Speaker 1: You are listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership with Montclair.
Speaker 2: Here at Ruthie's Table four, we have something exciting to
Speaker 2: tell you. Our new substack has just launched. You will
Speaker 2: find all kinds of extra material from the River Cafe,
Speaker 2: including recipes, our latest news, and bonus content from the podcast.
Speaker 2: If you enjoy listening to this series as much as
Speaker 2: I enjoy talking with our guests, visit the River Cafe,
Speaker 2: dot substack and subscribe. See you there. What I know
Speaker 2: about Luca Guardonino is, of course the films he's made.
Speaker 2: But what I know from Luca is how passionate he
Speaker 2: is about food. Meetium over lunch just last week at
Speaker 2: the River Cafe, we went straight into not what movies
Speaker 2: he was making, but what food he was cooking. He
Speaker 2: is Italian and he cares, friends tell me. In his
Speaker 2: home in Piermonte, Luca has three kitchens, including one elaborately
Speaker 2: equipped for pastries and a special room for keeping vinegar
Speaker 2: and dried herbs from his garden. It's always full of people,
Speaker 2: everyone gathering around the table and kitchen. He genuinely loves
Speaker 2: cooking with friends, participating and enjoying the process. Our mutual friend.
Speaker 2: Lorcan O'Neil says, Luca has a true instinct for friendship.
Speaker 2: Food not only plays a strong role in his home life,
Speaker 2: but an important role in his films, conveying sensuous desire
Speaker 2: and transformation. The prawns and I Am Love the Peach
Speaker 2: and call me by your name, the churros and Challengers.
Speaker 2: We're here today in the one kitchen I have in
Speaker 2: my home to talk about food and memories, food and film,
Speaker 2: food and family. A beginning to a new friendship, one
Speaker 2: cook to another.
Speaker 1: Wonderful. I'm so happy to be here.
Speaker 2: It's so nice to have you here so fast. We
Speaker 2: just saw each other two weeks ago. And you're back
Speaker 2: in London. You're going to come back more often.
Speaker 1: The first time in Vaccines I saw you.
Speaker 2: Oh, you're going to come back more. When's the next time?
Speaker 1: That's what I h I.
Speaker 3: Hope very soon I might be coming back and stay
Speaker 3: because I might do a movie in London. I did
Speaker 3: a movie last year.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what was that?
Speaker 3: It's After the Hunt? Yes, starring Julia Roberts and Yes
Speaker 3: are you Debuery and Andrew Garfield, l Seviny, Michael Stohlberg.
Speaker 1: And there was a great experience and I love to
Speaker 1: be in London. I was great about it, you know,
Speaker 1: like first of all, to be in the summer in London.
Speaker 3: It's good for me because I cannot stand the heat,
Speaker 3: so I like that the temperature here, okay, and the
Speaker 3: quality of water.
Speaker 2: What we don't like about London summer?
Speaker 1: Oh my god, I can trade place.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And then what else is the.
Speaker 1: Quality of work? Amazing amazing crafts. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I used to say that independent films were used to
Speaker 2: be made in Europe, the small films and the big
Speaker 2: ones in La, and now it's changing. Everybody wants to
Speaker 2: make a movie here La.
Speaker 1: I don't think they do any longer, any movies.
Speaker 3: But basically it's like impossible because of the very expensive
Speaker 3: nature of the business.
Speaker 2: There Brown, who's the prime minister here fifteen years ago,
Speaker 2: maybe he brought in the idea of lowering the tacks
Speaker 2: for making citys. You walk into the River Cafe, you know,
Speaker 2: you see everybody, you know, Noah and Greta here, you
Speaker 2: were here, Julia Roberts is making another film. Yeah, the
Speaker 2: Alejandro is here, and jj Abrams is here. It's like
Speaker 2: walking into a kind of canteen.
Speaker 3: You know, it's a bit of quality of one nice
Speaker 3: and good prices.
Speaker 2: What about in Italy are they making?
Speaker 3: Probably Italy that the quality of life is very good
Speaker 3: and we have very good craftsman in Italy, but unfortunately
Speaker 3: we don't have a very we have a short sighted
Speaker 3: politics at play there.
Speaker 2: Because the tradition in Rome. I mean it was amazing.
Speaker 3: I shot the movie in which is my previous one, Queer,
Speaker 3: I fulfill these kind of fantasy of making a movie
Speaker 3: entirely shot on stage in China.
Speaker 1: Chita voll interior interiorn next theeries.
Speaker 3: I think we had like ten stages. We built in
Speaker 3: the back loot, in the front lot. We even there
Speaker 3: was a sort of big heel of dirt that we
Speaker 3: took over and we created a jungle over there, and
Speaker 3: it was fascinating, but almost for the remembrance of things
Speaker 3: passed and more than the energy of the now.
Speaker 2: Beau just did Felini and ANTONIOI?
Speaker 1: Did they make all their Realini for sure?
Speaker 3: ANTONIOI, I would say maybe not, but Pelini for sure.
Speaker 2: So we would love to read. You know, we always
Speaker 2: try and start even the beginning of the conversation, because
Speaker 2: that's how this podcast started. It was during COVID. The
Speaker 2: idea originally it was just to read a recipe every day,
Speaker 2: and then the idea was to say, well, how do
Speaker 2: you segue from the recipe to this story of your
Speaker 2: life through food. So we want to talk about cinema,
Speaker 2: and we want to talk about Italy, and we want
Speaker 2: to talk about everything, but it's the kind of getting
Speaker 2: to understand who we are through our experience memories food, which.
Speaker 1: Is everything I think you think it is.
Speaker 3: I think so memory of meals, memory of food, memory
Speaker 3: of the tight, tactile experience of food, the smells, the texture.
Speaker 3: I think it constitutes. And I'm not talking about fancy
Speaker 3: food per se. I'm talking about the idea of nourishment
Speaker 3: or the deprivation of nourishment. It's really like one of
Speaker 3: the things that makes us universally linked as people.
