Speaker 1: Welcome back to season three of Ruthie's Table four. We've
Speaker 1: got a great group of people ahead, and we're going
Speaker 1: to start with my good friend with a great director,
Speaker 1: a great eater of food, appreciator of food, Wes Anderson.
Speaker 1: I have a few philosophies in life, one of which
Speaker 1: is to always say yes to Wes Anderson, my really
Speaker 1: good friend, Ruthie. Should we get a sheet from upstairs
Speaker 1: cupboard and screen fantastic mister Fox outside in the garden tonight, Yes, Wes, Ruthie.
Speaker 1: Shall we try again for the fourth time to make
Speaker 1: a perfect Bellini? Yes, Wes, Ruthie. How about if we
Speaker 1: invite all the kids and friends and watch Grand Budapest
Speaker 1: Hotel before it opens in your living room in London.
Speaker 2: Yes, Wes.
Speaker 1: And most recently, Ruthie, I'd be happy to do podcast
Speaker 1: with you. But could we do the interview by emailing
Speaker 1: questions and answers back and forth to each other over
Speaker 1: a few days or weeks, Yes, Wes. So here we
Speaker 1: are Wes Anderson with Wes Anderson. A little strange, but
Speaker 1: as always I said yes.
Speaker 3: I'll just jump around with a few things. Maybe for
Speaker 3: introducing myself. I don't know. If I'm responding to something
Speaker 3: Ruthie is saying. Is Ruthie saying something at the beginning,
Speaker 3: and then I'm chiming in. I'll wait to do that bit,
Speaker 3: and then you can also anything you want me to
Speaker 3: redo or add more.
Speaker 2: I'll just give a few things to start. Maybe I'll
Speaker 2: say I'll say hello, this is Wes Anderson.
Speaker 3: I'm going to read you the recipe for the River
Speaker 3: Cafe groast pigeon stuffed with kotaquino. This recipe serves six.
Speaker 3: You'll need one small red onion, peeled and chopped, two
Speaker 3: celery sticks chopped, two tablespoons of olive oil, plus twenty
Speaker 3: five mili liters for the roasting tin to put that
Speaker 3: on the side somewhere. You'll need one half ready cooked
Speaker 3: cotaquino sausage, half a sausage, ten fresh sage leaves shredded, please,
Speaker 3: five hundred milliters kianti. That's a more than a half bottle.
Speaker 3: And finally you found it. You said it again, Where
Speaker 3: did you find it?
Speaker 2: Okay, I'll come see it in a moment. I'm just
Speaker 2: going to finish this recipe.
Speaker 3: Finally, perhaps most importantly, you'll need six breast pigeons. That's
Speaker 3: six pigeons from the breast. I guess these are French pigeons.
Speaker 3: Breast I think is near near Lyon, near Genevas, south
Speaker 3: of must be almost Burgundy or next to Burgundy, or
Speaker 3: in Burgundy.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure. They may.
Speaker 3: Just make sure they're plucked and cleaned. Now, preheat the
Speaker 3: oven to two hundred and thirty degrees celsius to make
Speaker 3: the stuffing Soften the onion and celery in the two
Speaker 3: tablespoons of olive oil for ten minutes over a low heat.
Speaker 3: Small serpent, she says, remove the skin from the cotaquino
Speaker 3: and crumble the meat with your hands. But this get
Speaker 3: rid of this, put the skin somewhere else. Now, add
Speaker 3: the cotaquino and sage to the onion and celery and
Speaker 3: fry together for a few minutes. Then pour off the
Speaker 3: fat from the pan and add two hundred and fifty
Speaker 3: milli liters.
Speaker 2: I'm going to continue.
Speaker 3: Add two hundred and fifty mili liters red wine and
Speaker 3: boiled to reduce by at least half season with black pepper,
Speaker 3: and allow to cool before stuffing into the birds. Into
Speaker 3: the six birds, heat the two hundred and fifty milli
Speaker 3: liters of olive oil in a roasting tin over a
Speaker 3: medium high heat. Then brown each bird all over, season
Speaker 3: with sea salt and black pepper, and place the tin
Speaker 3: in the top of the hot oven the upper shelf
Speaker 3: inside the oven and roast for twenty minutes. Remove the
Speaker 3: tin from the oven and take out the pigeons.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure.
