Wes Anderson

0:00Welcome back to season three of Ruthie's Table Four. We've got a great group of people ahead, and we're going to start with my good friend, with a great director, a great eater of food, appreciator of food, Wes Anderson.

0:20I have a few philosophies in life, one of which is to always say yes to Wes Anderson, my really good friend. Ruthie, shall we get a sheet from upstairs cupboard and screen Fantastic Mr. Fox outside in the garden tonight? Yes, Wes. Ruthie, shall we try again for the fourth time to make a perfect Bellini? Yes, Wes. Ruthie, how about if we invite all the kids and friends and watch Grand Budapest Hotel before it opens in your living room in London? Yes, Wes. And most recently, Ruthie, I'd be happy to do a podcast with you, but could we do the interview by emailing questions and answers back and forth to each other over a few days or weeks?

1:08Yes, Wes. So here we are, Wes Anderson with Wes Anderson. A little strange, but as always, I said yes. I'll just jump around with a few things. Maybe for introducing myself, I don't know if I'm responding to something is Ruthie saying something at the beginning and then I'm chiming in? I'll wait to do that bit. And then you can also, anything you want me to redo or add more, I'll just give a few things to start. Maybe I'll say, I'll say, Hello, this is Wes Anderson. I'm going to read you the recipe for the River Cafe Roast Pigeon Stuffed with Cotacino. This recipe serves six. You'll need one small red onion, peeled and chopped, two celery sticks, chopped, two tablespoons of olive oil, plus 25 milliliters for the roasting tin.

2:12You've got to put that on the side somewhere. You'll need one half ready-cooked Cotacchino sausage, half a sausage, 10 fresh sage leaves, shredded, please, 500 milliliters Chianti. That's more than a half bottle. And finally... I found a creature with my magic torch. You found a creature... Say that again? I found a spell with my magic torch. Where did you find it? Down near the stairs. This torch for children. Okay. I'll come see it in a moment. I'm just going to finish this recipe. Finally, perhaps most importantly, you'll need six breast pigeons. That's six pigeons from the breast... I guess these are French pigeons.

3:01Breast, I think, is near Lyon, near Geneva, near south of... It must be almost Burgundy or next to Burgundy or in Burgundy. I'm not sure. Just make sure they're plucked and cleaned. Now, preheat the oven to 230 degrees Celsius. To make the stuffing, soften the onion and celery in the two tablespoons of olive oil for 10 minutes over low heat. Small serpent, she says. Remove the skin from the cotacchino and crumble the meat with your hands. Put the skin somewhere else now. Add the cotacchino and sage to the onion and celery and fry together for a few minutes. then pour off the fat from the pan and add 250 milliliters i'm going to continue add 250 milliliters red wine and boil to reduce by at least half season with black pepper and allow to cool before stuffing into the birds into the six birds heat the 250 milliliters of olive oil in a roasting tin over a medium-high heat.

4:16Then brown each bird all over. Season with sea salt and black pepper and place the tin in the top of the hot oven, the upper shelf inside the oven, and roast for 20 minutes. Remove the tin from the oven and take out the pigeons. I'm not sure. Maybe we cook them a bit more through. I'm not sure how they come out at 20 minutes. Keep them warm. pour any excess oil out of the tin then add the remaining red wine over a high heat reduce that's so we got half the wine still to go i think yes over a high heat and so their pigeons are not in there anymore so okay over a high heat reduce the liquid by half so cook it until half it goes away i think all the people who cook know this i don't i don't know that then season with sea salt and black pepper.

5:07And then this is your sauce. Pour it over the pigeons to serve, maybe with some peas or something like that. You've read the recipe for pigeon. Why have you chosen this recipe? Do you cook it yourself? When did you last eat it? Were there any memorable moments that you ate it? Well, I have not cooked any pigeon ever. I haven't cooked any bird. I can't really cook. I can cook a few things, but I have chosen the recipe for no reason other than the fact that any time I see this pigeon on the River Cafe menu, I immediately order it. Pigeon is my favorite bird anyway. And Rue, in fact, once told me about an occasion when he ate a pigeon and he literally began to cry out of happiness.

