Speaker 1: Welcome to Ruthie's Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and
Speaker 1: Adamized Studios.
Speaker 2: Michael Man and I met about twenty five years ago
Speaker 2: through architecture. On a trip to London. He asked to
Speaker 2: visit the Lloyd's Building, designed by my husband Richard Rogers.
Speaker 2: For us, it was an honor for if Michael was
Speaker 2: a fan of Richard's architecture. Richard was a huge fan
Speaker 2: of Michael's movies. In fact, when watching Ali, Miami, Vice, Collateral,
Speaker 2: my arm would be constantly squeezed, not due to a
Speaker 2: dramatic moment of fear or tension or mystery, but at
Speaker 2: the way the buildings, streets, airports, bridges, and interiors, even
Speaker 2: elevators were portrayed on screen. Over long dinners, Richard and
Speaker 2: Michael often compared making a movie to making a building.
Speaker 2: Michael once said, while at least Richard, in a building,
Speaker 2: you can say to a client, if you remove a column,
Speaker 2: the building will fall down. Try saying that about a
Speaker 2: scene to a producer. Of all the movies Michael has made, though,
Speaker 2: the one that I consider the greatest is sixty seconds
Speaker 2: long shot entirely underwater in a swimming pool. Michael and
Speaker 2: summer with their children swimmingly, wishing a happy birthday to Richard.
Speaker 2: No architecture in this movie, just love So Michael, would
Speaker 2: you read the recipe for sure?
Speaker 3: This is a Southern Italian version of a tello tonato
Speaker 3: cold roasvelle fresh tomato. So five hundred grams of cold
Speaker 3: roast velle, two hundred and fifty milli liters of tomato sauce,
Speaker 3: six basil leaves, fifty grams of salted capers, two lemons
Speaker 3: and extra virgin olive oil. Slice of veal as fine
Speaker 3: as possible. Squeeze the juice of one lemon and mixt
Speaker 3: it with three times its volume of olive oil, and season.
Speaker 3: Lay the veal slices over each plate, season with sea salt,
Speaker 3: and drizzle with the dressing. Spoon over the tomato sauce,
Speaker 3: and scatter with the capers and basil leaves, and then
Speaker 3: drizzle with olive oil.
Speaker 2: This dish Fatello tonato is very northern, and this is
Speaker 2: a southern version. And I wonder whether you have traveled
Speaker 2: from north to south in Italy? What is your Italian
Speaker 2: traveling experience?
Speaker 3: Varied but mostly spent a little time in Naples Once
Speaker 3: upon a time, and then then Venice and drove around
Speaker 3: the Dolomites at different times, but mostly it's been in
Speaker 3: It's been in the Media.
Speaker 4: Romagna, around Modena Maronello.
Speaker 3: The Ferrari factory is then in Bologna Milan, where all
Speaker 3: the great design is.
Speaker 2: And it's very different. You know, we're just describing northern Italy.
Speaker 2: I don't know what you ate in Naples and this
Speaker 2: dish being so southern that it is, it's not even
Speaker 2: region to region or city to city. It can be
Speaker 2: village to village town, you know, family to family. The
Speaker 2: way that people eat in Italy.
Speaker 3: First time I visited the Ferrari Factory, went across the
Speaker 3: street to Kavolino restaurant that has been there since the
Speaker 3: nineteen fifties, and the cuisine is modernation. So it's a
Speaker 3: big metal cart full of horribly boiled meats.
Speaker 2: Alo that's right. Yeah, I actually really love it. But
Speaker 2: they do cook it a very long time time and
Speaker 2: you get the tongue and you get the yet everything.
Speaker 3: Yeah, my grandmother hit the neck of totally destroying meats.
Speaker 4: I think it came from it came from it came
Speaker 4: from Big Russia.
Speaker 2: Living tell me about her, So just starting going back
Speaker 2: to your child. So your grandparents came, both of them
Speaker 2: from Russia.
Speaker 3: My grandfathers came from Russia. They came from about seventy
Speaker 3: or eighty miles north of Chernobol.
Speaker 2: Did they come from the same place or did they meet.
Speaker 3: They came, No, they came from the same place. They
Speaker 3: came from over. My grandfather had to leave at the
Speaker 3: very traumatic circumstances in nineteen twelve, and it took him
Speaker 3: ten years to get my father, who was one at
Speaker 3: the time, and my grandmother to the United States.
Speaker 2: Your grandfather came first in twelve, and then did he
Speaker 2: go directly?
Speaker 3: He went to White Chapel, he was in a British army.
Speaker 3: Then he wasn't in a British army. Then he came.