Speaker 3: Maybe we cook them a bit more through I'm not
Speaker 3: sure how they come out twenty minutes, keep them warm,
Speaker 3: Pour any excess oil out of the tin. Then add
Speaker 3: the remaining red wine over a high heat. Reduce us
Speaker 3: we got half the wine still to go, I think yes,
Speaker 3: over a high heat, and so their pigeons are not
Speaker 3: in there anymore. So okay, over a high heat, reduce
Speaker 3: the liquid by half. So cook it until half it
Speaker 3: goes away. I think all of the people who cook
Speaker 3: know this.
Speaker 2: I don't know that.
Speaker 3: Then season with sea salt and black pepper, and then
Speaker 3: this is your sauce. Pour it over the pigeons to serve,
Speaker 3: maybe with some peese or something like that. You've read
Speaker 3: the recipe for a pigeon. Why have you chosen this recipe?
Speaker 3: Do you cook it yourself? When did you last eat it?
Speaker 3: Were there any memorable moments that you ate it? Well,
Speaker 3: I have not cooked any pigeon ever. I haven't cooked
Speaker 3: any bird. I can't really cook. I can cook a
Speaker 3: few things, but I have chosen the recipe for no
Speaker 3: reason other than the fact that anytime I see this
Speaker 3: pigeon on the River Cafe menu, I immediately order it.
Speaker 3: Pigeon is my favorite bird anyway, and it ruined. Fact
Speaker 3: once told me about an occasion when he ate a
Speaker 3: pigeon and he literally began to cry out of happiness.
Speaker 2: Jaman saw the actual tears. See. I'm in the.
Speaker 3: Room here at the Chateau La Coste, which is extremely comfortable.
Speaker 3: It's a great place. So far, I have not been out.
Speaker 3: I haven't seen Richard's gallery yet, which I'm going to
Speaker 3: go do in about an hour. I've just been doing
Speaker 3: my work here in the room, which is really all
Speaker 3: I wanted to do except for go see Richard's building.
Speaker 3: You know one thing I thought might be worth mentioning
Speaker 3: is for years we do often the first premiere of
Speaker 3: a new movie I make ends up being one where
Speaker 3: you're cooking at it at your house. We had the
Speaker 3: first public screening of Grand Budapest hotel in Italy. Many
Speaker 3: years ago we showed Fantastic Mister Fox on a sheet
Speaker 3: and that was the first time anybody had seen it
Speaker 3: outside of the production. We always plan to do one,
Speaker 3: as you know, and we always eat very well afterwards.
Speaker 3: Now I'm going to act like Ruthie's asked me about
Speaker 3: how do we eat on our movies. Well, you know,
Speaker 3: on our movies, what we do during the day. We
Speaker 3: actually I don't like to stop work in the day.
Speaker 2: On movies.
Speaker 3: Often you stop and that there's a very long break,
Speaker 3: and then it takes even longer to get back from
Speaker 3: the break. So the way we've been doing it is
Speaker 3: we have these little tables. They're made to be folded
Speaker 3: into suitcases, and we set them up on the right
Speaker 3: on the side of the set. And the people who
Speaker 3: are actually working on the set, which is kind of
Speaker 3: a small group. Other people working building sets and things,
Speaker 3: they have a different experience. But the group on the set,
Speaker 3: we have our lunch there and it's brought out. And
Speaker 3: for years I tried to make it just soup and
Speaker 3: to convince everyone that we would just eat soup and
Speaker 3: then get right back to work.
Speaker 2: But we did have some very good soups.
Speaker 3: In Germany, there was a shop across the street from
Speaker 3: the hotel that we lived where they would make soups
Speaker 3: for us every day, but.
Speaker 2: Most people don't just want soup. Eventually there was a mutiny.
