Documentarian Matt Tyrnauer takes on ‘Nobu’

0:00From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

0:14It's The Treatment, which you can also hear at KCRW.com. My guest, director Matt Tyrnauer, has always kept himself relatively busy. He's just here a little over a year ago with his film Carville, Winning is Everything Stupid, a film that I wish had been seen by more people for obvious reasons. I think what he has an affinity for is shooting people and capturing people who tend to be themselves a center of cultural movements, such as his films, Valentino, the Last Emperor, Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood. And his new film is Nobu. And we should say the film is about Nobu Matsuhisa. But again, I think he falls into this thing that you do, where you tend to focus on people who are themselves cultural movements, don't you?

1:01Yeah, I could also say I like to enter into worlds. And Nobu created a world and a culture and by now an empire of restaurants. There are, I think, about to be 65 of them around the world. And there are not many chefs at this price point because sometimes it's$1 ,000 a head in there who can expand this much and keep the quality as high and keep the reputation where it needs to be. But he wasn't born on third base. So there's a whole backstory here that I think is certainly the foundation of the film. So often you are attracted to these people. again, we say the same thing about Scotty or Valentino, who are consumed with a kind of ambition that finds itself once they find something to do with themselves.

2:00Well, also James Carville. I was making the James Carville movie and the Nobu movie virtually simultaneously. Wow. And while I didn't realize when I set out to do both, not at the same time, but, you know, you're sort of a prisoner to vicissitudes institutes that throw things off schedule. So this ended up being the case. Both of these guys are in their 70s when I start the films. And I realized that both of them are very successful people, household names who were total failures until they were about 40 and repeat failures. in the case of Nobu contemplating suicide both had these dark nights of the soul where their worlds fell apart around them and they didn't know how they would carry on and then within a few years after those moments they both had explosive success that made them definitive figures in their particular worlds but also both figures kind of in their way surrounded by sort of deaths that left a big impact and a lot of guilt for both of them.

3:17Nobu had contemplated suicide when the first restaurant he owned of part of burnt to the ground in Anchorage, Alaska in the early 80s. And he was bankrupt in debt with nothing and nowhere really to turn. and seriously contemplated ending it all. And later in life, after he had pulled himself up from the ashes and become one of the most successful chefs ever, and a very wealthy man, a friend, really his closest friend, who had been there for him when he had collapsed, committed suicide. and I think the emotional gravitational center of the film is Nobu grappling with his tremendous guilt over not doing more for his friend who ended his life.

4:23Whether he could have or not is a mystery. But just suffice it to say, on my first interview day with him, he broke down into compulsive sobs and didn't stop crying for about 16, 17 minutes trying to tell this story. And really, I don't think we'll ever recover from this. So I'd never had someone cry that much. You know, I'm not Barbara Walters. I don't try to do it. But sometimes people do. Sometimes people do break down. I'd never seen anyone do it quite like this. But there are moments like that in almost every one of these films you've done this moment where your subject, your protagonist, if you will, has to sort of reckon with this event, this incident that's been traumatic for them.

5:13And it's interesting because I was telling you before we got started, I read the book, The Noble Memoir, which feels kind of sprightly, but slightly impersonal. and what it doesn't get is the hesitation in his voice but also this thing that he does he keeps moving he keeps charging ahead and if there's anything that unites all these films it's the fact that your subjects are constantly moving they're always walking towards something they can't be stopped you can say that valentino was at a similar age too and wasn't constantly in motion i mean there's this this ambition that sort of sweeps them along and they almost have no time to reflect on what's gone on in their lives.

5:58Scotty Bowers is a very different character than Nobu. He was, to put it in shorthand, the pimps of the stars. He was in his, he ran a brothel out of a gas station. You can see this film on Hulu. It's called Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood. He was in his 90s when I started interviewing him. And he also similarly broke down over the death of his brother, Ernie Iwo Jima. and he was running from something for sure. But his is a classic story of the so-called American century, World War II veteran with severe undiagnosed PTSD who'd seen horrors in the South Pacific during the war and had other traumas in his life, became what would today be called a sex worker, then probably a hooker.