Speaker 3: Then he went to Hartford, Connecticut. Then it was an
Speaker 3: American army.
Speaker 2: In the First World War.
Speaker 3: Then the First World War. Yeah, And then nineteen nineteen
Speaker 3: he lost his hearing and the flu epidemic and my.
Speaker 2: Grandfather died in the fluid the same generation, you know.
Speaker 3: And then finally in nineteen twenty two was able to
Speaker 3: get my grandmother my father out and then they moved
Speaker 3: to Chicago. But she was a spectacular woman, very very witty,
Speaker 3: very politically very progressive. But what she was she killed
Speaker 3: as a cork were COIs.
Speaker 2: She made these cheese described finish.
Speaker 3: Fish is kind of a It's a bread, small bread
Speaker 3: thing that's cooked in olive oil and has either meat
Speaker 3: or cheese on the inside. And what it's made in
Speaker 3: a cast iron frying pan that's been around for forty years.
Speaker 3: It's fantastic. And remember one time I was driving home
Speaker 3: from her house. I'd picked up a blue earthenware container
Speaker 3: of this of these things and around the seat of
Speaker 3: the car as car as a fifty four plymouth. It
Speaker 3: was my uncle Sam's car that he let me drive
Speaker 3: the car. And there was a lot of traffic on
Speaker 3: California Avenue and I was driving back to to our house,
Speaker 3: and so I took a hard light on Catalpa, took
Speaker 3: a left out in an alley and hit a gigantic
Speaker 3: pothole in the alley, and in the way time slows down,
Speaker 3: I saw this earthenware container of my grandmother's condess just
Speaker 3: start to fall off the seat in slow motion, and
Speaker 3: I saw myself had to get to a telephone pole
Speaker 3: and I'm thinking moment, it was either saved the conditioners
Speaker 3: or saved the car. So I reached for the conditions
Speaker 3: and just crashed the car into the pole.
Speaker 2: To die for a kindish might not have been.
Speaker 3: That's how much it's got all the important early themes
Speaker 3: of basically immature life. From that point forward, it was
Speaker 3: just driving cars.
Speaker 2: And so your grandmother was the cook, She made the conditions.
Speaker 2: Was she the one that overlooked the beef or was
Speaker 2: that your mother?
Speaker 4: No, she over cooked the beef. I don't know. I
Speaker 4: think it was.
Speaker 3: I mean it was a standing joke and the family,
Speaker 3: my brother and I, you know, you would chew it
Speaker 3: and tell you your jaws ate you couldn't masticate this.
Speaker 2: What else did your grandmother? Did she live with you?
Speaker 2: By the way, your grandmother, No, she didn't. So you
Speaker 2: would go to her house an event to eat in
Speaker 2: her house.
Speaker 3: And my father was my father stopped and saw her
Speaker 3: every day. And later in life, when I knew more
Speaker 3: about life, I realized there was because it's probably the
Speaker 3: ten years that they were alone together.
Speaker 4: There was a certain bond there.
Speaker 3: Because while my grandfather was gone came the First World War,
Speaker 3: the Russian Revolution, the Civil War, and there were progroms
Speaker 3: in the area from the through the Civil War from
Speaker 3: the white Russians. So you know, there were hard times.
Speaker 2: If your grandmother brought her food, did your mother did
Speaker 2: they move towards American food?
Speaker 3: My mother was born in the United States, Okay, so
Speaker 3: my grandmother. No, my grandmother cooked. You know, if you
Speaker 3: cook the way they traditionally the way they did, you went,
Speaker 3: you went to the store, you bought a live chicken.
Speaker 3: They killed the chicken. You brought the chicken at home.
Speaker 3: You know, I'm not going back to the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 2: And what was it like in your house? Who did
Speaker 2: the cooking at your house?
Speaker 4: My mother?
Speaker 2: Yeah, did your father ever venture into the kitchen.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he did, and he had a real sensibility for cusine,
Speaker 3: for fruit number one. But then also finally imported mushrooms
Speaker 3: from Poland, for example, a certain kind of a mushroom
Speaker 3: barley soup. Or when I was working for my father
Speaker 3: when I was a kid, from when I was like
Speaker 3: twelve to sixteen, Uh, he had like a supermarket, a
Speaker 3: small supermarket. And in the winter I was I was
Speaker 3: delivering groceries and it's ten below and you're carrying groceries
Speaker 3: wagon or something carrying a portion that you got cold.
Speaker 3: And they always had some gigantic pot with some kind
Speaker 3: of a massive.
Speaker 4: Stew, you know, it all day long in the grocery store.