Speaker 3: In particular our key grip Sanjay Sammy said you can't
Speaker 3: push a dolly all day and just only eat a
Speaker 3: thin soup. We started bringing sanch his own steaks and things.
Speaker 3: But the thing we do also is when we finish
Speaker 3: the shooting for the day, we always have a dinner
Speaker 3: with the whole cast and the department heads.
Speaker 2: That group.
Speaker 3: We all live together in a small hotel usually, and
Speaker 3: we have our own little dinner room and cook We
Speaker 3: always have great dinners at the end of the day.
Speaker 3: Almost invariably, everybody who's working in the cast and in
Speaker 3: those departments is there for dinner. Our costume designer usually
Speaker 3: shows up very late, sometimes close to midnight, but we
Speaker 3: keep a plate for her and usually a plate for
Speaker 3: the extremely large team of helpers who roll in. It
Speaker 3: just reinforces how dedicated she is because she works into
Speaker 3: the late out. You know, I've done a lot of
Speaker 3: work in restaurants over the years with no Ah boundback
Speaker 3: and we wrote a movie in Barpeiti in New York.
Speaker 3: We were there for probably six hours a day for
Speaker 3: a year, and we still go there of course in
Speaker 3: New York.
Speaker 2: That's our canteen.
Speaker 3: Ruthie am I allowed to turn the tables for a
Speaker 3: moment in this podcast and ask about Well, I've always
Speaker 3: loved the history of the River Cafe, you know, I've
Speaker 3: looked at the plans that show how it grew over
Speaker 3: the years from a little room which was a canteen
Speaker 3: for Richard's firm, for Rogers, Sirk and Harbor.
Speaker 2: Was it always called?
Speaker 1: Was it?
Speaker 2: Were those partners all there in the beginning?
Speaker 3: Can I asked you to tell a bit about the
Speaker 3: beginning of the River Cafe and what it was like
Speaker 3: and who started coming there and was it only at
Speaker 3: lunch at first? It reminds me of the commissaries of
Speaker 3: the old studios, which used to be such busy places.
Speaker 3: And I remember when Owen Wilson and I first went
Speaker 3: to Los Angeles to go to work. Essentially we our
Speaker 3: producers James L. Brooks and Polyplatt. They had their offices
Speaker 3: were in the Sydney Poitier.
Speaker 2: Building on the Columbia Lot, which was in Culver City.
Speaker 3: And it was the which had been the MGM lot,
Speaker 3: and the Commissary was still a busy place. I mean
Speaker 3: there were sort of two, but I don't know how
Speaker 3: much people use those anymore or if they're even there,
Speaker 3: but they were play you know, when I'm.
Speaker 2: Doing a movie.
Speaker 3: When I'm working on a movie, I try to have
Speaker 3: the lunch be briefest experience it possibly can be.
Speaker 2: We do it on the set.
Speaker 3: We bring to tables onto the set itself, and the
Speaker 3: people who are working on the set just have a
Speaker 3: fifteen minutes or something like that. That's that's the way I.
Speaker 2: Like to do it.
Speaker 3: But I love to have a So I like the
Speaker 3: idea of having the canteen right there in the workplace,
Speaker 3: but then to have a canteen that grows into the
Speaker 3: river cafe.
Speaker 2: That's an unusual story.
Speaker 3: Can I ask some nostalgic recollection of the beginnings of
Speaker 3: it and the evolution of it?
