Trivia

The author of the book 'The Dinner', Herman Koch, walked away from the European premiere in Berlin on February 10, 2017. He did not wish to stay for the after-party, nor talk to the director, cast members or audience. The reason was that he did not like the movie at all, mostly for the script which he thought had transferred his cynical story into a moral tale. Of the three movies made from his book, "this one is easily the worst", Koch said to Dutch newspaper NRC (Feb 11, 2017). "That after-party would have been rather awkward. What would I have done? Shake hands with everybody and tell them I hated their movie?" Koch disliked the movie's reference to themes like American violence and the stigma of mental illness. "That 'didactical' tone, isn't it killing?", Koch said.

This is actually the third film version to be made from Herman Koch's best selling novel. A Dutch film came out in 2013, and an Italian one in 2014. Both were well received and nominated for numerous awards.

The "Cheese Presentation" scene was filmed at the tail end of the last in a string of overnight sessions. At the NA Premier in TriBeCa, Michael Chernus shared that Director Oren Moverman pulled him aside at 3am and said "go to the kitchen and see... I heard they have some amazing cheeses back there. I need you to find out what they have, Google each one, come back, and do a monologue while looking straight down the barrel of the camera." Chernus did just that and came back 10 mins later to shoot what turned out to be a memorable (and educational) bit of comedic relief.

For this movie, The Dinner, English actor Steve Coogan's American accent used sounded so much like Willem Dafoe, that jokingly, Dafoe contacted Coogan to ask him to do voice overs for a new puppet show he was supposedly "in-production" and asked if he could use his voice to help out finishing while Dafoe was out sick. Coogan thought it was a serious offer and asked to talk it over with his agent. Dafoe promptly told him he was joking and did offer to keep in contact, "just in case!"

This marks as the third collaboration between Richard Gere and Laura Linney. They previously appeared in Primal Fear (1996) and The Mothman Prophecies (2002).