On Location peels back the curtain on some of your favourite films, television shows, and more. This time, we ask: where was Tony filmed?

Today, the name Anthony Bourdain is hailed by lovers of food, travel and hedonism everywhere. But, as the tagline of the new A24 film states: before he was Anthony Bourdain, he was Tony. The new biopic takes viewers back to the chef’s formative years, inspired by Bourdain’s memoir Kitchen Confidential. The film follows a young Tony, a “spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout” – Bourdain's words from the book, shown on screen at the beginning of the film – working as a pot washer in Cape Cod kitchens. He’s depressed, heartbroken and despondent, but the people he meets over the course of this summer change his life for good.

Antonio Banderas and Dominic Sessa in the kitchens on set of Tony

Eager to stay true to Anthony’s experiences on the peninsula, director Matt Johnson chose to set up production offices just north of Cape Cod, and subsequently, most of the action was shot on location. “This is a real Cape Cod movie,” says Charlie Harrington, locations manager. “Everything was filmed right there – it's all the real thing.”

“I live in Cape Cod, and I'm the exact same age as Anthony Bourdain,” Charlie tells me. “I didn't know Tony, but I spent that same summer in Provincetown, too. So I was uniquely qualified to be the guy who scouted this movie. I just kept thinking, ‘What would Tony think of this location?’ That kind of thing really mattered to me.”

Cape Cod, Massachusetts

“We always knew we were going to shoot part of it on Cape Cod, so we were down there scouting every day. Before long, we realised we wanted to shoot every exterior on Cape Cod because it just looks much better."

The cast and crew mainly shot in Provincetown (where the film is set), and in Dennis, a town about an hour south of Provincetown. There were a few exceptions, although all still within Massachusetts – the scenes shot at Vassar were filmed at Wheaton College in Norton; the Bourdain family home was at a house in Brockton, and Nancy’s house was shot in Plymouth. Below, Charlie gives us the lowdown on the filming process behind Tony – the hardest locations to find, the best memories from shooting the film, and the joys of making friends on the job.

Provincetown, Cape Cod

“Provincetown has always been a home for artists, poets, writers, painters. I've found, when I travel around the world doing this, that the end of peninsulas are like that – the artistic people tend to drip out to the end of the peninsula. It's the last place to go, and so they all end up there. Provincetown has been that way since at least the 20s. It's always been a real kind of hippie-dippy town, before there were even hippies.

I knew what P-Town looked like back then. It wouldn't have been the same result if some guy came from LA and scouted this movie. For every single shot I thought about what it used to be like, and then I would talk to the production designer about what I thought should change from my memories of the place at that particular time.

Originally, we were going to shoot the P-Town scenes earlier in the year, but because of cast availability, we pushed the shoot and we ended up there the third week of June, which is a really busy time. If you look down the street, the buildings are the same as they were back then, but all the signs are different and there's pot dispensaries and all sorts of things that are non-period, so the art department dressed the whole street. But closing down a busy resort town in season and with very little money was really challenging.”

Dominic Sessa in Provincetown

Spiritus Pizza is an iconic Provincetown pizza joint, loved by locals today as much as it was when Bourdain spent his summer there. In the film, this is where Nancy Putkoski, Tony’s crush, works during her summer break. “We shot it at the real place, and I learned as I was making the movie that Nancy actually worked at Spiritus Pizza that summer in real life,” Charlie says. “Tony apparently used to sleep on top of the walk-in cooler in the back because he became friends with the owner. He ended up marrying Nancy, the girl he's chasing the whole movie.”

Other filming locations in Provincetown include the Lobster Pot, the Old Colony Tap, and exterior shots of The Flagship, the restaurant where Bourdain started his career.

Dominic Sessa on the beach in Cape Cod

“A lot of the film was shot in the town of Dennis, which is the town that I live in. I had a five-minute commute every day. Antonio Banderas' house – with the dune in the background, where Tony gets splashed with water every morning – was only a mile from my house. All the beach scenes were shot just in front of that house, beyond the dunes. Gina's By the Sea is two miles from my house.

The chef's house was my favourite location visually. The house had a great interior, great exterior, and that dune is right next to the hammock that he [Tony] is sleeping at. From there you can see the ocean, and in reality, you can see P-Town in the background, too. The house had been in someone’s family since it was built in the 20s. So that was my favourite. I did a painting of that porch with the hammock for the production designer as a wrap gift.

The people who owned the house were great, and really cooperative. Same with the guy that owned Gina's, and every other location in the movie, I became friends with all the people and still am. That's why I’ll always have such great memories of this job.”

Michael Jibrin, Dominic Sessa, Antonio Banderas, Stavros Halkias on the set of Tony

“One of my favourite restaurants, owned by a friend, closed down because he's retiring. It was called Gina's By the Sea. It's famous to everyone in my town, but I knew it was closing and I knew a good portion of the movie took place in the restaurant. So I took it to the producers, but they asked me to find something closer to our production office because it would be cheaper. So then I shot 70 other closed restaurants that were closer to the production office, but we ended up at Gina's By the Sea because it was just so good. I knew we were going to – it was magical.

The Flagship restaurant in real life was on Commercial Street, which is the main street in Provincetown. Gina's By the Sea is actually surrounded by sand dunes, but it just screamed Cape Cod – it used to be somebody's Cape Cod cottage that they turned into a restaurant. The only thing I was concerned about was that the kitchen was small and so much of it takes place in a kitchen. But the cinematographer and the director decided the size would be great for intimacy. They loved it, and I think it worked really well.”