Speaker 1: Or I wes s it's Ruthie. I'm sitting here looking
Speaker 1: at Santa Margharita. I'm watching you were here. It seems
Speaker 1: wherever I go on holiday wish you were there, and
Speaker 1: I can understand why. So it's interesting your question, and
Speaker 1: I'm really happy to turn the table. Have you turned
Speaker 1: the table on me? When Richard finished the Pompadou after
Speaker 1: six years of living in Paris, working in Paris creating
Speaker 1: that building, the view going back to London was to
Speaker 1: create kind of almost like you were describing a studio
Speaker 1: community with open space, with common rooms and a place
Speaker 1: to eat, whether it was a commissary or canteen, that
Speaker 1: there would be a place where people could meet and
Speaker 1: talk of food. Very often what we did in Paris
Speaker 1: in a cafe or a bar on the way to
Speaker 1: the office or the way back. And I think what
Speaker 1: he did not want was to be just an office
Speaker 1: in a large building and then everybody disappeared at midday
Speaker 1: and came back to work. So I think when they
Speaker 1: found the warehouses on the Thames, it was completely ideal
Speaker 1: because it wasn't out of the center, it was on
Speaker 1: the river. It had the possibility of a green space.
Speaker 1: He actually tore down a building that blocked the view
Speaker 1: of the river and made that into a communal garden.
Speaker 1: Because it was quite large, there were spaces taken by
Speaker 1: other architectural firms. There was a space taken by a
Speaker 1: set designer, there was one taken by a framer, and
Speaker 1: so everybody was there doing different kind of creative things,
Speaker 1: and then the challenge was where to eat, what to
Speaker 1: do with that space. And I can remember very few
Speaker 1: decisions or decisions I think that you can actually remember
Speaker 1: being made in your life. But I do remember that
Speaker 1: we were on a ski holiday in Switzerland and Richard
Speaker 1: had sent out the office had sent out all sorts
Speaker 1: of applications for people who might want to open a
Speaker 1: restaurant or cafe, a canteen in the Thames Wharf. And
Speaker 1: I turned to Richard and I said, you know, the
Speaker 1: only thing worse not having a place to meet and
Speaker 1: to eat, but to be have something mediocre. Maybe I'll
Speaker 1: do it. And i'd come back from Paris. We had
Speaker 1: just had bo who was by that time for where
Speaker 1: as you know, was sort of fifteen with Jaman at
Speaker 1: the American School, and so that's kind of how we
Speaker 1: started the River Cafe. Rose and I knew that Rose
Speaker 1: had worked with the McNally's in New York and she
Speaker 1: was back in London really wanting to cook. And you know,
Speaker 1: I was a domestic cook, so I knew nothing about
Speaker 1: working in restaurants, but I always say also that restrictions
Speaker 1: are sometimes the best things you can have, and we
Speaker 1: definitely had restrictions. We had a very small space, we
Speaker 1: had a very low budget of what we could create,
Speaker 1: and we also had the council, which for some reason
Speaker 1: really was against having anything in a residential area, so
Speaker 1: they only allowed us to open to the people who
Speaker 1: worked in the warehouses, and only at lunch. But then
Speaker 1: as words spread that this was going on, that there
Speaker 1: was a place in Hammersmith where you could go and
Speaker 1: have aposta or a sandwich or Italian ingredients, that we
Speaker 1: were starting to get Feimashler, in her first review of
Speaker 1: The River Cafe wrote in The Evening Standard, I'm going
Speaker 1: to tell you about a restaurant you cannot go to.
Speaker 1: And of course it was a big struggle for us
Speaker 1: because it was very hard to make money. We were
Speaker 1: competing not against other restaurants or cafes, but against the
Speaker 1: sandwich girl who would bring sandwiches on her bicycle. So really,
Speaker 1: like your idea of the commissary in a film or
Speaker 1: working in a film and having tables brought in was
Speaker 1: exactly what Richard wanted to have a place where people
Speaker 1: could work, eat, go over for a coffee talk about
Speaker 1: a drawing. That's why we had the paper tablecloths, and
Speaker 1: we still do, so that the architects could draw while
Speaker 1: they sat there. We also wanted to be much more
Speaker 1: cafe can to me, because if we had linen tablecloss
Speaker 1: or no table class, it wouldn't be right. And in fact,
Speaker 1: not long ago, the Michelin people came in and said,
Speaker 1: you know, we could give you a second star, but
Speaker 1: you've got to lose the paper. That is something we'd
Speaker 1: rather have than a star.
