Jon Favreau spent three months training in restaurants to perfect his role in Chef. The director-actor talks about his passion for cooking and how he got actors like Scarlett Johansson and Robert Downey Jr ‘almost for nothing’
How was it keeping up with John leguizamoIJ
I’ve known his work for so long, and I’ve known him. What I like about him is he’s not just a comedian improviser, he’s an actor. He improvises but never at the expense of the scene. Acting is a very selfless thing. You have to be supportive of the story and the emotional baggage that the scene has to carry. So he was always great. And plus he’s a really hard worker, for as long as he’s been at it. He was really inspiring. Most actors, at a certain point, they want to do something else. They’ve had their fun acting and then they want to produce or they want to direct, and then they lose the passion. And I think he’d want to do other things besides it too. He writes and does other things, but still, primarily, he’s an actor, and he loves it. He always acts like he’s very lucky to be on the set everyday to get to work.
Did you train at a restaurant for your role in the filmIJ
Yes, I did. I worked with leguizamo at the restaurant he was working at. I was with Roy Choi, the chef, who is one of our producers of this film. He is the guy who came up with the menu and said he would help. Most chefs are disappointed with how their world is depicted on the big screen. And so every step of the way, whether it was the script or my training or the way the food was presented in the movie, Roy oversaw. To acquaint me, Roy sent me off to a very condensed version of traditional French culinary training. I worked very closely with him for three months. I already knew the basics of cooking, and I love reading books about food and watching shows about cooking, so I kind of had a really good context of it all, and I’d done a lot of research in writing it. But that’s totally different from actually being there in the kitchen and experiencing it.
One of the big themes of the movie is the creative process as it manifests through food. Where did the inspiration to use the food culture come fromIJ
I think the food came first, because I’ve been fixated. You have to really find something you would be happy to obsess over to make a movie, because you have to live it. As a director, you have to be able to pick something that excites you enough that you can breathe it, you know, everyday all day, and make a million different decisions about it, and love it. And food was something I just really thought was very cinematic. There are so few films on food and I wanted to do something about that world, especially with this rockstar chef culture. People in the movie business tend to be a little bit more realistic about it. People from chef culture, they never thought they were going to be public figures when they started working as chefs. And so you’ll get people who are a lot more flawed and a lot more dramatically interesting. You can’t really make a movie about making movies. It’s boring. It’s hard to be entertaining. This movie allowed me to take some of my experience from feeling like wanting to make something that’s my vision, but also having to satisfy an audience, people investing money, reviewers, online blogging, commenting on your stuff, being sensitive but also being bold. And I was able to use exaggerated aspects of that to help color this film.
You have some nice lady friends in this movie. What was it like working with Scarlett Johansson and Sofia VergaraIJ
There was more to that question than that. Did it take you out of itIJ Was it like, ‘Wow. He gave himself some hot girls to be around.’ It shows you how good of a chef he might have been. That’s what I’m figuring. The food must be really good.
They both (Scarlett Johansson and Sofia Vergara) seem perfectly cast for the roles that they played.
Yeah. They were. I’ve hung out with chefs. If you’re at the top of your game there’s something that’s really captivating about that. And what I like about chefs too is they’re very confident. And they don’t apologise for their individuality. As a matter of fact, they play it up with their tattoos, their hair and their personas. They are like rockstars. And also, even as a guy, having a guy cook for you, it’s incredibly intimate and incredibly flattering and emotional. And talking to them, it’s like talking to a musician who is playing a song for somebody, and I wanted to capture that. But beyond that, Sofia was somebody who I didn’t know personally, but as I wrote the role it was very clear that I don’t know who else it could have been. She was definitely my first choice. And Scarlett I knew from Black Widow and she’s just really super smart and cool. She and Downey came on it was a big favour on both their parts. This was not a high-paying gig by any stretch. As a matter of fact, it paid as little as the guilds would allow to get it made. And then everybody else, you know, this is a dream cast. These are all first choice. I wanted to get the movie right. And I didn’t want to change anything. Fortunately the movie was small enough I didn’t have to. Really, everything you see in the movie is exactly how I wanted.
The film took on the structure of the classic road trip. When did you decide that would be the structure and where did that inspiration come fromIJ
That’s an interesting question, because when I started writing it, I thought, ‘Oh here I am, writing a movie where I could stay home and really celebrate Venice and the culinary culture in California and los Angeles.’ And then, like everything else I’ve written without a structure, I ended up on the road. The idea was to take the truck on the road with the cameras and go from town to town and film in the real environments. When you don’t have a lot of money but you have that freedom you can get a lot of production value from our country. And just getting the authentic backdrop and music was great.