Speaker 3: In the back of the grocery store. It was a
Speaker 3: very family kind of a kind of affair. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: exotic kinds of smoked fish from Eastern Europe would show
Speaker 3: up and there'd be something hanging in the basement, but
Speaker 3: he would sell that. That was that's where that's where
Speaker 3: we had.
Speaker 2: That's we head home, you know, and the grocery store sold.
Speaker 4: It was just a big Yeah.
Speaker 3: It was just a standard kind of supermarket, neighborhood, supermar
Speaker 3: What was the.
Speaker 2: Area was it.
Speaker 3: It's near the northwest side, it says, kind of a
Speaker 3: mixed kind of lower middle class, working class area, very
Speaker 3: very diverse population. Two waves of Polish immigrants, a very
Speaker 3: upper middle class wave of Polish immigration from the nineteen twenties,
Speaker 3: very sophisticated people, a Jewish, Italian, some Irish.
Speaker 4: So it was quite mixed.
Speaker 3: I saw when they had we used to go to
Speaker 3: a church right after must have been nineteen forty six
Speaker 3: forty seven, right right after the War. There was a
Speaker 3: neighborhood church a block away that had showed movies in
Speaker 3: the basement, the old black and white, sixteen milimeter movies.
Speaker 4: And I remember being taken that.
Speaker 3: When I was very young and I saw a movie,
Speaker 3: I just remembered certain things about it. In nineteen ninety one,
Speaker 3: when I had I couldn't figure out what to do next,
Speaker 3: what film to do next. I remember that railing around
Speaker 3: in my brain was this image of a of an
Speaker 3: Iroquois Indian head shaved bold and lined with a red coat,
Speaker 3: a British uniform eighteenth century British uniform soldier. And that's
Speaker 3: such an anomaly because we always saw as your kid,
Speaker 3: you always saw America, you know, Native Americans and cowboys
Speaker 3: or something, and that stuck in my mind, and also
Speaker 3: a corollary tragedy of the death of a young woman.
Speaker 3: And I realized that this has been rattling around in
Speaker 3: my head since I was about three. So it was
Speaker 3: last of the Mohicans and so so well, you got
Speaker 3: to go to the last Mohicans. So this, this old
Speaker 3: neighborhood really had this resonance. I think things impressed themselves
Speaker 3: on your memory when you're very young, in ways that
Speaker 3: are are are huge.
Speaker 2: And then at home, who is it you have a
Speaker 2: brother or sister?
Speaker 4: How many brother?
Speaker 2: And did you sit down for meals? Did your father
Speaker 2: come back?
Speaker 4: We waited. My father came home.
Speaker 3: He took a bath and took a shower, and we
Speaker 3: formally sat down and he always had a good shot
Speaker 3: of whiskey and a shot of whiskey and uh and
Speaker 3: we had a formal dinner every night.
Speaker 2: And that continued till you left home.
Speaker 4: That continued until I left home.
Speaker 2: You know, when you left home?
Speaker 3: What was that like?
Speaker 2: Going from being cooked for every day and then being
Speaker 2: out there? Did you cook yourself? Where were you after it?
Speaker 3: I did? I went to I went to the University
Speaker 3: of Wisconsin, Madison, and then after four years there I
Speaker 3: went to London.
Speaker 4: And uh, yes, I did. I cook for myself.
Speaker 3: I also was working as a kind of a short
Speaker 3: ordered cook, doing breakfast at a girls dormitory in the
Speaker 3: morning in Wisconsin.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: So it was just interesting getting up at five thirty
Speaker 3: in the morning and Wisconsin in a winter and going
Speaker 3: to you know, a.
Speaker 2: Lot of clue from your grandmother to your mother, to
Speaker 2: the grocery store to working. Did you ever work in
Speaker 2: a restaurant.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I did. I was a short cook one summer
Speaker 3: in front of Yeah, which is crazy. You will blanche
Speaker 3: at some of these stories from these places. We used
Speaker 3: to because there'd be this massive rush and it was
Speaker 3: a memory test because you were having to remember all
Speaker 3: these orders at the same time. And if somebody ordered
Speaker 3: a steak the way we would get a steak done quickly,
Speaker 3: somebody would grab it out of the freezer, they throw
Speaker 3: it down the kitchen. We would catch it and dump
Speaker 3: it in the French frar.
Speaker 2: In the fire.
Speaker 4: Yes, absolutely horrible.