Speaker 1: So I do agree with you completely.
Speaker 2: A memory.
Speaker 3: Yeah, when my father was dying, I flew when I
Speaker 3: was in twenty twenty, during lockdown, I flew to Sicily
Speaker 3: where he was born, in his village, and I walked
Speaker 3: toward the building where he grew up, where he was
Speaker 3: born and grew up and where I spent a lot
Speaker 3: of summers when I was very little, and I could
Speaker 3: distinctively remember in my mind and still now I can
Speaker 3: the smell of mold and grapes be dried coming from
Speaker 3: a storage place in the building. So I went into
Speaker 3: the building and I could enter and the smell came
Speaker 3: back to me in its physical presence and was incredible.
Speaker 2: Is that And your father was drying in a hospital somewhere.
Speaker 1: Else, Yeah, he was in Milano.
Speaker 3: I could come back home fun and and see him
Speaker 3: going to help.
Speaker 2: It. Never smell, nothing helps, Nothing helps, but the smell
Speaker 2: that you could feel.
Speaker 3: Now it's like a legacy and something that I makes
Speaker 3: me have him close, even the memory of that.
Speaker 1: You went to Ethiopia, and I was supposed.
Speaker 3: To be born in Ethiopia, but for I came out earlier,
Speaker 3: so like seven months in August, I had to be
Speaker 3: a Leo.
Speaker 1: There was no way around it. I'm a cancer also closed. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I like cancer women. I don't like men.
Speaker 2: I have a friend that went to she went to
Speaker 2: La and she called that's the hotel to find her babysitter.
Speaker 2: And the baby said, well, I can babysit, but I
Speaker 2: need to know the sign of the baby first.
Speaker 1: I agree. Oh, come on, I mean scorpio woman. Impossible,
Speaker 1: my mom.
Speaker 2: Okay, we'll get back to the side you went. You're
Speaker 2: born a Leo in Ethiopia.
Speaker 1: Yes, and then moved in September.
Speaker 2: You were born in Palermo.
Speaker 3: Palermo, and then with you too, Abeba, when I was
Speaker 3: two months and I spent the first five years of
Speaker 3: my life there.
Speaker 2: Can you remember the smells of ethiop Oh yeah, what
Speaker 2: were they like?
Speaker 1: Well, I mean I can. I don't know.
Speaker 3: I don't know how to describe a smell, but I
Speaker 3: remember very well the smell of the garden. I remember
Speaker 3: the smell of the pets we had.
Speaker 1: Which was also big turtle. We had a big turtle
Speaker 1: as a pet.
Speaker 3: I can remember the smell of the coffee being roasted outside.
Speaker 3: I can remember the food and gera and jera is
Speaker 3: very tangy smell.
Speaker 2: Very good food Ethiopia.
Speaker 1: Yes, amazing. The sweets of the onions mixed.
Speaker 3: With the with the with the powdery smell of the barberret.
Speaker 3: It's Fantasticbara is a mixture of spices that is typical
Speaker 3: of the of Ethiopian kitchen. It's very red and it's
Speaker 3: used for the door watt, which is a chicken stew
Speaker 3: or for the lamb or beef stew called ziguiney.
Speaker 2: Wonder why Ethiopia.
Speaker 3: My father was really restless. He met my mother when
Speaker 3: he was teaching. He was a professor in Casablanca and
Speaker 3: my mother is was living there.
Speaker 1: She was she grew up in Morocco. She's Algerian, but
Speaker 1: she grew up in Morocco.
Speaker 3: And then once I was born, he wanted to do
Speaker 3: another adventure abroad, so he got a post in a disabeba.
Speaker 2: Are you an only child?
Speaker 1: No, I am the last of three.
Speaker 2: Three so all three of you went to Etho.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, every now and then I do and you
Speaker 1: get the green Yes?
Speaker 2: Is that what you keep in your special kitchen?
Speaker 3: I do have a lot of you know that I
Speaker 3: have like a collection of spices.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you have a very large yeah.
Speaker 3: And then I have made with the wonderful people at
Speaker 3: Ninfenburg in Munich. They sourced from their archives those jars
Speaker 3: made for Apotheke in porcelain. And I asked them how
Speaker 3: many sizes you have and they had every sizes because
Speaker 3: these Ninfenburg gits four hundred years so they used to
Speaker 3: make them for Apoteke. So that for me, like I
Speaker 3: don't know ten kilos to ten grains, and I made
Speaker 3: two hundreds of them for my kitchen, from ten kilos
Speaker 3: to to twenty grames.
Speaker 2: How long does the ten kilos stay good? I mean
Speaker 2: do they.
Speaker 3: Stay I cook a lot, so if you put ten
Speaker 3: kilos of flour, maybe it's gonna last two weeks or
Speaker 3: even less.
Speaker 2: I think the only youse tried a bit of dried
Speaker 2: time and a bit of dried regular or recana. But
Speaker 2: I don't think we in narc should we do the freshers.
Speaker 2: We don't use you know, kind.
Speaker 1: Of cooking we do, yes, but you do use spices.
Speaker 2: You're not marriage close human use core.
Speaker 3: The world of spices is so wide, Yeah, amazing beautiful smells.
Speaker 2: So the recipe that you chose to read today.
Speaker 1: Is I chose from all the beauty.
Speaker 2: That was our thirtieth birth birthday.
Speaker 1: So beautiful.
Speaker 3: I chose tierini with asparagus and herbs. There's a wonderful
Speaker 3: lady on the picture on the left side. Who's this
Speaker 3: lady that.
Speaker 2: Is FASTI arm it? Who's the manager of the River Cafe.
Speaker 3: The River Cafe is an incredible table. You eat so well,
Speaker 3: they're good.
Speaker 2: Thank you. We have to eat more. So would you
Speaker 2: like to read the recipe, which.
Speaker 1: Is a recipe, and then we're going.