Speaker 3: I think that it's best to have paper tablecloths, not
Speaker 3: just on every table everywhere, but on every surface everywhere,
Speaker 3: because you never know, something always comes out of the
Speaker 3: fact if you have a paper tablecloth and a pen,
Speaker 3: this is always a great combination. Everybody's going to do something.
Speaker 3: So here's me pretending we're having the conversation again. Well,
Speaker 3: I live partly in Paris, and when we're in England,
Speaker 3: where we partly live, we eat at home every night,
Speaker 3: and when we're in Paris we go out to dinner
Speaker 3: every night.
Speaker 2: When I was first.
Speaker 3: Kind of living in Paris or spending more time in Paris,
Speaker 3: Juman and I, Juman, my wife, we used to try
Speaker 3: new restaurants continuously and then over the years. The thing
Speaker 3: I is my favorite kind of restaurant is a restaurant
Speaker 3: where I've already been a restaurant where I know the place.
Speaker 3: I I sort of know where I would like to
Speaker 3: sit and what I want to order already. And in France,
Speaker 3: I think it if you're a foreigner, it helps if
Speaker 3: you're a familiar face in the restaurant, if you've been
Speaker 3: there thirty times, that's a good way to.
Speaker 2: Establish yourself there.
Speaker 3: I will say in France, I have a tendency to
Speaker 3: eat the now I wouldn't call them the healthiest dishes,
Speaker 3: the confie of duck and quite a few lamb chops
Speaker 3: and more pigeon.
Speaker 2: You asked about bar Luce and Milan.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, we made this sort of restaurant bar
Speaker 3: bar Lucca in Milan. It's what Mutual Product wanted, something
Speaker 3: like a kind of classic spot.
Speaker 2: And the sandwiches are very good. They make extremely.
Speaker 3: Good cocktails and things, and lots of sweets and things
Speaker 3: like that gelato. I guess I was trying to make
Speaker 3: a place, try to draw on different places we love,
Speaker 3: like a bit of Nino in Rome and a bit
Speaker 3: of a place called New York burgher town. That's on
Speaker 3: what is it forty third Street, fifty I can't even
Speaker 3: remember where it is. Near Saint Piez. Is that the cathedral? Gosh,
Speaker 3: I can't remember where it is. They have these if
Speaker 3: it's still there. They have these tables where you sit
Speaker 3: more like desks with little arms to the tables, wondering
Speaker 3: if there one is the one to mention in Paris
Speaker 3: or Rome. In Rome, we like to go to Nino,
Speaker 3: we like to go to Tulio, we like to go
Speaker 3: to Pure Luigi. But maybe our other favorite place to
Speaker 3: go eat in the world is Tokyo. Every now and
Speaker 3: then we find ourselves in Japan and there as careful
Speaker 3: and interesting and inventive and perfectionist with with their cooking
Speaker 3: as anyone in the world. Maybe I guess on some
Speaker 3: level it's the Japanese food and the Italian food that
Speaker 3: leads the way these days. I particularly love Japanese food.
Speaker 3: But you know an interesting thing. The last time we
Speaker 3: were in Japan, we were there for a couple of
Speaker 3: weeks probably, and at the end of our stay, our
Speaker 3: friend Con had been trying to convince us to go
Speaker 3: to this Italian restaurant, and I was I don't want
Speaker 3: to go to Italian restaurant Signal Inoteca. The chef was
Speaker 3: called Toshiji Tomori. Well, anyway, finally the last night we
Speaker 3: were there, we just went with going to the Italian place. Well,
Speaker 3: you would be very impressed because it would be one
Speaker 3: of the better ones outside of Italy and the River Cafe.
Speaker 3: I'll act like you asked about when we went on
Speaker 3: the boat. Yes, we went on the Queen Mary too,
Speaker 3: and we had a group with us Jason Schwarzman and
Speaker 3: Roman and Roman's wife Jenny, and Tilda Swinton, Sandro cop
Speaker 3: and me and my wife Juman and we really all
Speaker 3: had a great time. I mean when the boat arrived
Speaker 3: from New York to England, we tried to convince them
Speaker 3: to let us sail on to Germany, but they had
Speaker 3: to bump us out of our rooms. And we showed
Speaker 3: our movies and things and did little talks during the journey.
