The story of their film is one of serendipity. How as the two old friends talked they began to see how their conversation might be shaped into a play--or perhaps a film. How Louis Malle (1932-1995), the gifted French director (“Lacombe, Lucien,” “Pretty Baby,” “Atlantic City,” “Au Revoir, les Enfants”) signed on, and devised the understated but sophisticated shooting style, in which the distance from the camera to the actors at key moments is calculated to the millimeter, while half-seen reflections in mirrors create the illusion of a real restaurant, and the rhythm of the reaction shots subtly reflects the buried tension between the two men. How the film opened in New York, faltered, almost closed, and then gathered helpful reviews and went on to run for more than a year in that theater and--despite its challenging style--in 900 others.

Gene Siskel and I did a question-and-answer session with Gregory and Shawn after the first anniversary screening of the film's New York run. What I remember best from that night is that the two men, asked what they might do differently a second time around, said they would switch roles--”so that no one would think we were playing ourselves.” Are they playing themselves? Perhaps not, but I think they're playing their own personalities. The people they seem to be on the screen are the same people they seem to be in life (“whatever that means,” Andre might say).

In another sense, they are simply carriers for a thrilling drama--a film with more action than “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” What “My Dinner With Andre” exploits is the well-known ability of the mind to picture a story as it is being told. Both Shawn and Gregory are born storytellers, and as they talk we see their faces, but we picture much more: Andre being buried alive, and a monk lifting himself by his fingertips, and fauns cavorting in a forest. And Wally trudging around to agents with his plays, and happily having dinner with Debbie, and, yes, enjoying Heston's autobiography. We see all of these things so vividly that “My Dinner With Andre” never, ever, becomes a static series of two shots and closeups, but seems only precariously anchored to that restaurant, and in imminent danger of hurtling itself to the top of Everest (where, Wally stubbornly argues, it is simply not necessary to go to find the truth).

What they actually say is not really the point, I think. I made a lot of notes about Andre's theories and Wally's doubts, but this is not a logical process, it is a conversation, in which the real subject is the tone, the mood, the energy. Here are two friends who have each found a way to live successfully. Each is urging the other to wake up and smell the coffee. The difference is that, in Wally's case, it's real coffee.