5:56Juman saw the actual tears. Ruthie, I'm in the room here at the Chateau Lacoste which is extremely comfortable It's a great place So far I have not been out I haven't seen Richard's gallery yet which I'm going to go do in about an hour I've just been doing my work here in the room which is really all I want to do except for go see Richard's building You know, one thing I thought might be worth mentioning is for years we do often the first premiere of a new movie I make ends up being one where you're cooking at it. At your house, we had the first public screening of Grand Budapest Hotel in Italy many years ago.

6:45We showed Fantastic Mr. Fox on a sheet and that was the first time anybody had seen it outside of the production. we always plan to do one as you know and we always eat very well afterwards now i'm going to act like ruthie's asked me about how do we eat on our movies well you know on our movies what we do during the day we actually i don't like to stop work in the day on movies often you stop and there's a very long break and then it takes even longer to get back from the break so the way we've been doing is we have these little tables they're made to be folded into suitcases and we set them up on the right on the side of the set and the people who are actually working on the set which is kind of a small group other people working building sets and things they have a different experience but the group on the set we have our lunch there and it's brought out and for years i tried to make it just soup and to convince everyone that we would just eat soup and then get right back to work but we did have some very good soups in germany there was a shop across the street from the hotel that we lived where they would make soups for us every day but most people don't just want soup and eventually there was a mutiny in particular our key grip sanjay sammy said you can't push a dolly all day and just only eat a thin soup we started bringing sanjay his own steaks and things.

8:13But the thing we do also is when we finish the shooting for the day, we always have a dinner with the whole cast and the department heads, that group. We all live together in a small hotel usually, and we have our own little dinner room and cook. We always have great dinners at the end of the day. Almost invariably, everybody who's working in the cast and in those departments is there for dinner. Our costume designer usually shows up very late, sometimes close to midnight, but we keep a plate for her and usually a plate for the extremely large team of helpers who roll in. It just reinforces how dedicated she is because she works into the late hours.

9:00You know, I've done a lot of work in restaurants over the years. Noah Baumbach and I, we wrote a movie in Bar Pitti in New York. We were there for probably six hours a day for a year. And we still go there, of course, in New York. That's our canteen.

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10:06Plus, our pet-friendly stain-resistant fabrics ensure your sofa stays beautiful for years. Don't compromise quality for price. Visit washablesofas.com to upgrade your living space today with no risk returns and a 30-day money-back guarantee. Get up to 60 % off plus free shipping and free returns. Shop now at washablesofas.com. Authors are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply. Ruthie, am I allowed to turn the tables for a moment in this podcast and ask about, well, I've always loved the history of the River Cafe. You know, I've looked at the plans that show how it grew over the years from a little room, which was a canteen for Richard's Firm, for Rogers Cirque and Harbor.

10:56Was it always called? Were those partners all there in the beginning? Can I ask you to tell a bit about the beginning of the River Cafe and what it was like and who started coming there? And was it only at lunch at first? It reminds me of the commissaries of the old studios, which used to be such busy places. And I remember when Owen Wilson and I first went to Los Angeles to go to work, essentially, we, our producers, James L. Brooks and Polly Platt, they had, their offices were in the Sidney Poitier building on the Columbia lot, which was in Culver City. And it was, which had been the MGM lot.

11:36and the commissary was still a busy place. I mean, there were sort of two, but I don't know how much people use those anymore or if they're even there. But they were, you know, when I'm doing a movie, when I'm working on a movie, I try to have the lunch be briefest experience if possibly can be. We do it on the set. We bring tables onto the set itself and the people who are working on the set just have 15 minutes or something like that. That's the way I like to do it, but I love to have a... So I like the idea of having the canteen right there in the workplace, but then to have a canteen that grows into the River Cafe, that's an unusual story.

12:24Can I ask some nostalgic recollection of the beginnings of it and the evolution of it? Hi, Wes, it's Ruthie. and I'm sitting here looking at Santa Margarita and wishing you were here. It seems wherever I go on holiday, I wish you were there and I can understand why. So it's interesting your question and I'm really happy to turn the table or have you turn the table on me. When Richard finished the Pompidou after six years of living in Paris, working in Paris, creating that building, the view to going back to London was to create kind of, almost like you were describing, a studio community with open space, with common rooms, and a place to eat, whether it was commissary or canteen, that there would be a place where people could meet and talk over food.