Speaker 3: Probably guilty of some form of order, manslaughter or something,
Speaker 3: because there's probably regular diets who had earlier heart disease
Speaker 3: because they ate these things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that was Wisconsin. And then you went to
Speaker 2: this is about but what about London? Because I was
Speaker 2: in London in the sixties and it was kind of
Speaker 2: I always felt there was a kind of beginning of
Speaker 2: that multicultural excitement of food rationing was you know, only
Speaker 2: fifteen years before after the war, I think that then
Speaker 2: and then in the sixties there seemed to be a
Speaker 2: lot more food of Greece and Italy. This it was
Speaker 2: much more vibrant. Did you remember the food of this.
Speaker 3: Totally absolutely my experience with bigger short of cook and
Speaker 3: all this stuff. This is in the this in your
Speaker 3: early sixties and the States and h I talked about,
Speaker 3: you're working for my father.
Speaker 4: This is in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 3: But in sixty five I went to London to a
Speaker 3: film school for two years and stayed there for six years.
Speaker 3: And the cuisine was, you know, basically beans on toast, yeah,
Speaker 3: and transport.
Speaker 2: Calf yeah, and chip sandwiches.
Speaker 4: Did you ever have chip sandwiches?
Speaker 3: That was really big on transport caffs, beans on toast
Speaker 3: or you're having you know, or eggs.
Speaker 4: I used to love.
Speaker 2: Yeah, every swimming in Greece, bacon fat maybe large.
Speaker 3: And the revelation was I couldn't afford it. But the
Speaker 3: revelation was was Greek food particularly particularly there's a heavy
Speaker 3: influence from Cypriot food, so it's like cheftalia sausage and
Speaker 3: those kinds of things. So there's these little funky kebab
Speaker 3: stands around Charlotte Street just north of Oxford Street, and
Speaker 3: an Indian food.
Speaker 4: Which is a revelation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, where did you live?
Speaker 3: I lived all over I lived in Queensway, very briefly,
Speaker 3: and then we were on New King's Road. Then I
Speaker 3: lived in Balum, then clap himself and back in South ken.
Speaker 2: Did anybody ever take you to a restaurant that was Yeah?
Speaker 3: How did I start actually started making a little bit
Speaker 3: of money? And then the thing was so attractive was
Speaker 3: on Fulham Road there was an Italian restaurant and I
Speaker 3: was living on ten pounds a week, literally is five
Speaker 3: pounds for rent, five pounds. But the ambiance of a
Speaker 3: nice Italian restaurant on the spring or a summer day
Speaker 3: and you know, a Saturday or Sunday with families kind
Speaker 3: of which to me was kind of was so touching
Speaker 3: about the River Cafe because that ambiance is there and
Speaker 3: its fullest, most technicolor form in your restaurant and this
Speaker 3: whole extended family that you created.
Speaker 2: So were you taken to when you were in film school? Then?
Speaker 2: What was that in London?
Speaker 3: I was in London, it was in Covent Garden, It's
Speaker 3: on Charlotte Street. Then the move to Covent Garden. It's
Speaker 3: a London film school.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and what was that like?
Speaker 4: That was great?
Speaker 3: For the first time in my life, I was doing
Speaker 3: exactly only what I wanted to do, which is make film,
Speaker 3: which was a revelation to me when it happened in
Speaker 3: my junior.
Speaker 4: Year at was Scott's.
Speaker 3: So I took a film history course for a kind
Speaker 3: of cynically, I thought, oh, we're going to there's gonna.
Speaker 4: Be three credits for looking at movies.
Speaker 3: And I didn't expect to get completely mugged and hijacked
Speaker 3: by this whole notion which curded a flash of light,
Speaker 3: like the skies parted and bolt of lightning came down and.
Speaker 4: Said you will do this, you will become a film director.
Speaker 4: And from that point on and that was it. That's
Speaker 4: what I want to do with you.
Speaker 2: Was Ridley Scott. There was Alan Parker and Ridley Scott.
Speaker 2: Were they in the same Did you know them?
Speaker 3: Then?
Speaker 4: I knew Ridley.
Speaker 3: I didn't know I met Alan Parker years later, but
Speaker 3: I knew Ridley, And you know, the late sixties, I
Speaker 3: started a small production company after I got out of
Speaker 3: film school and London. We made some commercials and documentaries
Speaker 3: and I shot some of Paris after Major in sixty eight.
Speaker 3: That was politically pretty involved. Yeah, and so life was
Speaker 3: changing and evolving. At one point I worked at twentieth
Speaker 3: century Fox towards sixty nine in production, and by that
Speaker 3: point I was making enough money it's going to live reasonably.
Speaker 3: And I had a production manager I worked with whose
Speaker 3: wife was fresh and he was.