Speaker 3: One of the great things was we had this room
Speaker 3: and it was on the opposite end of the boat
Speaker 3: from the kitchens. I mean there are probably many kitchens
Speaker 3: on there, but we often arranged to have a curry
Speaker 3: dinner that we watched them roll the cart down a
Speaker 3: corridor that's probably about a kilometer long, and it was
Speaker 3: very good.
Speaker 2: We had very good dinners on that boat, all right.
Speaker 1: So Wes Anderson, there was Wessa Anderson, Michael Caine, and
Speaker 1: Jake John who are our first three podcasts, and when
Speaker 1: we didn't really know what we were doing with thought
Speaker 1: we might be just doing a recipe. So we asked
Speaker 1: Wes to choose a recipe, and he chose a recipe
Speaker 1: from the Blue Book, which was published in nineteen ninety four,
Speaker 1: soon to be thirty years old. And it has canty classico,
Speaker 1: it's stuff with codaquino, and it's a breast pigeon, which,
Speaker 1: coming up to Christmas is very christmasy. It's a bit
Speaker 1: like the Blito misto using the kurdaquino kanti. What do
Speaker 1: you think about that?
Speaker 4: It's one of those dishes that people who have worked
Speaker 4: in the River Cafe a long time ago come back
Speaker 4: and eat and they're like, it's like the menu was
Speaker 4: very from when I was here before, because it's one
Speaker 4: of those dishes. It's timeless. It's a timeless dish, isn't it.
Speaker 4: I remember when I learned to cook pigeon when I
Speaker 4: was a young chef heir and how you guys would
Speaker 4: would say, don't cook it, like if we're in rules
Speaker 4: or a gentleman's dining club. It's not got to be
Speaker 4: served so pink that it's ripping off the bone. It
Speaker 4: can be cooked more like an a rosta misto and
Speaker 4: cooked so it's so it's maybe cooked a bit slower,
Speaker 4: but so you can eat the whole. Yeah, pigeon. And
Speaker 4: you know, Riches would literally the whole pigeon.
Speaker 1: You see him cutting off the legs and picking them up.
Speaker 1: It's a great bird to have when we don't have
Speaker 1: the game season, so when we don't have grouse or partridge, pheasant,
Speaker 1: and then we can have pigeon, you know, all through
Speaker 1: the other seasons. Now yeah, I mean as as an animal,
Speaker 1: I might offend people, but I really have a real
Speaker 1: version to pigeons.
Speaker 4: Generally, maybe the Brits like the thought of eating them
Speaker 4: rather than have a sere.
Speaker 1: I was trying to Danny about it, and he was saying,
Speaker 1: you know, pigeon in a way, it's so rich. I
Speaker 1: kind of can also almost taste like fois gras.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's one of the ingredients that we can be
Speaker 4: flamboyant with. I feel you can put things with it
Speaker 4: that you think that I can do a really decadent
Speaker 4: dish with this pigeon. Often you can put things like lardo,
Speaker 4: fresh chestnuts, cook it in vincanto if you want to
Speaker 4: be really swanky, and you can really change the dish
Speaker 4: by just altering even the wine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I like doing it, so, especially when we do
Speaker 1: velshin and red wine and you're thinking of using so
Speaker 1: much red wine, and then you think about what we
Speaker 1: can use as a white wine, as you say, vincenta
Speaker 1: white wine.
Speaker 4: But we do them on bread that we can do
Speaker 4: them with briscatta, with cavaloneio. It's quite versatile ingredient.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And you can do them in the summer with
Speaker 1: peas locally.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Oh that's very nice and viols.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And so I think the recipe that he chose
Speaker 1: it's a bit eccentric, and the way he reads it
Speaker 1: is eccentric, but it's good. Well, let's hear what else
Speaker 1: has to say about his memories of food growing up,
Speaker 1: cooking and eating.