6:51And was probably the most successful one who, you know, never had a fall from grace. And certainly in Los Angeles, he was running from something. He was running from a past and childhood traumas, I think, and really never stopped. I mean, he's in semi-retirement at 94 when I'm filming him. And, you know, you can interpret that how you want to. but he's climbing ladders getting on roofs you know going up into palm trees and trimming them doing things that you know a 25 year old would be reluctant to do probably just to keep himself from thinking of a lot of things that he didn't want to think about nobu's never not on a airplane going to one restaurant or another he definitely is on the run i think a lot of these characters especially the ones who are literally and figuratively flying high financially and in terms of their profile are afraid that if they step off the treadmill or, you know, pop out of the habit trail, it'll all fall apart.

8:00That somehow they're skittering about and their constant motion keeps the thing going. It's almost like a vestal flame that if they stop, it'll go out. And I think with Nobu, there's a real question in this film about how you build an empire and how you build a luxury brand around somebody who was really a broke, inspired sushi chef in the 80s in LA and how you keep that thing flying high. We're talking about motion with my guest who was severely underestimating his own talents, Matt Turnhauer, director. His new film was Noble. He was last year for his James Carville film. It's The Treatment, which you're going to see at kcrw.com slash The Treatment.

8:48We get this sense of you capturing these people at a point where they've been for so long regarded as somebody with a service or a product rather than as a person. Because how many interviews has Carville done where he hadn't talked about any of that stuff before? And I've read the Noble book and I can tell you that a lot of this stuff is glossed over. I guess that's some cases that's what memoir does is it sort of puts a sheen on things. And there's a rawness that clearly interests you. At some point, we realize that none of these guys know what to do with their hands when they're sitting still.

9:21And we see that it becomes easier to talk rather than just try to stop fidgeting. I wouldn't say fidgeting, It's just this need to keep in motion. And it's not quite so fidgety with Nobu, but certainly sort of see that he doesn't quite know to do it himself when he's in what passes for a repose. And again, it's because these people are used to being addressed that what you do is great or what you've made is great rather than tell me about you. So I want to go back to my first film and how I came upon it as a subject and the revelation I had about why I should make this movie. and it's getting at what you're talking about.

10:02So this is about the very famous designer Valentino, who's a household name. He's still around. He's retired. He retired at the end of that film. I met him because I was sent to do a story about him for Vanity Fair where I was a writer for years. He had been written about for 45 years on a near daily basis in the Italian press and the global fashion press. And I thought, well, this won't be that interesting because he's been so gone over. And when I got there and spent some time with him, and this is a testament to the budgets of Condé Nast at that time and the golden age of that type of magazine journalism, where you could go and keep returning and flying overseas and really spend time with your subject, which made these stories substantive and substantial and interesting.

10:55I got in there and I realized this person's never been written about in any way that reflects what is going on in his life and made him successful. It was the story of a marriage, happened to be a gay marriage, figuratively, because it wasn't happening in Italy in the 60s when Giancarlo Giametti and Valentino became a couple. And Giametti took over the business side of a failing fashion business and helped Valentino become a household name and a global brand. No one had told that story. In fact, when I published the Vanity Fair story, when it came out, the Italian newspapers had a headline, Valentino Fa Outing, which is Valentino Comes Out, which is an extraordinary in plain sight type of journalism.

11:46So water is wet, as James Carville says. But, you know, OK, so people got that in the way that they got that Siegfried and Roy might be a couple or could have been at one point. But really, it was a story of the relationship, a love story that just had never been told. And he could give 100 interviews and the journalists would never get there. And this wasn't the story they were trying to tell. But finally, they let me tell it. and I said after I saw the real story would you let me make a film and they said yes and that was the result so this this is now what I look for I look for people oftentimes not always who have been are sitting there in plain sight and you think you know their story and they think they know their story because maybe they've told it so many times and it's been reinforced to them so many times and they've created extraordinary worlds, but no one, including them, really maybe understands the full dimension of this particular world.