Speaker 4: Quite a spectacular cook.
Speaker 3: And that was probably the first serious exposure I had
Speaker 3: to really good cuzin home cooking. Yeah, it was home
Speaker 3: cooked French French food. And then we were spending a
Speaker 3: lot of time in France at that point, in trailing
Speaker 3: to Morocco in Italy, and so the world was getting
Speaker 3: to be a much larger place.
Speaker 2: And France was that huge few Being in Paris.
Speaker 3: Well sixty eight was pretty wild.
Speaker 2: Well, we got there much later. We got there in
Speaker 2: sort of seventy one, but there were still the buses
Speaker 2: full of police and Daniel Combandi Well.
Speaker 3: I interviewed Combindi Lan's mar Alon Cravine.
Speaker 2: Wow have that footage?
Speaker 4: No, it wound up.
Speaker 3: It grown up in the bowels of NBC News someplace,
Speaker 3: and I tried to find it years and years ago,
Speaker 3: couldn't find it.
Speaker 2: Did you make a documentary about from beginning to end it?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 2: You just is it footage for the news documentary?
Speaker 3: About the focus of documentary was that the sixth May
Speaker 3: JUnit happened, and what's what's going to be the after effect,
Speaker 3: And that's what it was really focused on. And the
Speaker 3: prediction at the time, which was partially true parsonally not,
Speaker 3: was that the major impact was going to be amongst
Speaker 3: teenagers into these says, and that there was a radicalization
Speaker 3: of the young workers, particularly young workers at the Renaul
Speaker 3: factory who were CGT, and they started to look at
Speaker 3: the CGT in a very different light as being basically reactionary.
Speaker 3: But the idea that you're in a country and forty
Speaker 3: percent of the population is on strike, and if you
Speaker 3: turned on RTF at six o'clock to watch the news,
Speaker 3: there'd be some girls she might or may not still
Speaker 3: reading the news, sitting on the desk, she may may
Speaker 3: not have a shirt on.
Speaker 4: I mean, it was everybody.
Speaker 3: A youth generation had taken over, and it wasn't just students.
Speaker 3: There was students and young workers.
Speaker 2: But then you know, and they say that the gold
Speaker 2: that he had a plane ready, it was very very
Speaker 2: close to him leaving.
Speaker 3: He was basically a prisoner in the palace, and then
Speaker 3: he made a deal and he couldn't count on the
Speaker 3: French army in France because they would deploy and then
Speaker 3: some you know, girls would show up with some flowers
Speaker 3: and the soldiers would walk away from the APC's so
Speaker 3: it's complete chaos. So he made a deal with the
Speaker 3: French Army of the Rhine, because Germany is still occupy
Speaker 3: at that point, to come in and support him, and
Speaker 3: they extorted from him, in effect, the release of Ceylon,
Speaker 3: who was a right wing of French general.
Speaker 4: Who over the war in Algeria.
Speaker 3: It was part of a plot to sassinate the Gall
Speaker 3: and was in prison, and that that was the quid
Speaker 3: pro quo of the Gall getting support from the military,
Speaker 3: and that they they marched in from Germany and that
Speaker 3: so so better kind of dived and everything dissipated.
Speaker 2: So that the military cushed it. Right, Yeah, I was
Speaker 2: because there was always theories that the working class didn't
Speaker 2: you know, that it was a student led revolution, and
Speaker 2: that it just didn't have the backing of.
Speaker 3: Well but every but the people who were intellectually on
Speaker 3: top of it, who were at the heart of it,
Speaker 3: knew nothing serious was actually going to happen in the
Speaker 3: real world right then and there. It was very sophisticated.
Speaker 3: The irony is that is that sitting in London prior
Speaker 3: to Major sixty eight, everybody dismissed the French's Cafe Marxist
Speaker 3: or something, and then ironically that's where sixty eight was
Speaker 3: just extraordinary. You're in Czechoslovakia and Mexico City. I was
Speaker 3: in the Grosvenor Square on October twenty fifth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was there.
Speaker 3: You were there, Clinton was there, Tarika, he was there.
Speaker 2: Illy have a picture by the march. It was heady times.
Speaker 2: And as I said, when Richard, when the Pampato we went,
Speaker 2: it would still there would be go to the cinema
Speaker 2: on a Sunday night and it was scary coming back
Speaker 2: because they just they would lock the police when they
Speaker 2: just just locked them in these vans for hours and
Speaker 2: you're just can imagine the tension and the fear and
Speaker 2: you know the horror of having to sit in there.
Speaker 2: That's true. And then you did when did you go
Speaker 2: to Morocco? Why was that?