Speaker 3: Can you describe a typical meal when you were a child?
Speaker 3: What was the food? Who cooked it? Can you paint
Speaker 3: a picture of a family meal. Well, when my parents
Speaker 3: were together, I think it was more of a communal
Speaker 3: type family meal. But most of my childhood my mother
Speaker 3: was studying. After my parents had split, my mother decided
Speaker 3: she would like to be an archaeologist. For ten years,
Speaker 3: she was working on studying for her masters than her PhD.
Speaker 3: And she did all this she was taking care of
Speaker 3: three boys all the time. It was a little more
Speaker 3: thrown together, and she was juggling a lot of things.
Speaker 3: Wes As a young boy, what is your earliest food memory.
Speaker 3: I was known as the one who liked hamburgers. My
Speaker 3: older brother was known as the one who liked hot dogs.
Speaker 3: I was Ernie, he was Burt. I drove the police car.
Speaker 2: He did the radio.
Speaker 3: I think for most things, anytime there was there were
Speaker 3: there were two options.
Speaker 2: We always shared that we did. We never competed for
Speaker 2: the options.
Speaker 3: We identified different ones, and that became part of our ritual.
Speaker 2: There was nothing typical.
Speaker 3: Every night was a different venue and a different situation,
Speaker 3: and I think possibly over the years this may lead
Speaker 3: to why I've always liked to eat in restaurants. In fact,
Speaker 3: I tend to if I'm not working on a film,
Speaker 3: I tend to work at home and until the thing
Speaker 3: I do is to go out to dinner. That's the
Speaker 3: main often I haven't left my residence until dinner. Now
Speaker 3: you mentioned food in high school, Well, I went to
Speaker 3: high schools.
Speaker 2: First, a public high school.
Speaker 3: There was a cafeteria in lunch, but I think I
Speaker 3: brought my lunch in a sack, and I don't really
Speaker 3: remember much. But then I went to another school, the
Speaker 3: school where we made Rushmore, and that school had a
Speaker 3: system that was a little more It wasn't like a.
Speaker 2: Public school system.
Speaker 3: It was a thing where they run you a tab
Speaker 3: and they send the bill to your parents. There was
Speaker 3: much more freedom in what you could eat. It was
Speaker 3: more like having a kind of canteen on the school campus,
Speaker 3: which was new for me. But the food was not
Speaker 3: memorable in either location really, although I was I don't
Speaker 3: know if i'd even heard of bagels before going to
Speaker 3: this school, and bagels did not become a huge part
Speaker 3: of my life. But I guess I started to see
Speaker 3: there was a lot out there that I didn't know
Speaker 3: about in terms of things to eat. When did you
Speaker 3: first meet Ruthie rough day place talking?
Speaker 2: But do you remember what the event was? What you ate?
Speaker 3: Who else was there any colored to bring it to
Speaker 3: life some storytelling. Well, you know, I first met Ruthie
Speaker 3: in Italy.
Speaker 2: I had met Ru already.
Speaker 3: Rue is Juman's middle school friend and then life's long
Speaker 3: friend since then, so I considered myself as of late arrival. Nevertheless,
Speaker 3: I just insert myself into both families. We rented a
Speaker 3: house in Tuscany, which we thought was in the middle
Speaker 3: of a vast empty countryside surrounded by vineyards, but it
Speaker 3: was actually surrounded by several other houses connected to it,
Speaker 3: all filled with families and busy. And then slowly we
Speaker 3: began to hear a lot of noises and we realized
Speaker 3: we weren't in an isolated place at all.
Speaker 2: Then we got a call.
Speaker 3: From Rue to go where they were, and we went
Speaker 3: down to your house, Ruthie, to where you were staying,
Speaker 3: where you often have stayed and for many years, and
Speaker 3: it was much better. We were much happier there. The
Speaker 3: people were very interesting and wonderful, and the food was
Speaker 3: wildly improved over what we were eating where we were.
