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When André Ricciardi turned 50, his best friend Lee made an unusual proposition: how about they go and get a colonoscopy together? The pair had reached the qualifying age for men in the US to access the health check, and Lee had visions of them farting merrily on adjacent toilets while the medication flushed out their bowels, then chatting on hospital beds as tiny cameras travelled through their anal passages. André was always up for ridiculous stuff, but on this occasion he surprised Lee: he said no.
“I was 100% shocked,” says Lee today. “I actually got jealous because I assumed he must have organised to go with somebody else!” But André had not made other colonoscopy plans. He just thought it was a crazy idea and for once, he was being sensible. That turned out to be the stupidest thing he’d ever done. Eighteen months later, perturbed by blood in his stools, André did go for a colonoscopy. It turned out he had stage 4 cancer.
“I hadn’t spoken to André in probably five years,” says Tony Benna, director of a moving – and hilarious – new documentary called André Is an Idiot. “Then I get this email from him and Lee saying, ‘We’ve got a great idea for a film. Can we meet on Zoom?’” Benna was excited. He had worked with André, a maverick advertising creative from San Francisco, on numerous projects. “We’d go shoot with Ozzy Osbourne, or meet Eminem, or hang out with the guitar technician for the Rolling Stones. And somehow you’d tie that back to, like, Dove soap or something.”
The next day, on screen, André told him: “I have cancer and I’ll probably be dead in three years. Want to make a film about it?”
It was a lot to process, says Benna. He didn’t particularly want to make a maudlin film about cancer, but he had always wanted to make one about André. “He’s one of the most insane people I’ve ever met. He had so many wild stories. I wanted to get to the bottom of them.”
And so, Benna soon discovered, André really did once buy a pair of Kim Kardashian’s old leather trousers at auction in the hope of cloning her DNA. He really did have to pull splinters out of his penis after a masturbation experiment gone wrong in his grandparents’ bathroom. He really did read Helter Skelter, a book about the Manson murders, to his daughter while she was recovering from surgery in hospital.
Then there was the wedding story. In the 1990s – during what friends call André’s “bathrobe era” since he spent an entire year wearing one – he was out drinking when he overheard the server asking a friend to marry her so she could get a green card. The friend declined, so André piped up: “I’ll do it!”
André had a girlfriend at the time (“She didn’t take it very well”) and Janice the bartender was seeing someone too, so the marriage was to be strictly platonic. Yet somehow, this fake couple ended up wangling their way on to Newlyweds, the US gameshow in which couples compete to show how well they know their new partner. André devised an ingenious plan: when asked multiple choice questions separately, they would each select the answer that, going by its first letter, came latest in the alphabet.
“I don’t know how legal it was,” laughs Janice today. Probably not very – but it worked. The pair won a holiday to the Caribbean where, somewhat inconveniently, they fell in love.
Although André, with his wild hair and explosion of ideas, is the star of the film, Janice is the understated hero, always there crossing her fingers for positive test results, keeping the house running and nursing André as he gets sicker. Her presence adds emotional depth to what might otherwise be a series of wacky adventures, of which there are many. At one point, André considers making a hard copy of his genome so he can return as a clone. He visits a teacher of “death yells” – basically, a rehearsal for the last sound you will ever make on Earth. And he pitches a TV show called Who Wants to Kill Me? in which contestants compete for the chance to finish André off in imaginative ways (fed to lions? Cooked by a chef with a thing for human flesh?).
“He was so serious about that idea, we actually went to Hollywood to pitch it,” says Benna. “We got turned down, so then he went out on Hollywood Boulevard, asking people if they would watch this show, so we could go back and say, ‘Look, all these people want to see it!’” He wouldn’t really have let someone turn him into soup, though, would he? Benna laughs. “You never knew. It was a little scary at times – because you weren’t sure if he was actually going to get a head transplant.”
Part of Benna’s job was to just roll with André. “If he wanted to go to a Radon mine and breathe radioactive air, we went. If he wanted to do a crystal healing session, we did it. If he wanted to do nine grams of mushrooms, we were OK with that.”
It’s riotous fun. Benna uses stop-motion animation to recreate some scenes. In one, clumps of André’s fallen chemo hair are brought to life. When André’s dad, an intensely private man, refuses to appear on camera, they hire a lookalike. This turns out to be the legendary weed smoker Tommy Chong.
The pace is frenetic, but there’s a point to it. “We’re all going to go through this at some point,” says Benna. “And there are different ways to approach it. You don’t have to be scared. You don’t have to be angry. You can approach it with humour, with friends, with art. I think that message has resonated.”
At the start, André declares: “You only have time in life to get good at one or two things – and I chose advertising. What the fuck is wrong with me? What a waste of a life!” But he gets a chance to find meaning in his work, creating a campaign encouraging men to get their colon checked (it revolves around everyday items that look like sphincters).
André is forced to confront difficult parts of his past. The love he has for his two girls is undeniable, but he is not always affectionate. He never hugs them. “He won’t talk about pain and fear,” one of them says, “which is hard for my mum.”
But it’s Andre’s conversations with his therapist, Peter, that take the film to another level. Peter loves André’s jokes but realises they’re often a defence mechanism to avoid confronting difficult emotions. “You are more than just your irreverent humour,” he tells André.
“Without Peter, I’m not sure the film would have had much direction,” says Benna. “Peter helped André grieve his own situation, but also let his family grieve. André learned to be vulnerable and humble. That allowed him to appreciate the life he lived and the love that was all around him.”
“I was surprised at how willing he was to talk,” says Janice. “The film was a wonderful way for him to think about his path and what was valuable in his life.”
André copes with chemo incredibly well. “I prepared myself by getting the worst hangovers for 30 years,” he says in the doc. But eventually it stops working. His belly swells, his hair grows back crazier than ever and he develops long eyelashes. He starts to resemble a wild mystic sat atop a mountain. And the changes are not just physical: spiritually, his transformation is even greater, providing the film with a powerful climax and sense of closure.
“He had so much more to do,” says Janice, who lost her soulmate in December 2023. “So many more stories, so much creativity. And he would have made a great cranky old man.”
When Janice heard the film had won the audience award at last year’s Sundance festival, she pulled her car over and cried. Nobody had expected the film to even get a showing there. Benna hadn’t even RSVPd. “There was a standing ovation and it felt surreal, like I was floating,” he says. “People came up to me and said they wished they’d seen it when they’d been diagnosed, because they would have felt less afraid, less angry, less isolated.”
Then there are all those who got colonoscopies because of the film. “I’ve had at least three dozen people say the film saved their life, because they got checked and caught something early.”
Lee asked Andre, shortly before he died, how he’d sum up the previous three years. “André said, ‘The best years of my life.’” Janice, who was in the room at the time making a sandwich, shouted out: “Mine too!” Lee realised it was the same for him.
Despite the heartbreaking outcome, they’d spent three precious years making countless memories with their crazy friend. “It brought us all together in a really intense, emotional way,” says Lee. “I honestly think this was part of André’s master plan all along.”
English (US) ·