Speaker 3: I went to Morocco just to be in Morocco, went
Speaker 3: to Costa Blanco because I'd seen a movie called Costa Blanca.
Speaker 4: You had to go to costap Bloc.
Speaker 3: Great food, great food, I think, great food. Marvelous dysentery.
Speaker 3: In some it's looking at some hot on the coast
Speaker 3: and some healer. A woman came in and gave me something.
Speaker 4: I don't know what it was.
Speaker 3: It must have been some opiate, because I suddenly felt great,
Speaker 3: got all.
Speaker 4: Bound up, and then kind of continued on. Toured through
Speaker 4: the Atlass Mountains a bit.
Speaker 2: When you were on a movie set, did you think
Speaker 2: about how the feed the crew did you eat yourself?
Speaker 3: I do, and I make sure that the food on
Speaker 3: the set is really, really great and have great catering.
Speaker 3: Is a guy named Mario and in Miami who I
Speaker 3: used all the time, and Miami I couldn't tell you.
Speaker 3: He's by Miami, Vice and other pictures.
Speaker 4: I just bring them with me.
Speaker 2: I think that's kind of unique because I've talked to
Speaker 2: various directors and people who've worked on film and they
Speaker 2: say it can be a disaster for lunch. You know,
Speaker 2: there's just they're just terrible food, and people eat on
Speaker 2: a healthy food and then the amount of time it
Speaker 2: takes to stop for lunch and eat.
Speaker 4: It's pretty it's pretty tough.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Japan was interesting because because the catering was not great,
Speaker 3: it's kind of you know kind of you know, cardboard
Speaker 3: bento boxes and stuff, and we improved it when I
Speaker 3: shot the Tokyo I spilot in Tokyo.
Speaker 2: Did you tell me about food in Tokyo?
Speaker 3: Food and Toki go spectacular. You can't get a bad
Speaker 3: meal if you're tried to get a bad meal. Within
Speaker 3: We're living in Daka, Yama, and within one hundred and
Speaker 3: fifty meters of our apartment were probably half a dozen
Speaker 3: spectacular restaurants, any one of which would have been the
Speaker 3: best sushi restaurant in Los Angeles.
Speaker 2: Did you eat anything else other than Japanese?
Speaker 3: Yes, Italian they're the you know, like literally one hundred
Speaker 3: and fifty feet outside the front door was the Princely
Speaker 3: Bakery from Milan, had an outpost next to Sutaya, the
Speaker 3: big Sataya bookstore. So there was fantastic Italian bakery, gooods
Speaker 3: every morning, fresh food with spectacular in Tokyo. People in
Speaker 3: Tokyo they spend money in a different way than they
Speaker 3: do in the West. They don't spend money on living space.
Speaker 3: They spend money on clothes, on food, on cars, but
Speaker 3: not on living space.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's funny. I went spent morning in a cafe
Speaker 2: in Milan, and I just kept seeing all these people
Speaker 2: coming and dressed immaculately beautifully, and young people, and I said,
Speaker 2: how do they afford to buy that Prada shirt, that
Speaker 2: Gucci sweater? And they live at home? Yeah, they live
Speaker 2: at home. They don't pay rent, and so they stay
Speaker 2: until they get married or they really leave it. And
Speaker 2: that gives you, you know, a lot of money to spend,
Speaker 2: as you say, on food, on clothes, on the culture,
Speaker 2: you know. And so when you're going tomorrow to Milan,
Speaker 2: are you to know where is.
Speaker 4: I'NFL like to Milan? They were driving right to Modorna.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and tell me about that. What are you doing?
Speaker 3: We're doing very early pre production on a feature film
Speaker 3: about three months in the life of Enzo Ferrari in
Speaker 3: nineteen fifty seven, when all of the all the dynamics
Speaker 3: of his life that had happened to him at that
Speaker 3: point come into collision in those three months, which will
Speaker 3: determine the fate of everything he's going to become. His son,
Speaker 3: Dino had died by a year earlier. His wife sent
Speaker 3: warning he had another child, and illegitimate son named Piero
Speaker 3: Pierro Lardi, who was starting to wonder why his name
Speaker 3: is Lardi and not Ferrari.
Speaker 4: And this company was going.