Speaker 2: To talk about some fresh pastad.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean you call them tierini and they are
Speaker 3: technically called tierine and.
Speaker 1: It's Pimontes pasta.
Speaker 3: And I am, as you said before, I live in Pimonte,
Speaker 3: and you the typical way of using tierne is with
Speaker 3: truffle when the season is right. It's very thin and
Speaker 3: very sturdy kind of pasta. So tierne with asparagus and herbs.
Speaker 3: This is for six six hundred and seventy five grains
Speaker 3: of thin asparagus pears, which could be also wild asparagus if.
Speaker 1: You can find them.
Speaker 2: We try and get that. It's not so easy.
Speaker 3: My friend Camillo, who is the gardener in my house,
Speaker 3: his father who harvests collects from the nature's wild herbs,
Speaker 3: brought me wild asparagus.
Speaker 2: Last week, so already I have it in the season
Speaker 2: now because we just got green asparagus today.
Speaker 3: So everything's really I know, four garlic clothes. I think
Speaker 3: this is too much, I would say one.
Speaker 1: Can I Yeah, I love it.
Speaker 2: I am nothing like an Italian teaching me how to cook.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I really appreciate it. I'm not teaching you. I'm
Speaker 1: saying just the balance.
Speaker 3: If I put the proportion of the number the games
Speaker 3: of asparagus, I think one garlic cloves would be enough.
Speaker 3: Four tablespoons of chopped I love it, chop mix.
Speaker 2: Wait till I go see your movie. I'm going to
Speaker 2: give you some advice.
Speaker 1: I want all the advice.
Speaker 3: Four tablespoons chopped mix, fresh herbs, basil, mint, parsley, oregano,
Speaker 3: fantastic one millimetery double cream.
Speaker 1: And in England you have the incredible double cream.
Speaker 2: That's one thing we have that fans. We have crimb fresh.
Speaker 2: You don't have it at all.
Speaker 1: No, we have like you.
Speaker 2: Get those little the cream that's in those packets that's
Speaker 2: last for years.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But even if even the fresh one is not as
Speaker 3: thick and good as the one you find here, fair
Speaker 3: enough two tablespoons of olive oil, fifty grams of unsalted butter,
Speaker 3: two hundred and fifty grams tierine or tale, one hundred
Speaker 3: and twenty grams of freshly grated parmesan cheese. Trim or
Speaker 3: snap off the tough ends from the asparagu spears. Finally,
Speaker 3: chop the asparagus all together with one of the garlic
Speaker 3: clothes and the herbs. Bring the cream to the boil
Speaker 3: in a saucepan with the rest of the whole garlic clothes,
Speaker 3: and simmer until the clothes are soft. Remove from the
Speaker 3: heat to discard the galic. So I changed my mind.
Speaker 3: It's actually good to have four gathered clothes and.
Speaker 2: Then meeting them this way and then throw them away.
Speaker 1: I apologize.
Speaker 3: You know what, Bernard Bertolucci, we used to say only
Speaker 3: a sole they don't change their mind.
Speaker 1: I agree, So you see.
Speaker 2: But I have to say that I haven't looked at
Speaker 2: that recipe for a long time, so I accepted that
Speaker 2: I forgot that we took it out. We do that
Speaker 2: quite often when we use the cream, like when we
Speaker 2: do for sure the cream.
Speaker 1: Yes, so we take the aroma. Yeah, I think it's great.
Speaker 3: Heat the olive oil and butter in a separate large
Speaker 3: saucepan and fry half of the chopplatea sparagus for five minutes,
Speaker 3: steering at the rest of the chopping the sparagus, followed
Speaker 3: by the flavored cream. Bring to the boil, then reduce
Speaker 3: the heat and simmer until the cream begins to thicken,
Speaker 3: about six minutes.
Speaker 1: Season Remove from the heat and keep warm.
Speaker 3: Cook the path in a generous amount of boiling water,
Speaker 3: salted and then drain too roughly. Add to the sauce
Speaker 3: along with about half of the parmesan, and tossed together
Speaker 3: with the remaining parmesan.
Speaker 1: Great recipe when you cook.
Speaker 2: Do you think when you're in Piedmonte and you're making
Speaker 2: me lunch, what would you make If you were saying, ruthy,
Speaker 2: I'm going to show you something from.
Speaker 1: The region, I would make you.
Speaker 3: Do you like to sweets the SERTs, I would make
Speaker 3: you a coppa. The Carama diras, which translates into a
Speaker 3: cup of Syra's cream is a ricotta cheese create produced
Speaker 3: only in Again and that part of the Pimonte where
Speaker 3: I live. And it's super thin and almost like double
Speaker 3: cream kind of texture, but it's ricotta. And I found
Speaker 3: these in this book. This all ancient aristocratic recipe where
Speaker 3: you mix the ricotta with raisins, cinnamon, nutmeg, a little
Speaker 3: bit of double cream, and then you break some savoyard
Speaker 3: biscuits and rum.
Speaker 1: It's super good.
Speaker 2: You getting run the biscuits and rum or do you
Speaker 2: add the raum no.
Speaker 3: I and the rum to the cream I think the
Speaker 3: it's goods to be broken and put with the cream
Speaker 3: makes this crunchy thing that is good nice.
Speaker 2: So what do you think about that recipe? Then you
Speaker 2: prove of the garlic, I thought.
Speaker 1: Don't improve. I approved the recipe.
Speaker 3: I love the way in which you you thick the sauce,
Speaker 3: you make the cream thick. I like the way you
Speaker 3: chop the asparagus is because that bleeds into the cream
Speaker 3: and makes the cream being riped with the safe the
Speaker 3: taste of the which is like sweet and slightly bitter,
Speaker 3: which I love.
