André Ricciardi in a still from “André is an Idiot” by Anthony Benna, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.
By Shelby Shaw
“Cancer’s not funny, but André definitely is,” director Tony Benna says when asked how André is an Idiot came together, a documentary profiling creative André Ricciardi during his yearslong battle with cancer. Onstage at the post-premiere Q&A on January 24 for the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, Benna is joined by Lee Einhorn, André’s best friend, who appears throughout the film and was a creative collaborator on making the project happen. “We kind of signed in blood a little bit to say yes to whatever he wanted to do,” Einhorn explains.
“Death is surprisingly boring,” says André in a scene from André is an Idiot. He isn’t an idiot, but he is dying from Stage 4 colon cancer when he says that death is boring. He isn’t wrong: He points out how much of his time is spent waiting, sleeping, and caught in a routine of taking medications or going through treatments. This man who caused the term “terror marketing” to be coined in advertising is anything but boring, or an idiot. He is raw and truthful, and he committed to capturing his body’s battle on camera as a way to subvert modern taboos around the subjects of dying and terminal illness. André left a remarkable personal legacy that includes this 88-minute gift to the public, reminding us all: get your ******* colonoscopy.
Benna’s directing (interspersed with his own stop-motion animation) introduces us to André through countless diaristic interviews he records along the journey of his progressing cancer, his humor whipping out even when least expected, such as pointing to his years as a drug-using alcoholic as a way to be prepared for the effects of chemo. With music by Dan Deacon, countering his calm approach to accepting his new reality is the laugh-out-loud love in the anecdotes from friends and family, archival footage, and personal photographs.
“André got to see quite a bit of the scenes,” Benna explains of the editing process, which saw multiple editors over four years. “He didn’t get to see a final cut, ever, but he felt like it was in good hands.” Benna describes the visual style as influenced by their background with ads and music videos. Finding a successful outlet for his wild, nearly uncontrollable output of creativity in a career in advertising, André challenged norms, knowing that to make something memorable, you had to stand out. But after getting the shocking diagnosis of Stage 4 colon cancer, André takes his usual and extreme out-of-the-box methods of production to tell the story of his own mortality. The target audience for this campaign? Everyone.
“Every project André had was always insane,” Benna says of having directed pieces for him in the past through their work as colleagues at the same advertising agency. “We gotta jump some fences, might break some laws” is how he describes the collaborative pitches that would come from André.
“For years he’d always talked about wanting to make a really funny documentary about something really serious. Unfortunately, this was the project,” Einhorn says with a laugh at the irony.
Calling himself an idiot for not having gotten his colonoscopy sooner, André makes this film, premiering in the U.S. Documentary Competition, as a document of himself, his family, and his friends, as they use inspiration from André’s unique ride through life to try to make sense of an inevitable ending. “André kept laughing to the end, and that was his mission, to be lighthearted and humorous about this,” Benna says. Amid numerous standing ovations, he adds to André’s wife and daughters in the audience, “Thank you for sharing your beautiful husband with us, and his story.” By making a documentary, André says he shifts his obsession with his diagnosis away from the consuming anxiety of a terminal sentence and instead focuses on making one more creative project — this time, using himself as the message to help spread awareness for those who think, “It won’t happen to me.”
“I think he would try to sabotage it in some way,” says Einhorn when he and Benna are asked what they think André would make of the final film and its premiering at the Sundance Film Festival. “He’d be so excited, and then come up with a million reasons why we shouldn’t even fucking go to Sundance.” The room erupts into laughter. “It would be something like that,” he continues, “but honestly, this was the dream.”