Speaker 3: Bankrupt, so is his rival Maserati. They were both competing
Speaker 3: to see who could get financing. His wife Lara, who
Speaker 3: was kind of a Maria callous figure, was about to
Speaker 3: find out what the whole town knew, which is that
Speaker 3: there was another family living in Costell Meethro. So it's
Speaker 3: all of these things coming to collision. And the opera
Speaker 3: house one of the two opera houses in Mode and
Speaker 3: I was right next door. So opera is a huge
Speaker 3: plays a huge role in this. Fra early on wanted
Speaker 3: to be an opera singer. Then he wanted to be
Speaker 3: a sports writer, Yeah, sports writer. Then he wanted to
Speaker 3: be a race car driver. And she was a race
Speaker 3: car driver in the early twenties, and then he raced
Speaker 3: one or two times against Neil Valeri and knew he
Speaker 3: had no future as a race car driver and started
Speaker 3: managing the Alfa Romeo racing team and then started his
Speaker 3: own scooterio within Alpha and that that was the that's
Speaker 3: that's the origins of the company, which he then began
Speaker 3: in forty seven with Lara, and they started with absolutely nothing,
Speaker 3: so if you think of racing and what is racing,
Speaker 3: which is an interesting question, why is it so appealing?
Speaker 3: I think it's so appealing because we have a basic
Speaker 3: human impulse to exceed limits. I think it's primitive and
Speaker 3: drives everything we do, whether it's going out of space
Speaker 3: or doing research or building machines to make us go faster.
Speaker 3: So that's why I think it taps into I think
Speaker 3: that's why it's appealing.
Speaker 2: Are there food scenes in the movie?
Speaker 4: Not yet.
Speaker 3: I'm all with the suggestion, Okay, tell.
Speaker 2: Me about food in your movies, because there's obviously in
Speaker 2: Heat when they become a diner or there's another diner.
Speaker 2: Does that interest you the kind of language or the
Speaker 2: kind of intimacy you can have in a restaurant as
Speaker 2: opposed to you.
Speaker 3: It does because it's such an important thing in life.
Speaker 3: And there's two fantastic restaurants that nobody heat. There's one
Speaker 3: of the Broadway Dells, which sadly is no longer there.
Speaker 3: It's where Denio picks up Amy Brenneman and he and
Speaker 3: the others. The coffee shop scene at Cape Mandelini, which
Speaker 3: is this spectacled glafi shop. Cape Mandellini was a coffee,
Speaker 3: a big coffee shop restaurant with wonderful modern architecture and
Speaker 3: a contemporary architecture, and right on Wilship Boulevard, about a
Speaker 3: block block west of the Academy, and everybody in Los
Speaker 3: Angeles and the West side Los Angeles loved this restaurant.
Speaker 3: Whoever owned the building decided they should double the rent,
Speaker 3: and the restaurant went out of business, and there was
Speaker 3: so much animosity that nobody would open another restaurant there
Speaker 3: because they knew that nobody would go out of hostility
Speaker 3: to its presence. So it's seven or eight years later,
Speaker 3: it's still vacant. It's a sitting there.
Speaker 4: No one ever went in there.
Speaker 2: I always think, you know, I say over and over
Speaker 2: again that people do very private things in a very
Speaker 2: public space in a restaurant. You know, do you think
Speaker 2: that's interesting as a scene that you could have filmed,
Speaker 2: perhaps in somebody's kitchen, that you would film in a restaurant.
Speaker 2: What does a restaurant mean?
Speaker 3: For some reason, I don't know why, It's always strikes
Speaker 3: me is it's it's social, it's warm, and when the
Speaker 3: aunbiance is working as it does in your restaurant, you
Speaker 3: feel that you the phrase extended family, which which you
Speaker 3: use the way you view it. You really feel that
Speaker 3: presence and so it's both intimate and it's and you're
Speaker 3: in amongst humanity at the.
Speaker 2: Same time, and you're doing safety around you.
Speaker 3: Safety, and you're also part of a context, you know,
Speaker 3: So you're a sentiment and you're part of the human context,
Speaker 3: the social context simultaneously. Uh, you're doing something as essential
Speaker 3: as eating and it's appealing to all your sensory intake.
Speaker 4: You know, it changes your mood. I mean, it's do you.
Speaker 2: Think you can tell about a person by the way
Speaker 2: they are in a restaurant? Are they nice to the waiter?
Speaker 2: Do they say thank you? Do they share their food?
Speaker 2: Does it tell you something if you were going to
Speaker 2: hire somebody, would you want to take them to a
Speaker 2: restaurant first or would you rather bring them home or
Speaker 2: or just interview them across the table.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm a bad person to ask, because as a
Speaker 3: film director, I'm constantly find myself in an involuntary way.
Speaker 4: It's like a It's like I'm like an MRI.