Speaker 2: And you're really an amazing, incredible palate. So when you're
Speaker 2: growing up, just tell me going back from Ethiopia and
Speaker 2: you describe the smells and the food and the recipes
Speaker 2: which you've stayed with you all your life. But you
Speaker 2: went back to and what was that like? There was
Speaker 2: did your mother cooked?
Speaker 1: My father? Your father did the cooking, Oh, very much
Speaker 1: a lot. What did he make everything? He was cooking
Speaker 1: every day and he was cooking a lot, like you,
Speaker 1: more than what we needed.
Speaker 2: For three children.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but it was a large meals or larger recipes.
Speaker 2: But he was a teacher.
Speaker 1: He was teaching.
Speaker 3: It was coming back home at one, and he was
Speaker 3: cooking all day.
Speaker 2: What about your mother?
Speaker 3: My mother was more like shy in the kitchen, probably
Speaker 3: because my father was very Yeah, she cooked a lot
Speaker 3: of Moroccan in time to time. She told me how
Speaker 3: to do crap which is desturded. I love French crab,
Speaker 3: French crap.
Speaker 2: What was the technique do you remember?
Speaker 1: Yeah? I think you have to do it so that
Speaker 1: once you have.
Speaker 3: Created the butter butter, he said, butter with the milk, eggs,
Speaker 3: a little bit of sugar, a little bit of butter,
Speaker 3: you let it rest for one day near a like
Speaker 3: how do you call that radiator?
Speaker 1: So the heat makes that the butter ferment.
Speaker 2: Did you ever have farinata?
Speaker 1: Oh? I love much.
Speaker 2: We do it a lot, because.
Speaker 3: I had a great farinata the River Cafe when I
Speaker 3: was there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's really I think we often give people pizzas
Speaker 2: to start, but there's something about a farinata.
Speaker 1: Which is an incredible.
Speaker 2: It's just chickpea, flour, olive.
Speaker 3: Oil, very good nutritive thing, a lot of protein in it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, is some incredible.
Speaker 3: I mean, we have so many different ways of farinata
Speaker 3: in Italy because you have far not in Tuscany, and
Speaker 3: then you have panelle in Fiftily. Yeah, you have farinata in,
Speaker 3: you have it in Liguria, you have it in and
Speaker 3: you have the panell inmo in Sicily, which is chickpeas
Speaker 3: flour mixed with water boiled boiled, yes, and then put
Speaker 3: on a thin layer, cut in slices and fried. That's
Speaker 3: panel panel, which is a typical street fair street food. Yes,
Speaker 3: but it's another variation of the farinata.
Speaker 2: Imagine estate bottled olive oil chosen and bottled for the
Speaker 2: River Cafe, arriving at your door every month. Our subscription
Speaker 2: is available for six or twelve months, with each oil
Speaker 2: chosen personally by our head chefs and varying with each delivery.
Speaker 2: It's a perfect way to bring some River Cafe flavor
Speaker 2: into your home or to show someone you really care
Speaker 2: for them with the gift. Visit our website shop the
Speaker 2: Rivercafe dot co dot uk to place your order. Now,
Speaker 2: how long did you live at home for?
Speaker 1: Was it? I think I left home when I was
Speaker 1: twenty one.
Speaker 3: I left, I went to Palerm, I went to Rome
Speaker 3: to study literature.
Speaker 2: Did you know that you wanted to do film? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I always I was I was torn between two
Speaker 3: directions for myself. One was to be a director of
Speaker 3: indirector and the other one was to be a chef.
Speaker 3: I was cooking. I had my little mini pants when
Speaker 3: I was in Ethiopic growing up, I had my little
Speaker 3: corner in the kitchen where I could do what I wanted.
Speaker 3: And I grew more and more into this, and then
Speaker 3: when I was like fourteen, I realized that if I
Speaker 3: had to go into that direction, I would have probably
Speaker 3: abandoned the intellectual part of my bringing because I was
Speaker 3: also a very avid reader of.
Speaker 1: Books, quite academic.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I felt like that between the two, probably I
Speaker 3: could have kept being a passionate with food, but I
Speaker 3: would have made my life more intellectual.
Speaker 1: And that's why I choose not had a cinema.
Speaker 2: Did you have if you had little hands for media?
Speaker 3: I had a camera, Yes, you did either Super eight
Speaker 3: my first superade.
Speaker 1: I had it when I was like nine or eight.
Speaker 1: Your parents gave it to you, my mother.
Speaker 3: My mother gave me a Super eight, and I started
Speaker 3: shooting my little short films with this. You know, like
Speaker 3: you could get these eight millimeters little box where you
Speaker 3: put into the camera and then you had to ship
Speaker 3: it to Germany and wait like two months to get
Speaker 3: it back. So I had my camera and I had
Speaker 3: my projector, and I started to learn that if you
Speaker 3: wanted to not tell a story but communicate something, you
Speaker 3: didn't have to just film, but you have to create
Speaker 3: a juxtaposition. But I didn't know how to actually cut,
Speaker 3: so I started to cut on camera. So I was
Speaker 3: doing a shot, and then I was thinking what I
Speaker 3: want this to be followed by? And I was shooting
Speaker 3: another thing, and I was doing these mini movies about
Speaker 3: juxtaposition of things you haven't my mom must have in
Speaker 3: some boxes.
Speaker 2: Yes, you should find them, we should find them, but
Speaker 2: you still cook.
Speaker 1: Cook.
Speaker 3: I became friends with great chefs like yourself, and I
Speaker 3: cultivated the cult of food all my life.
Speaker 1: I was for one year and a half.
Speaker 3: I was a gastronomic critic for Vanity Fair Italy.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, every week, reviewed restaurants, yeah, all over the world.
Speaker 3: And it's interesting because at the beginning, of course, it
Speaker 3: was like we start, but then I became very consistent
Speaker 3: because I was doing once a week for like more
Speaker 3: than seventy weeks. For Vanity Fair Italy was a week weekly, Yes,
Speaker 3: it's weekly. Wow, And there was a great director, Daniella Amaui.