12:49That's a common theme for sure. And it's a really exciting thing to do if you're let in there to pull this enterprise apart, pull the story apart and reconstruct it in a narrative that makes sense and is entertaining enough to keep people's attention and kind of sometimes knock your socks off. We're going to take a break and give listeners a chance to put their socks back on. My guest is Matt Turnhauer. His new film is a documentary, Noble, which is in theaters. It's The Treatment. There's more to come. Stay with us.

13:28Welcome back. I hope you got your socks back on. It's The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. You can go to kcrw.com slash retreat. But my guest is our old friend Matt Turnhauer, who hasn't been here since his James Carville documentary of a little more than a year ago. His new film is about the restaurateur and sushi artist Nobu. First of all, it's just that these people have been around for so long that they are not regarded as people anymore. And they're often covered as these phenomena because they've been successful for so long. I mean, in the case of Nobu, over 30 years with a luxury brand. What other restaurateur can claim that kind of success?

14:10I can say the same thing about Valentino to some extent about Scotty, I think. Certainly with Carville. These are people who have been treated in a certain way. I think also it comes from your background in journalism, but also the kind of journalism, magazine journalism, where you did get to spend time with people, and you didn't expect that the first hour you talked to them was going to give you everything you needed. Yeah, I'm going to give more testimony about the importance of well-financed journalism. I was brought up at Vanity Fair Magazine. Graydon Carter was the editor, and Cy Newhouse was running the company that he owned.

14:50Newhouse was a church and state type of publisher of the old school. He did not, you'll see in Graydon's book, he did not interfere in the content of the publications, and he gave the editors free reign. And generally, you know, if they did well, they could stay there a long time. Sometimes he would brutally, mercilessly fire them if he didn't think they were doing well. That was part of the story. And the New York media at the time breathlessly reported all of this. And now no one really seems to care about anything in that world. But what I would take from it is that this is why it's important to have well-financed independent journalism because it yields magnificent reporting that can change the world and influence people and change the culture and Vanity Fair did all those things.

15:39So I take a page from that. I thought my long, you know, sometimes there were 8 ,000 word stories. It seemed to me with a film bachelor's degree that I was writing in a way treatments for nonfiction films or stranger than fiction films. So I thought that would be interesting to do. I was very influenced by the Maisel brothers and Frederick Weissman and Penny Baker and Hegidus and all the direct cinema people of the mid-century. And that's how this whole thing got going. But it's based on this hanging around, reporting for a long time. Gay Talese, I think, has a book out about his epic magazine piece called Frank Sinatra has a cold, which is one of the pillars of new journalism.

16:31And he talks about that period of how you reported a story and how you became a kind of resident alien in the world of your subject. If you had the access or didn't have the access, had to figure out how to get the access, but were given the time to linger and to observe and to engage. And new journalism has a lot to do with what I do. I think it's a big influence and part of the foundation of everyone that does documentaries today, whether they know it or not. These are also people, we should say too, who spent a lot of time in front of cameras and know how to deport themselves and know how to be glib and basically tell the story that they've been telling so long, you can see their boredom in telling it.

17:19And I think part of it, what you do is it's a relief to finally get a chance for them to really speak. there's a section in the Noble that really I think sort of describes what you do where he's talking with his staff and he's saying chef makes with a heart so serve using your heart and that feeling of serving with your heart so to speak becomes a part of the way your subjects reveal themselves. The sushi chef is the chef who prepares the food with their own hands in front of the customer and makes eye contact and then hands it to the customer. That's not the way most kitchens operate. So that was interesting.

18:03That's the kind of foundational principle of this. And that's when Nobu talks about putting your heart into it and serving with your heart. But that's a one-on-one concept for which he was mentored by a master chef in Tokyo. And then he brought it to Lima, Peru, where he set out to make his name and failed, and then brought it to Alaska and failed again, and finally to Los Angeles in the 1980s and had this explosive success. The The transmogrification now of something that is personal, the sushi chef and the customer and the eye contact and the satisfaction you get from doing something perfectly and seeing the satisfaction of the customer across the sushi bar.

