Go backBack to selection

“Finally Allowing Myself to Grieve” | Tony Benna, André is an Idiot

Close-up of a brown-skinned men with long gray hair.Still from André is an Idiot. Courtesy Sundance Institute.

Films are made over many days, but some days are more memorable, and important, than others. Imagine yourself in ten years looking back on this production. What day from your film’s development, production or post do you think you’ll view as the most significant and why?

The night before the Sundance deadline, I found myself laying on the floor of my edit suite at 3am with a freshly self-inflicted broken hand and a waterfall of tears running down my face. To say that I had lost my mind a bit would’ve been an understatement. The post-production process had been an insane uphill battle and I was broken in so many ways.

I knew in my heart of hearts that I had given it my all, but at the same time I could not help but feel that I had failed. This sense of failure was deeper than me or the film; I truly felt that I had failed my friend André and I had failed his family. I felt I had let my wife and daughter down and wasted four years of my life in the process. Eventually, I pulled myself up off the floor and hen-pecked an email together as best as I could with a broken hand and hit send just hours before the deadline.

This was the most significant day on the project because every emotion I had experienced over the four years of making this film finally came out. It wasn’t failure I was feeling; it was me finally allowing myself to grieve and accept the fact that my friend had died, and this was the last moment I had to tell his story.

See all responses to our annual Sundance Question here.

© 2025 Filmmaker Magazine. All Rights Reserved. A Publication of The Gotham