Speaker 1: She was great.
Speaker 3: Then she left and the new director fired me because
Speaker 3: he said to me, you know, we don't like criticism,
Speaker 3: maybe because we want to be friends with everybody.
Speaker 1: So I said, okay, bye bye, Adrian girl. Yeah I'm gone.
Speaker 3: And actually the conversation started because I sent a review
Speaker 3: of a very important restaurant in Bergamo, three star mish Lands.
Speaker 3: So now everybody who knows that knows who's the restaurant
Speaker 3: still there? Oh yeah, yeah, super important. And I sent
Speaker 3: it and they said to me, we can't publish this
Speaker 3: because we're friends, and I said yes, but I say,
Speaker 3: your friends, but journalis journalists, right, No. Then I made
Speaker 3: another review of another restaurant, two Starmish Lanes and it
Speaker 3: was another skating review, and they said we can't either.
Speaker 3: So I went to see the director the editor of
Speaker 3: the magazine and they fired me. We parted ways, but
Speaker 3: I made like I made like sixty five seventy reviews.
Speaker 1: I should put them in a book you could put
Speaker 1: it was nice.
Speaker 3: But then I started to go to places and people
Speaker 3: were like, ah, they were like treating me in a
Speaker 3: different way, and that was bad. And sometimes they were
Speaker 3: asking me, can you come and review us?
Speaker 1: Even if it's a better review, we want the review.
Speaker 2: There is a I wonder you know. I just we
Speaker 2: did a podcast recently with Francis Coppola.
Speaker 1: The Divine Francis.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Do you see him?
Speaker 3: No, I never met with him. I'm a friend with
Speaker 3: his daughter, the wonderful Sofia.
Speaker 2: He's living in London now I would love okay, and
Speaker 2: he also you know, you talk about the parallels between
Speaker 2: making a movie and making a recipe running a restaurant.
Speaker 2: Directing a film, you know how you of course, it's
Speaker 2: in one way not very similar at all, but in
Speaker 2: many ways it is about creating something, something, perhaps temporary.
Speaker 2: The response of the critics, how you do it? Do
Speaker 2: you think? I mean, did you find directing films and
Speaker 2: writing about food or cooking food?
Speaker 3: I think directing films and cooking or in general running
Speaker 3: an enterprise like a restaurant, are very close because the
Speaker 3: director is the entrepreneur who is putting together all the elements,
Speaker 3: including the ingredients, to make the experience be.
Speaker 1: So I think they're very.
Speaker 3: Close, and I think there is a lot of savvness
Speaker 3: in the entrepreneur who knows life and habits and behavior.
Speaker 3: So a director should be someone.
Speaker 1: Who does know that.
Speaker 2: And when you made your first film, what was your
Speaker 2: first film.
Speaker 3: That you actually what we called The Protagonists that I
Speaker 3: shot in London with tild the Swinton, and it's a
Speaker 3: movie that I'm not very happy with that the Cinema
Speaker 3: Tech in Bologna restored. I met with the director of
Speaker 3: the cinema Tech, Jan Luca Luka, why you restarted that movie?
Speaker 2: That's bad?
Speaker 1: And it had to be shut up? The movies great.
Speaker 3: And then a few months later it was on movie
Speaker 3: which is still and I'm very like, why anyway?
Speaker 1: And it's gonna be.
Speaker 3: Your vengeance for the four Garly closes. I have no
Speaker 3: I'm kidding.
Speaker 2: I think that it's interesting to think about the way
Speaker 2: you've brought food into film. You know, how your films,
Speaker 2: As I said in my introduction, the sensuous quality, the
Speaker 2: the way that food can transport you into knowing about
Speaker 2: a relationship, by the way people eat together, by the
Speaker 2: way they feed each other.
Speaker 1: With a zero as people to very few and.
Speaker 3: You cannot surpass unsurpassable elements of our being one is
Speaker 3: the biological is important like sleep, it, drink, shite, pee,
Speaker 3: those are elements that are constitutional of who we are
Speaker 3: as people. And because we are also capable of telling
Speaker 3: a story about ourselves, meaning our condition as people, to
Speaker 3: discard the elements that constitute our everyday life from the narrative,
Speaker 3: it's advertisement, it's a sort of artificial construction. So that's
Speaker 3: why I'm very keen that in my storytelling there is
Speaker 3: always the possibility of experiencing our universal being, which has
Speaker 3: to do with sleeping, waking up, being, shiting, and eating
Speaker 3: and sex and having sex. Even though I think that
Speaker 3: sex as a cultural.
Speaker 1: Artifacts is overrated, so.
Speaker 2: Boring, boring to watch, boring in film.
Speaker 1: Boring to be discuss it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, challenging in film to.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean there is the challenge of filming sex
Speaker 3: deals with the undemocratic nature of filmmaking and the inevitable
Speaker 3: and absolutely welcome need of democracy in dealing with people
Speaker 3: that helps.
Speaker 1: You making the movie.
Speaker 3: Translation, if you make a movie as a director, you
Speaker 3: always have this totalitarian idea that everything has to be
Speaker 3: the way you want. But how can you have that
Speaker 3: attitude when you ask two people, maybe two people that
Speaker 3: are strangers to each other, to do something intimate, even
Speaker 3: if for the fiction of it so it's a compromise,
Speaker 3: it's a conversation. It's like, sometimes the compromise brings something
Speaker 3: you didn't expect. Sometimes the compromise this troy what you
Speaker 3: wanted to do. Sometimes it hurts you or it hurts
Speaker 3: the other and it shouldn't.
Speaker 2: We were talking with Francis the other day. We're talking
Speaker 2: about erotic film. When you see something erotic in the movie, and.
Speaker 3: Remind me to tell you what is the most erotic
Speaker 3: cinema scene in my life, in my.