18:59How do you transmogrify that to a global empire with 65 restaurants and hundreds of chefs whom you train for maybe an hour or two, if you train them at all? Your designees, lieutenants train them mostly, and he goes around and checks. How do you do that? How do you keep that quality up? how do you get your vision and your style across to so many kitchens and also keep it alive and fresh and literally and figuratively and he likes to use local ingredients from the countries in which the restaurants open so he's kind of modifying and allowing the chef some freedom and he'll go around and correct it so you see that in the film because we follow him around the world to a few countries, actually.

19:50You know, it doesn't always go well. He's not really a kitchen confidential, you know, satanic force. You know, he's a gentle presence. But he has to tell them how he wants it. He's a perfectionist, and you see that also. I liked capturing that scene. He's correcting the chefs in Cabo San Lucas, and they're not doing it right and he's not happy. So you see him be not happy and you see him. It's excruciating at one point, I think, where he just keeps sending it back. But that's how it's done. That's the process. And, you know, the customer can decide. I mean, it's hard to escape a Nobu without a$500 per head bill.

20:37That's a big commitment. And you're asking a lot of your clients when you charge them that much. How do you keep that going? It's the treatment. We're talking about Nobu and the film Nobu, who is my guest, Matt Turnhauer, the director of the film. You'll see the show at kcrw.com slash the treatment. But I think what this comes down to for me, we're saying so many things about what your films are and are not. But I think this accrues to both you and the way you write and the way you make films is you're interested in people who have a style and style and the way that that style or deports itself is important to the way they communicate as these kind of brand ambassadors for themselves, as you will.

21:20They are all singular people who tend to attract acolytes and people who want to do what they do. But these are people who are incredibly sort of judgmental about the way people, their acolytes follow them. I'm not trying to be reductive, Matt, but I do see certainly there are linkages in your work. I think you got to it earlier when you said observational. That, for me, was something that emerged with my writing at Vanity Fair. I remember Graydon gave me some Lillian Ross pieces from The New Yorker. She was a great observational journalist. and then I was reading Joan Didion and we mentioned Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe and Gore Vidal was my mentor who is a little different but he was certainly a great observer and a satirist, by the way.

22:15We used to joke at the magazine when there were too many eyes in the first paragraph when the reporter would be first person having too much of a kind of experience about themselves and not the subject of the article. So I think the goal with what I have to do is to be there and insert myself in the situation enough to be the resident alien observer and the counterpart in some time, in some cases, of the subject who he needs something he or she needs someone to talk to generally so you know how you do this you stand kind of next to the camera close enough to the lens where they can look at you and not look down the barrel of the lens but kind of look slightly off they're talking to me and that creates the effect really that's the eyeline and that in that eyeline really is the essence of the film because they're talking to someone who happens to be me and I don't like to put myself in it.

23:35The most you'll hear from me is a kind of shouted question off camera to maybe keep it going sometimes or to bring awareness that there's someone there doing something and then the rest happens in the edit room. But basically being an inch or two away from the lens at eye level is the way these things are done. That's the physical position that I put myself in. And then when I was writing it all out, you know, I didn't have a lens. There I had a pencil, but that was eye contact. This is a little different. This is like eye contact with another eye that's recording. How to put that together and tell the story in a kind of invisible style, which is something the new wave French critics coined for directors like Howard Hawks and to some extent, John Ford or Mankiewicz, the other masters of the golden age of cinema.

24:41That's a big influence on me too, the invisible style. So there's a style, but it's not announcing itself. I think what's interesting, finally, too, about the films is that we can talk about them at length and not give them away. Because we can talk about the scenes in the film, but these scenes don't tell us what the entire film is. I mean, I was thinking about something that happens early in the movie, that it's kind of a simple description, a turn of phrase, that in some ways or another could be applied to many of the films. that just changed the subject, where Nobu says, food is not simply something to fill up your stomach.