Speaker 3: I see what people do, and I just you know,
Speaker 3: and I'm probably in my mind thinking if I had
Speaker 3: a cast or direct an actor to be this kind
Speaker 3: of person in a scene. Would I be telling him
Speaker 3: to wear that shirt or he's eating with the wrong fork,
Speaker 3: or the way he wipes his mouth or he doesn't
Speaker 3: put his napkin in his lap, or the way he
Speaker 3: picks up a glass. And one of the things you
Speaker 3: notice right away is that you can pick up a glass,
Speaker 3: but if you're a convict and falsome, this is how
Speaker 3: you pick up the glass.
Speaker 4: Every gesture.
Speaker 2: Why do you pick up a glass?
Speaker 3: Because it's a possession, it's a movement, it's an action,
Speaker 3: you know, and everything is telling. And so people in
Speaker 3: the restaurants are both totally self conscious and self aware
Speaker 3: and they're totally unconscious and un self aware depending on.
Speaker 4: Who they are what's going on.
Speaker 3: So it's both revealing and what they're hiding, or it's
Speaker 3: revealing and what they don't know they're I think there's
Speaker 3: something romantic about restaurants. There used to be a restaurant
Speaker 3: here called Ladome, and we went to La Dome. It
Speaker 3: was our family restaurant where every occasion was at Ladome.
Speaker 3: You know, a gigantic round table. We have a very
Speaker 3: large family, four daughters and sometimes extended boyfriends and what
Speaker 3: have you. And so every time we went out to dinner,
Speaker 3: it was like seven or eight nine people going out
Speaker 3: to dinner, and all important family occasions were there. And
Speaker 3: then it was Toscano over here the last twenty five years.
Speaker 3: There is a family place and you get to know
Speaker 3: the waiters so well, and then there's a party because
Speaker 3: you know, Alberto's retiring after twenty years, so you know,
Speaker 3: and then we meet people who are part of my daughter.
Speaker 4: Aaron worked at the River.
Speaker 3: Cafe for years and even walk in there, there's still
Speaker 3: people say, oh, say hi to Air They do they do?
Speaker 2: They remember her? And I think there is a sense.
Speaker 2: I always think that when you walk into a restaurant
Speaker 2: you want to feel somehow whatever you've been through, you know,
Speaker 2: traffic getting to the restaurant or market. I'm in a
Speaker 2: phone call that when you walk in you're safe, you know.
Speaker 2: And I say that too to the people who work there,
Speaker 2: that you just have to remember. People might have saved
Speaker 2: up to come here. This might be a big date,
Speaker 2: it might be a problem, and we just have to
Speaker 2: say yes.
Speaker 3: Really, why is it exciting? Is it is exciting to
Speaker 3: walk in the River cart for it is exciting to
Speaker 3: walk into a restaurant you love and people say hello,
Speaker 3: and it's just the simplest of human interactions.
Speaker 4: It's very common human, it's very you know that I
Speaker 4: also exciting.
Speaker 2: I think you elicted it as well, because there are
Speaker 2: people who walk into a restaurant and don't get that
Speaker 2: kind of welcome. But I think when Michael Mann in
Speaker 2: Summer and Aaron come into a restaurant, you look people
Speaker 2: in the eye, you say hello, you greet them, you know,
Speaker 2: you look up when you're choosing, you know, something from
Speaker 2: the menu, And so I think that it's a two
Speaker 2: way street, you know. I do think that you get
Speaker 2: what you give, you know, and speaking of getting and
Speaker 2: what we give, because I know you have to start
Speaker 2: packing for Italy. If food is love and food is
Speaker 2: something that's creative to cook, it's also and be comfort.
Speaker 2: So my last question to you, Michael Man, is if
Speaker 2: you needed food for comfort, is there a food that
Speaker 2: you would reach for?
Speaker 3: Probably Pastinian bruto nice one.
Speaker 2: To me.
Speaker 3: It's like you know, culinary five milligrams of morphine. I
Speaker 3: can't explain it. It was just it's wonderful, it is mellow.
Speaker 3: You know, probably all kinds of old sense memories of
Speaker 3: my grandmother.
Speaker 4: I mean, there's.
Speaker 3: Probably all kinds of things roll together because it's it's
Speaker 3: chicken broth in the pie and the cheek.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's just I.
Speaker 3: Don't know, that's just if you ask me about comfort food,
Speaker 3: that's it.
Speaker 2: Well, you're going to have it in northern Italy, you'll
Speaker 2: have it. You know, that's where it comes from. Thank you, Michael,
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: The River Cafe Look Book is now available in bookshops
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Speaker 1: with photographs from the renowned photographer Matthew Donaldson. The book
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