Speaker 2: Idea, and I said that one of the most erotic
Speaker 2: scenes that I remember, and I'm not gonna remember which
Speaker 2: one it was with Daniel day Lewis the Edith Wharton
Speaker 2: movie of the Age of when he holds her hand
Speaker 2: in the carriage. Do you remember I.
Speaker 3: Was going, this is incredible, because I was going to
Speaker 3: tell you one scene from Manuel de la Vera, and
Speaker 3: this was going to be my second. In the scene
Speaker 3: that you describe, which is incredible, he takes the hand
Speaker 3: and unbuttoned the glove on the on the wrist and
Speaker 3: he opens the glove almost like in a sort of
Speaker 3: like vagina shape and kisses it and smells it.
Speaker 1: I agree with you, that's one of the.
Speaker 3: Most erotic scenes ever shot from a director who knows
Speaker 3: everything about human nature. The other scene is in the
Speaker 3: great movie La vallea Brown The Valley of Sin, which
Speaker 3: is a sort of version of Madame Bovarie, shot by
Speaker 3: the greatest director or ever, leave Manuel de Olivera Portuguese,
Speaker 3: in which she has this actress, Leonor silvera amazing actress,
Speaker 3: playing Madame Beavverie, being tormented by this kind of shock
Speaker 3: of eroticism that she's feeling for the man, and she
Speaker 3: grabs a flower and she fingers the flower and the
Speaker 3: director makes this closeup of the flower cup being fingered
Speaker 3: by the finger of Leonora silvera incredible moment.
Speaker 2: So as I've just been help patizen, but as another
Speaker 2: scene that I was thinking another way of torture, and
Speaker 2: one of the most upsetting torture scenes that I've seen
Speaker 2: was in Rome Open City, because you never see it,
Speaker 2: You never see the torture. It's behind in a room behind,
Speaker 2: and you hear you just hear it. It's fromazing and
Speaker 2: now if they probably were doing we think of all
Speaker 2: the torture scenes we see in film, whether the guy's
Speaker 2: tied up or somebody comes in and throws this and.
Speaker 3: I say something that is going to make me lose
Speaker 3: some people that likes my work or myself. I don't
Speaker 3: think everybody should make films, only the people who know
Speaker 3: how to make them. And you're hitting a very delicate
Speaker 3: hot button here, because to represent something like torture, it
Speaker 3: takes an ethical and also humanistic wisdom to have to
Speaker 3: do it properly. And that's why you mentioned this scene
Speaker 3: from one of the greatest movies ever made from one
Speaker 3: of the greatest directors I ever leaved, Roberto Rossellini. So
Speaker 3: like I agree with you violence spreading on the screen
Speaker 3: indiscriminately because it's like a trade and it doesn't come
Speaker 3: with an idea of ethics at play from filmmakers sometimes
Speaker 3: not now from a long time or in general.
Speaker 1: Ramachita Perta, which I.
Speaker 3: Watched again, like lasts I haven't seen in London at
Speaker 3: the curtain, mayfird they had.
Speaker 1: A red you say re re release.
Speaker 3: It's interesting because historically the movie has been told of
Speaker 3: being one of the great example of Italian neo realism,
Speaker 3: but in fact is then one of the great melodramas.
Speaker 1: I think more than neo realism. Beautiful movie.
Speaker 2: I thought it was sting, so beautiful. So if we're
Speaker 2: going back to the cooking and the food, and your
Speaker 2: tell me a scene, because I could say the showsers
Speaker 2: and challengers, or we could talk about the peach, or
Speaker 2: we could talk about the prawns. For you, which one
Speaker 2: would you talk about if I asked you to talk
Speaker 2: to me about the film.
Speaker 3: I don't want to be sensationalist. But one scene of
Speaker 3: food that I think is very, very successfully made in
Speaker 3: my movies, it's when Maren and Sally played by Mark
Speaker 3: Rylance and Taylor Russell eat the lady in the house
Speaker 3: and bones and all.
Speaker 1: That is a great meal scene.
Speaker 2: I would say, can you describe it to someone who
Speaker 2: I can describe you to? He is listening to this
Speaker 2: and they won't have seen it.
Speaker 3: I think, if I remember properly, you have the character
Speaker 3: of Lee of mav Maar, and this girl who is
Speaker 3: coping with her own nature. She realizes that she's a
Speaker 3: cannibal and cannot stop by being one, and she's in
Speaker 3: search of a way not to be like that, and
Speaker 3: also in search of someone to share the burden of
Speaker 3: this wave being. And she has met the older man Mark.
Speaker 3: Sally played by Mark Rylands, the amazing Mark Rylance and
Speaker 3: who is like her an eater, someone who has an
Speaker 3: impulse of eating, a cannibalistic and cannot stop from refrain from.
Speaker 3: And he brings her to a house in a village
Speaker 3: in the night and base he tells her that in
Speaker 3: the other room a lady is almost dying, an older lady,
Speaker 3: and revolves by this. She wants to run away, and
Speaker 3: she tells her, you that's your nature. She goes into
Speaker 3: another room and spend the night awake and not knowing
Speaker 3: what to do, and then she falls asleep. And then
Speaker 3: when the first light of the day comes, the lady dies,
Speaker 3: and she suddenly smells the impulse to go there.
Speaker 1: She smells what she has.
Speaker 3: To go for, and she opens the door and she
Speaker 3: walks in the landing, and we can see part of
Speaker 3: the body of the lady, but you see Sally bending
Speaker 3: over the woman, already fisting on her and turning towards
Speaker 3: Matine and looking at her and kindly inviting her in.
Speaker 3: And the scene. I mean, I thought the movie was
Speaker 3: going to be like a great successful love story, and
Speaker 3: people were really appalled by the nature of the cannibalies
Speaker 3: in the movie. But we were very committed to make
Speaker 3: it properly. And I would say that both Taylor Russell
Speaker 3: and Mark were sublime in the movie. And of course,
Speaker 3: my dear dear Timo Tshelamet was incredible in the movie.