13:20Very often what we did in Paris in a cafe or a bar on the way to the office or the way back. And I think what he did not want was to be just an office in a large building, and then everybody disappeared at midday and came back to work. So I think when they found the warehouses on the Thames, it was completely ideal because it was out of the center, it was on the river, it had the possibility of a green space. He actually tore down a building that blocked the view of the river and made that into a communal garden because it was quite large there were spaces taken by other architectural firms there was a space taken by a set designer there was one taken by a framer and so everybody was there doing different kind of creative things and then the challenge was where to eat what to do with that space and I can remember very few decisions are decisions I think that you can actually remember being made in your life but I do remember that we were on a ski holiday in Switzerland and Richard had sent out the office and sent out all sorts of applications for people who might want to open a restaurant a cafe a canteen in the Thames wharf and I turned to Richard I said you know the only thing worse not having a place to meet and to eat but do we have something mediocre, maybe I'll do it.

14:51And I'd come back from Paris, we had just had Beau, who was by that time four, who, as you know, was sort of 15 with Juman at the American School. And so that's kind of how we started the River Cafe. Rose and I met, I knew that Rose had worked with the McNally's in New York, and she was back in London, really wanting to cook. And you know, I was a domestic cook so I knew nothing about working in restaurants but I always say also that restrictions are sometimes the best things you can have we definitely had restrictions we had a very small space we had a very low budget of what we could create and we also had the council which for some reason really was against having anything in a residential area so they only allowed us to open to the people who worked in the warehouses and only at lunch.

15:46But then as word spread that this was going on, that there was a place in Hammersmith where you could go and have a pasta or a sandwich or Italian ingredients that we were starting to get. Faye Mashler, in her first review of the River Cafe, wrote in the Eating Standard, I'm going to tell you about a restaurant you cannot go to. And of course it was a big struggle for us because it was very hard to make money. We were competing not against other restaurants or cafes, but against the sandwich girl who would bring sandwiches on her bicycle. So really, like your idea of the commissary in a film, or working in a film and having, you know, tables brought in, was exactly what Richard wanted.

16:32To have a place where people could work, eat, go over for coffee, talk about a drawing. That's why we had the paper tablecloths, and we still do, so that the architects could draw while they sat there. We also wanted to be much more cafe, cantini, because if we had linen tablecloths or no tablecloths, it wouldn't be right. And in fact, not long ago, the Michelin people came in and said, you know, we could give you a second star, but you've got to lose the paper. And it's something we'd rather have than a star. I think that it's best to have paper tablecloths, not just on every table everywhere, but on every surface everywhere, because you never know.

17:13Something always comes out of the fact, if you have a paper tablecloth and a pen, this is always a great combination. Everybody's going to do something. So here's me pretending we're having the conversation again. Well, I live partly in Paris, and when we're in England, where we partly live, we eat at home every night. And when we're in Paris, we go out to dinner every night. When I was first kind of living in Paris or spending more time in Paris, Jumann and I, Jumann, my wife, we used to try new restaurants continuously. And then over the years, the thing I realized, my favorite kind of restaurant is a restaurant where I've already been.

17:57A restaurant where I know the place, I sort of know where I would like to sit and what I want to order already. And in France, I think if you're a foreigner, it helps if you're a familiar face in the restaurant. If you've been there 30 times, that's a good way to establish yourself there. I will say in France, I have a tendency to eat the, I wouldn't call them the healthiest dishes, the confit of duck and quite a few lamb chops and more pigeon. You asked about Bar Luce in Milan. Well, you know, we made this sort of restaurant bar, Bar Luce in Milan. It's what Miuccia Prada wanted, something like a kind of classic spot.

18:48And the sandwiches are very good. They make extremely good cocktails and things and lots of sweets and things like that. Gelato. I guess I was trying to make a place and try to draw on different places we love, like a bit of Nino in Rome and a bit of a place called New York Burger Town that's on, what is it, 43rd Street, 57th? I can't even remember where it is. near St. Pete's. Is that the cathedral? Gosh, I can't remember where it is. They have these, if it's still there, they have these tables where you sit more like desks with little arms to the tables. I'm wondering if there's one, is there one to mention in Paris or Rome?

