kleine, opens today at New York’s Film Forum. In it, Gregory delves into his past, including his fraught relationship with his pare…
WHEN NOAH MET WALLY
WHEN NOAH MET WALLY
Almost thirty years have gone by since Wallace Shawn and André Gregory sat down for dinner on the Upper West Side and talked (and talked) their way into film history. So for our new special edition DVD of that encounter, Louis Malle’s My Dinner wi…

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.