25:17And you can say the same thing about fashion and then Valentino or politics for Carville. These are things that are so often reduced that are so much more than people think they are. A film about Nobu, my God, that line heard Gene shouts, creating voice. Well, how much talent can he have? He just cuts up raw fish. Oh, my God.

25:40yeah i actually really like gene shallot

25:46i thought he's not on camera elvis this is so great he's not even on camera you you knew his voice uh he's not identified but yes that was gene shallot but that was so much of the period this was the you know it was the early 90s a little late actually but you know to denigrate raw fish as something that was, you know, took no talent to create. But that was good for me because it showed you that people had that, now we think, strange perspective at the time. I noticed Valentino just had a kind of museum opening in Rome. And they were quoting him. And I think was emblazoned on banners and put in books and things was, I love beauty.

26:36It's not my fault. Valentino. And that's from the movie. He says that early in the movie to a journalist. And I remember in the edit room finding that we'd shot this interview he was doing backstage at a fashion show. And he just blurts this line out. I love beauty. It's not my fault. That's become kind of the Bartlett's quote for Valentino, which is great. I love that. I mean, this is the beauty of this type of filmmaking is that you find these lines. You don't write the line or anticipate the line. You find it and then you write it backward, kind of. It's reporting. And it's a wonderful process, but it takes time.

27:22And it's sort of with the slow food movement of cinema. That's a great way to put it and a great way to end it. My guest is Matt Turnhauer, director, and yes, still a journalist. He can't leave that behind. His new film, his new documentary, his director is No Boom. Matt, as always, it's a pleasure. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you.

27:47Documentary director Matt Turnhauer has taken us inside the worlds of people who reshape cultures we think we already know. Chef and icon Nobu Masahisa is just such a person. And the subject of Matt's new documentary, Nobu, is available now on demand. Subjects worthy of a second look at the archive. KCRW.com slash the treatment. More to come. I'm Elvis Mitchell.

28:31It's The Treatment, which you can also hear at kcrw.com slash the treatment. I think my guest director, Joshua Raffae, has a talent for getting people to talk about things that they can't believe they're talking about. And some incredible stories about really, at the very least, toxic masculinity. His amazing documentaries include Lorena on Lorena Bobbitt and Bob Ross' Happy Accidents, Betrayal and Greed. His newest project, which is on HBO, is the three-part documentary that's about so many things, including about its title subject. It's called The Mortician. First, Josh, thanks so much for being here, and congratulations on the success of the film.

29:15Thank you, Elvis. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. There is this thing you do that's in so many films about how the dangers of sort of like 20th century masculinity. It's funny. I'm not conscious of that. I got to be honest. But I was thinking about that since the last time we spoke about it. And throughout the years, I've just had people in my life point out that I am attracted to just sort of wild characters. Even when I was a kid, my friends were nuts. My best friend when I was a kid, his nickname was Crazy Leroy, you know. And Crazy Leroy didn't know what he was going to do after high school.

29:53I'm going to leave out his real name. You'll understand why in a second. He didn't know what he was going to do after high school. He's sitting in his room. This is back in New Jersey. And his mother walks into the bedroom and she says, what are you going to do with yourself? A commercial for the Marines comes on and he says, I'll do that. Now, that was about a week before September 11th and he signed up the next day. And so then he went and he did two tours and he thrived. He loved being in a reconnaissance unit. It was a place that he could just he could go full bore. And when he got back, he didn't get a regular job.

30:28He started working for a sketchy friend of his father's. And I wasn't exactly sure what he did, but I knew it wasn't legal. And then fast forward a few years and he is arrested at about five o 'clock in the morning. I think it was probably the DEA who came banging on the door. And he got taken down in this huge sting operation where it turned out he'd been working for the Albanian mob. There were murders. There was the burning down of some warehouse overseas. There was a massive drug ring. And it was just this wild thing where I had been living out in L.A. at this point, pursuing my dream of being a filmmaker.