19:29In Rome, we like to go to Nino. We like to go to Tulio. We like to go to Pierluigi. But maybe our other favorite place to go eat in the world is Tokyo. every now and then we find ourselves in Japan and they're as careful and interesting and inventive and perfectionist with their cooking as anyone in the world. Maybe, I guess on some level, it's the Japanese food and the Italian food that leads the way these days. I particularly love Japanese food, but an interesting thing, The last time we were in Japan, we were there for a couple of weeks probably. And at the end of our stay, our friend, Kon, had been trying to convince us to go to this Italian restaurant.

20:25And I was like, I don't want to go to an Italian restaurant. Signale Inoteca. The chef was called Toshiji, Tomori. Well, anyway, finally, the last night we were there, we just went with going to the Italian place. well, you would be very impressed because it would be one of the better ones outside of Italy and the River Cafe. I'll act like you asked about when we went on the boat. Yes, we went on the Queen Mary too, and we had a group with us, Jason Schwartzman and Roman and Roman's wife Jenny and Attilda Swinton Sandro, cop and me and my wife Juman and we really all had a great time I mean when the boat arrived from New York to England we tried to convince them to let us sail on to Germany but they had to bump us out of our rooms and we showed our movies and things and did little talks during the journey one of the great things was we had this room and it was on the opposite end of the boat from the kitchens.

21:35I mean, there are probably many kitchens on there, but we often arranged to have a curry dinner that we watched them roll the cart down a corridor that's probably about a kilometer long, and it was very good. We had very good dinners on that boat.

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22:58Parking shouldn't slow you down. ParkWiz gives every driver a shortcut. Book ahead, save up to 50 % and skip the hassle of circling the block. Park smarter, park faster. ParkWiz. Download the ParkWiz app today and save every time you park. All right. So Wes Anderson, there was Wes Anderson, Michael Caine, and Jake Gyllenhaal, who were our first three podcasts. And when we didn't really know what we were doing, we thought we might be just doing a recipe. So we asked Wes to choose a recipe, and he chose a recipe from the Blue Book, which was published in 1994, soon to be 30 years old. and it has Chianti Classico.

23:40It's stuffed with Cottochino and it's a breast pigeon, which coming up to Christmas is very Christmassy. It's a bit like the Bolito Misto using the Cottochino Chianti. What do you think about that recipe? It's one of those dishes that people who have worked in the River Cafe a long time ago come back and eat and they're like, it's like the menu was from when I was here before because it's one of those dishes that's timeless. It's a timeless dish, isn't it? I remember when I learned to cook pigeon when I was a young chef here and how you guys would say, don't cook it like we're in rules or a gentleman's dining club.

24:16It's not got to be served so pink that it's ripping off the bone. It can be cooked more like an Arosto Misto and cooked. So it's maybe cooked a bit slower, but so you can eat the whole pigeon. And, you know, Richard would literally... The whole pigeon, you see him kind of cutting off the legs but then picking them up. It's a great bird to have when we don't have the game season, so when we don't have grouse or partridge or pheasant, and then we can have pigeon all through the other seasons, don't we? Yeah. I mean, as an animal, I might offend people, but I really have a real aversion to pigeons generally.

24:57Maybe the Brits like the thought of eating them rather than seeing the flag. I swear. I was talking to Danny about it, and he was saying, you know, pigeon, in a way, it's so rich. It kind of can also almost taste like foie gras. Yeah, it's one of the ingredients that we can be flamboyant with, I feel. You can put things with it that you think, I can do a really decadent dish with this pigeon. Often you can put things like lardo, fresh chestnuts, cook it in Vincanto if you want to be really swanky. and you can really change the dish by just altering even the wine. Yeah, I like doing it. So especially when we do veilschen and red wine and you're thinking you're using so much red wine and then you think about what we can use as a white wine, as you say, a Vincente white wine.

25:43But we do them on bread. We can do them with bruschetta, with cavallonero. It's quite a versatile ingredient. Yeah, and you can do them in the summer with peas, local peas. Yeah, oh, that's very nice, vignoles. Yeah. And so Wes, I think the recipe that he chose, it's a bit eccentric. And the way he reads it is eccentric, but it's good. Let's hear what else Wes has to say about his memories of food growing up, cooking and eating. Can you describe a typical meal when you were a child? What was the food? Who cooked it? Can you paint a picture of a family meal? Well, when my parents were together, I think it was more of a communal type family meal.