Speaker 3: Either that's my favorite meal scene that I filmed in
Speaker 3: my life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's your favorite.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because it's terminal. It's like, what can you go
Speaker 3: beyond that?
Speaker 1: You can't? That's it. I haven't seen it.
Speaker 3: Bones and All was twenty twenty two and it stars
Speaker 3: Timtschelamette and Taylor Russell and Mark Rylance.
Speaker 2: The River Cafe when you said Lunch is now running
Speaker 2: from Monday to Thursday. Reserve a booking at www. Rivercafe
Speaker 2: dot co dot uk or give us a call. Let's
Speaker 2: go back to your kitchen's three kitchens in Piermont, Say so,
Speaker 2: tell me about the three kitchens. You have a pastry
Speaker 2: kitchen as.
Speaker 3: Well to The house I live in is an old
Speaker 3: house from nineteenth century, and I renovated it slowly in time.
Speaker 3: And I always wanted to be able to have space
Speaker 3: to cook properly and to have all the things I
Speaker 3: need to cook properly. And I always thought that you
Speaker 3: could not cook savory where you cook suite.
Speaker 2: Well restaurants, we have a pastry kitchen.
Speaker 1: Separated, so that was a rule.
Speaker 3: So I created these two rooms separating them. One is
Speaker 3: cream color and one is pitch color. It's all tiles.
Speaker 3: Which one is the pitch is the is the pastry
Speaker 3: the pastry. Then I have another kitchen outside for if
Speaker 3: I do. I have not put the actual gears yet,
Speaker 3: but this is going to be for caterings maybe. And
Speaker 3: I'm now doing a bakery. Are you in the courtyard, yes,
Speaker 3: for yourself, because there is this is like a countryside
Speaker 3: home with all the buildings made for heart of a
Speaker 3: thing and da da da, And there wasn't an old
Speaker 3: brick oven already there. So I'm restoring the brick oven
Speaker 3: and making a bakery in order to do bread.
Speaker 2: It's very very different, isn't it making bread making pastries
Speaker 2: from making pasta.
Speaker 1: Or Oh yeah, all of them are very differently.
Speaker 2: We have a chefs who are great cooks, and they
Speaker 2: just I mean once because we always had the system
Speaker 2: that we didn't have a pastry kitchen from until about
Speaker 2: ten years ago. Maybe when the demand we just everything
Speaker 2: we made. You came into work in the river cafe,
Speaker 2: you come to work and you don't know what you're
Speaker 2: going to cook. You might make a risotta one day,
Speaker 2: you might make a sauce another day, or you may
Speaker 2: make a chocolate cake. And it was really interesting to
Speaker 2: get the consistency and hearing from some chefs saying I
Speaker 2: just don't like to bake, you know, I don't want
Speaker 2: to make a cake. Or then you have the people
Speaker 2: who are in the pastry kitchen saying. Some of them
Speaker 2: say they want to come down and learn how to
Speaker 2: make a osobuco or you know, girlleds steak, but a
Speaker 2: lot of them feel very proprietor about what they're Do
Speaker 2: you feel that, Are you happier when you're making a cake?
Speaker 1: To make it? Like? So, I like to be in
Speaker 1: the kitchen and nurturing people. I love to do that,
Speaker 1: But what I'm.
Speaker 3: Really fond of is to be alone in the pastry
Speaker 3: and to do complicated things that takes a lot of time, and.
Speaker 1: Be alone the solitary. I love the solitary aspect of it.
Speaker 3: One of the things that I love is when in
Speaker 3: the in the when I do stolen around Christmas time
Speaker 3: and I do like I don't know ten kilos of
Speaker 3: stolins still long, and it takes three days, and maybe
Speaker 3: you have to be renovating the mix the dough seven
Speaker 3: hours in and maybe that's like three o'clock in the morning.
Speaker 3: So I go to sleep at ten. I woke up
Speaker 3: at two thirty, and then I go and do it.
Speaker 3: Then I go another map.
Speaker 1: I love that. That's beautiful.
Speaker 2: To quote another person, I keep quoting people today. But
Speaker 2: Michael Caine said that he loved to cook because it
Speaker 2: was the only thing he could do without other people.
Speaker 2: It was solitary, he said, gardening and cooking did He said,
Speaker 2: you know everything in a life where making a movie
Speaker 2: you have so many people around you.
Speaker 1: I don't like when people get into the kitchen.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I was going to ask you if I
Speaker 2: come and stay, I don't. I don't have to cook
Speaker 2: with you.
Speaker 1: You you you you you. You would be more than
Speaker 1: welcome in the kitchen.
Speaker 2: No, you don't have to.
Speaker 1: But I don't like when people. You know why I like.
Speaker 3: I like people who knows what I'm doing and they
Speaker 3: can understand the dyamic.
Speaker 2: I feel the same way when somebody. We have an
Speaker 2: open kitchen, and so people are curious and it's very nice,
Speaker 2: but you kind of want them to go away a
Speaker 2: little bit, you know. I like having people help me.
Speaker 2: I love having Louis too.
Speaker 3: I like to host people, but friends they should stay
Speaker 3: away from the kitchen.
Speaker 1: I remember I was a kid. I was like fifteen.
Speaker 3: My best friend Manfredi, Manfredi Romano, we were growing.
Speaker 1: Up together, high school together.
Speaker 3: He said to me, come with me for Christmas holidays
Speaker 3: to my grandma house in Milano.
Speaker 1: I was in Ficily, so I was very exotic for me.
Speaker 3: We went to Leco, this beautiful all mention for like
Speaker 3: this large important, like Milanie family. And the second I
Speaker 3: stepped into the kitchen, this woman looks at me and
Speaker 3: goes like out out and I felt like, oh so ashamed,
Speaker 3: but I understood her.
Speaker 1: She was right.
Speaker 2: And when you're working on a film set, when you're
Speaker 2: making a movie, do you care about what you feed
Speaker 2: the people who are working on the set.
