He was talking about his first summer spent in Provincetown, arriving on the tip of Cape Cod. He worked there in several seaside restaurants, including the “Lobster Pot,” a local and tourist favorite. Bourdain was also a fixture circa the opening of the nearby Italian “Ciro & Sal’s.” The archetypal ground-shifting summer like the ones Bourdain had in his early years also became a creatively fertile time period for director-co-writer Matt Johnson (“BlackBerry,” “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie”) to explore, and to make the subject of the biopic Tony, out August 7 from A24.

The film stars The Holdovers breakout Dominic Sessa as the young Bourdain, freshly out of his teenage years, opposite Antonio Banderas as the Ciro & Sals restaurateur who hired Bourdain, with Stavros Halkias and “Tuner” and “White Lotus” fave Leo Woodall as restaurant workers who bandied with the chef.

Little is known about the portrayal of Bourdain beyond the initial trailer, but at P-Town Film Fest, Johnson, Sessa, and Woodall sat down for a friendly conversation about Tony.

“We were remarking how wonderful it is to be in Provincetown and not have to be making a movie,” Johnson said. “I lived here for two months when I was putting this screenplay together, but it was really off-season, the dark times. I think I got here the end of February.”

Tony was shot on location last summer: “It was the most cooperative city I’ve ever filmed a movie with in my life.”

Adapting “Kitchen Confidential” with co-writers Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels, and Lou Howe, Johnson said that Tony condenses 3 years of Bourdain’s life into one summer, “not just the first summer that Tony came here in between years at [Vassar], but it also talks about when he came here the next summer … and another summer after that. … All of his writing is self-report, so it’s like he says what’s going on with him, which is something that [I’m] so interested in as a filmmaker. This is him looking up and looking down at his own history, this is what’s important to me, and skipping all kinds of things. I’m always interested in that from a journalistic point of view, what are you willing to tell us actually happened combined … with talking to other people who were there and getting their version of what actually happened. It really gives you a sense that Bourdain is both lionizing and minimizing lots of things that happened to him.”

Johnson added, “Dom’s from New Jersey, not far from where Bourdain grew up. There were many things that were so connected. … I didn’t want him to do a lot of research. I didn’t want him to do an impression. … I didn’t want him to turn into somebody who was crafting a performance. I wanted him to be himself.”

Asked if he had any kitchen experience, he said, “No, I didn’t have any, but I was very excited to learn how to shuck oysters, and that’s basically all I do. It’s not easy, especially when you get cocky, and throw the towel away and don’t even look at the oyster because I did impale my hand on, like, day four,” Woodall said.

“Sal, the guy I play, was a combination of fun and kind of terrifying, the way that we shot this and the way that Matt works; he wants us to take off our safety belts and just go for it.”

Filmmaker Johnson promotes Tony on the heels of “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” (by Neon) becoming one of this year’s acclaimed films. “BlackBerry,” in 2023, was a loose dramatization of the history of the once-trendy phone, was also revered.

Watch the full P-Town Film Fest panel below.