26:21But most of my childhood, my mother was studying. After my parents had split, my mother decided she would like to be an archaeologist. So for 10 years, she was working on studying for her master's and then her PhD. And she did all this. She was taking care of three boys all the time. It was a little more thrown together. And she was juggling a lot of things. Wes, as a young boy, what is your earliest food memory? I was known as the one who liked hamburgers. My older brother was known as the one who liked hot dogs. I was Ernie. He was Bert. I drove the police car. He did the radio. I think for most things, anytime there were two options, we always shared.

27:12We never competed for the options. We identified with different ones, and that became part of our ritual. There was nothing typical. Every night was a different venue and a different situation. And I think possibly over the years, this may lead to why I've always liked to eat in restaurants. In fact, I tend to, if I'm not working on a film, I tend to work at home until the thing I do is to go out to dinner. Often I haven't left my residence until dinner. Now you mentioned food in high school. Well, I went to two high schools. First, a public high school. There was a cafeteria lunch, but I think I brought my lunch in a sack, and I don't really remember much.

28:02But then I went to another school, the school where we made Rushmore, and that school had a system that was a little more, it wasn't like a public school system. It was a thing where they run you a tab, and they send the bill to your parents. there was much more freedom in what you could eat. It was more like having a kind of canteen on the school campus, which was new for me. But the food was not memorable in either location, really. Although I will say, I don't know if I'd even heard of bagels before going to this school. And bagels did not become a huge part of my life. but I guess I started to see there was a lot out there that I didn't know about in terms of things to eat.

28:52When did you first meet Ruthie? Rough date, place, talking, do you remember what the event was, what you ate, who else was there, any color to bring to life, some storytelling? Well, you know, I first met Ruthie in Italy. I had met Rue already. Rue is Juman's middle school friend and then lifelong friend since then. So I consider myself as a late arrival. Nevertheless, I just insert myself into both families. We rented a house in Tuscany, which we thought was in the middle of a vast, empty countryside surrounded by vineyards. But it was actually surrounded by several other houses connected to it, all filled with families and busy.

29:37and then slowly we began to hear a lot of noises and we realized we weren't in an isolated place at all. Then we got a call from Rue to go where they were and we went down to your house, Ruthie, to where you often have stayed for many years and it was much better. We were much happier there. The people were very interesting and wonderful and the food was wildly improved over what we were eating where we were and along with all that, well, I met you. And also who happened to be there at the time was Ralph Fiennes, who I had met before, but who on this occasion was preparing the earliest stages of his adaptation of Coriolanus.

30:25And he showed me a little clip he had made, but he also played. I asked how he was going to do a certain speech and he did it for me in close quarters. In fact, just a few inches away from me and it was extremely powerful. And in that moment, I had the thought that I particularly wanted to write a movie for Rafe and my friend Hugo and I set to work on that shortly thereafter and we actually did the movie and Rafe actually played the part. In some of your films, you have starched linen, waiters, costume, trays of drinks, beautifully presented. Ah, yes. well, you know, this is a question about food in relation to my own movies I've made.

31:09And I can say two of them. One is in the Grand Budapest Hotel, there's a dinner during which the whole story of the movie is kind of told. And I've always loved an old menu. I like seeing first what they used to eat and what they have involved, what we don't eat that people used to eat, how the preparations and things have evolved. And as we know, often a dinner in a luxurious restaurant used to involve many, many courses and a lot more food. And, you know, I've always, A.J. Liebling wrote about food in a way I have always, I think he's the funniest writer about food. And we use some of that in another movie, The French Dispatch.

31:58And that one, we do have a tray of drinks, which shows everything from the aperitif that you would have at three o 'clock in the afternoon to the strongest digestif at the very end of the night, all spinning on one round tray. I mean, we made our own versions of each, I guess. I think, well, also in French, we have a cook and we tell a whole story of a cook and we have some peculiar dishes that he makes. In fact, pigeon, I think we call it a city park pigeon hash. His food is meant to be specialized in food for police working on locations, on stakeouts and things like that. So it has some special characteristics that make it more suited to that.