Speaker 3: I must say, I wish, I wish I could be
Speaker 3: like Wes Anderson, who famously has incredible catering on his sets.
Speaker 3: That what I heard, but I don't. I don't because
Speaker 3: it's a Scifian endeavor. Like, first of all, a crew
Speaker 3: works so hard that they need to eat a lot.
Speaker 3: They need to eat things that makes their energy going.
Speaker 3: And I can't think. I mean, I am a control freak.
Speaker 3: When I do a movie, I complete control freak. But
Speaker 3: if I put my mind also onto that, it becomes
Speaker 3: too much, too much.
Speaker 1: So there are people who know how to do it.
Speaker 1: And I don't eat much when.
Speaker 2: I shoot you down. I was going to ask you
Speaker 2: about your own.
Speaker 1: I don't eat on set. No, No, I don't.
Speaker 3: At the end of the day, when you shoot something,
Speaker 3: unless it's like a complicated many extras or a lot
Speaker 3: of action seen, you don't need much.
Speaker 1: Many people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's interest because film and food and cooking, and
Speaker 2: interior architecture, because you are involved in creating not just
Speaker 2: the environment for the table, but for rooms and perhaps
Speaker 2: even a hotel.
Speaker 1: I did. I did a hotel in Rome called Palazza Talia.
Speaker 2: Where is it.
Speaker 3: It's in the formerly known Collegio del Nazzareno, which is
Speaker 3: a very famous building from seventeenth century that being has
Speaker 3: school for the elite of Roman children for long and
Speaker 3: then now became a hotel. It's basically in the middle
Speaker 3: between Piazza Espana and Fontana di trevi.
Speaker 1: Yeh of this place.
Speaker 3: I did two suites and all the communal spaces everything.
Speaker 1: What does it look like, I don't know, whimsical, whimsical.
Speaker 2: Traumatic as a as a and you enjoy it?
Speaker 1: I did? I did?
Speaker 2: You never thought of doing architecture or design.
Speaker 1: I want to be an architect as well, but that
Speaker 1: there was a lot.
Speaker 3: Of mathic architecture and mathematics and me, I'm not good
Speaker 3: at it.
Speaker 2: Would you do another?
Speaker 1: I'm actually doing another. What I can't say?
Speaker 2: Okay, hotel?
Speaker 1: Yeah, important, But.
Speaker 2: I think there are maybe the lines that we think
Speaker 2: are barriers between film and cooking and architecture design. It's
Speaker 2: all maybe at all.
Speaker 3: For me, it's a question of making, you know. I
Speaker 3: love to make. I like craftsmanship. I like artists in general.
Speaker 3: I like creative people. I am happy when I'm surrounded
Speaker 3: by them.
Speaker 1: I like to share.
Speaker 3: But at the same time, I like the beautiful, unique
Speaker 3: feeling that you feel when you see something becoming, whether
Speaker 3: it's an pasta dish with asparagusis or it's this incredible
Speaker 3: fantastic house that I mean, or it's like a scene,
Speaker 3: the actual happening of something that becomes a transformation. And
Speaker 3: food deals a lot with transformation. It's all about transformation.
Speaker 3: So like, I think that is really, really, really at
Speaker 3: the end of it. What I love about what I
Speaker 3: do that I can witness transformation.
Speaker 2: And if food is transformation, and it is memory, and
Speaker 2: it is sharing with your friends or creating something, it
Speaker 2: also is comfort. Yeah, when you need comfort, is there
Speaker 2: something that you would go to? Would it be a
Speaker 2: food of your childhood or something tomato pasta that you
Speaker 2: make We're going to make for me. What would be
Speaker 2: your comfort food?
Speaker 3: I think my comfort food and I know the answer
Speaker 3: very precisely is rice with milk.
Speaker 2: Is that sweet?
Speaker 1: Sweet?
Speaker 2: So it's what we call rice, But tell me about it.
Speaker 1: Rice pudding.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would use round rice tiny short right, what
Speaker 3: we call vielano or tondo, and I would wash it
Speaker 3: a lot and then I would boil in a lot
Speaker 3: of water for like five to seven minutes. I would
Speaker 3: drain it and then I would put let's say one
Speaker 3: hundred and fifty grams of these rice washed and pre
Speaker 3: boiled in a litter of whole milk and two hundred
Speaker 3: and fifty grams of double cream and make it go
Speaker 3: into the into the stove for like.
Speaker 1: An hour and a half.
Speaker 3: You put cinnamon or I would put I would put
Speaker 3: sugar and a lot of vanilla and not cinnamon.
Speaker 1: And I love cinnamon.
Speaker 3: And I would make it cook for like an hour
Speaker 3: and a half until you have a good ratio between
Speaker 3: the growth of the of the grains and the cream
Speaker 3: you need to have.
Speaker 1: That's why the best, like.
Speaker 2: I love you eat it hot cold? Yeah, so you
Speaker 2: do eat somethings in that room temperature. I generally like
Speaker 2: everything room temperature myself. But something is a good cold.
Speaker 3: Well like desrt you can have ice cream at the.
Speaker 2: Boy said to me in the restaurant, I, so, would
Speaker 2: you like some ice cream? He said, no, it's too cold.
Speaker 1: But not even in a sunny place, in a warm place.
Speaker 2: No. I like pasta has to be hot. But otherwise
Speaker 2: what I like about Italian food is there doesn't seem
Speaker 2: to be that America. You get my country in the
Speaker 2: United States, you get either very.
Speaker 1: Hot or very cold, very cold. Everybody, So I quite.
Speaker 2: Is it no good or good?
Speaker 1: Not good? Cold? It is not good. You needn temperature
Speaker 1: is perfect.
Speaker 2: Okay, Well that's what I go for.
Speaker 1: Thank you very much, Thank you so much. With you
Speaker 1: an thank you for listening to Ruthie's Table four in
Speaker 1: partnership with Montclair