Speaker 3: And along with all that, while I met you, and
Speaker 3: also while who happened to be there at the time
Speaker 3: was Rape Fines who I had met before, but who
Speaker 3: on this occasion was preparing the earliest stages of his
Speaker 3: adaptation of Coreolanis, and he showed me a little clip
Speaker 3: he had made, but he also played.
Speaker 2: I asked how.
Speaker 3: He was going to do a certain speech, and he
Speaker 3: did it for me in close quarters. He in fact,
Speaker 3: just a few inches away from me, and it was
Speaker 3: extremely powerful. And in that moment I had the thought
Speaker 3: that I particularly wanted to write a movie for Raife
Speaker 3: and my friend Hugo and I set to work on
Speaker 3: that shortly there after, and we actually did the movie,
Speaker 3: and Reefe actually played the part.
Speaker 2: In some of your.
Speaker 3: Films, you have starts, Lennon Waiter's got some phrases drinks
Speaker 3: beautiful present as well. You know, that's a question about
Speaker 3: food in relation to my own movies I've made, and
Speaker 3: I can say two of them. One is in the
Speaker 3: Grand Budapest Hotel. There's a dinner during which the whole
Speaker 3: story of the movie is kind of told. And I've
Speaker 3: always loved an old menu. I like seeing first what
Speaker 3: they used to eat and what they have involved, what
Speaker 3: we don't eat that people used to eat, how the
Speaker 3: preparations and things have evolved, and as we know, often
Speaker 3: a dinner in a luxurious restaurant used to involve many, many.
Speaker 2: Courses and a lot more food.
Speaker 3: And you know, I've always aj Leebling wrote about food
Speaker 3: in a way. I have always that I think he's
Speaker 3: the funniest writer about food. And we use some of
Speaker 3: that in another movie, The French Dispatch, and that when
Speaker 3: we do have a tray of drinks which shows everything
Speaker 3: from the appartif that you would have three o'clock in
Speaker 3: the afternoon to the strongest d just tief at the
Speaker 3: very end of the night, all spinning on one round tray.
Speaker 2: I mean we made our own versions of each.
Speaker 3: I guess I think it will also in French this
Speaker 3: but we have a cook, and we tell the whole
Speaker 3: story of a cook, and we have some peculiar dishes
Speaker 3: that he makes. In fact, pigeon I think we call
Speaker 3: it a city park pigeon hash. His food is meant
Speaker 3: to be specialized in a food for police working on locations,
Speaker 3: on stakeouts and things like that, so it has some
Speaker 3: special characteristics that make it more suited to that. So
Speaker 3: that I've come to the end of the questions, Wes.
Speaker 1: It's a few weeks later and we are almost done.
Speaker 1: I'm in the edit with Willem and you've done a
Speaker 1: brilliant podcast. I have to say it's ready to go.
Speaker 1: But there is one question that I need to ask you,
Speaker 1: because that's what I do for every single person who's
Speaker 1: on the podcast, and that is what Wes Anderson is
Speaker 1: your for.
Speaker 3: Food, Ruthie, I'm answering your last message.
Speaker 2: It now it's some weeks later.
Speaker 3: I always liked the Italian hamburger, the ash dimonzo with
Speaker 3: butter and sage. Sometimes that is one of my favorites,
Speaker 3: which you sometimes see on the menu here or there.
Speaker 3: I would recommend it if somebody crosses paths with it.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Ruthie, thank you for listening.
Speaker 1: We're going to be back next week with another great guest.
Speaker 1: And meanwhile, we're here if you want to contact us,
Speaker 1: if you have ideas, if you have thoughts, please let
Speaker 1: us know.
Speaker 2: Ruthie's Table Floor is produced by Atami Studios for iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: It's hosted by Ruthie Rodgers. It's produced by William Lenski.
Speaker 3: Our executive producers are Zad Rodgers and Fay Stuart.
Speaker 2: Our production manager is Caitline Paramore. This episode has additional
Speaker 2: contributions by Jean Renaul. Special thanks to everyone at the
Speaker 2: River Cafe.