Welcome to Ruthie's Table for a production of iHeartRadio and Adami's Studios. Michael Mann and I met about twenty five years ago through architecture. On a trip to London, he asked to visit the Lloyd's Building, designed by my husband Richard Rogers. For us, it was a manner for if Michael was a fan of Richard's architecture, Richard was a huge fan of Michael's movies. In fact, when watching Alley, Miami, Vice, Collateral, my arm would be constantly squeezed, not due to a dramatic moment of fear or tension or mystery, but at the way the buildings, streets, airports, bridges, and interiors, even elevators were portrayed on screen. Over long dinners, Richard and Michael often compared making a movie to making a building. Michael once said, while at least Richard, in a building, you can say to a client, if you remove a column, the building will fall down. Try saying that about a scene to a producer. Of all the movies Michael has made, though, the one that I consider the greatest is sixty seconds long shot entirely underwater in a swimming pool. Michael and summer with their children swimmingly, wishing a happy birthday to Richard. No architecture in this movie, just love so Michael, would you read the recipe for sure? This is a Southern Italian version of a tello tonato cold rose veal. First tomato, so five hundred grams of cold rose velle, two hundred and fifty million leaders of tomato sauce, six basil leaves, fifty grams of salted capers, two lemons, and extra virgin olive oil. Slice of veal is as possible. It squeeze the juice of one lemon and mix it with three times his volume of olive oil, and season. Lay the veal slices over each plate, season with sea salt and drizzle with the dressing. Spoon over the tolato sauce, and scatter with the capers and basil leaves, and then drizzle with olive oil. This dish Fatello tonato is very northern, and this is a southern version. And I wonder whether you have traveled from north to south in Italy? What is your Italian traveling experience? Very but mostly spending a little time in Naples once upon a time, and then a Ventice and drove around the Dolomites at different times, but mostly it's been It's been in the Media Romagna around Mona Marnello with a Frari factory is then in Bologna Milan where all the great design is, and it's very different. You know, we're just describing northern Italy. I don't know what you ate in Naples and this dish being so southern that it is, it's not even region to region or city to city. It's can be village to village town, you know, family to family. The way that people eat in Italy. First time I visited the Ferrari factory went across the street to Cavellino, Russia, mont that has been there since the nineteen fifties and the cuisine is moderns. So it's a big metal cart full of horribly boiled meat. Butlito misto, that's right. Yea, yeah, I actually really love it. But they do cook at a very long time and you get the tongue and you get the get everything. Yeah. My grandmother hit the neck of totally destroying meat. I think it came from Okay, from bigger Russian. Ever tell me about her. So just starting going back to your child. So your grandparents came, both of them from Russia. My grandpas came from Russia. They came from about seventy or eighty miles north of Tcherno. Did they come from the same place or did they meet. They can't know. They came from the same place. They came from over. My grandfather had to leave a very traumatic circumstances in nineteen twelve, and it took him ten years to get my father, who was one at the time, and my grandmother to the United States. Your grandfather came first and twelve, and then did he got direct editions. He went to White Chapel, he was in the British Army. Then it wasn't in a British army. Then he came. Then he went to Hartford, Connecticut. Then he was an American Army in the First World War. Then First World War. Yeah, and then in nineteen nineteen he lost his hearing and the flu epidemic. Yeah, and my grandfather died in the the same generation, you know. And then find nineteen twenty two is able to get my grandmother my father out and then they moved to Schaggle. But she was a spectacular woman, very very witty, very politically, very progressive. But when she killed as a cork were condicianus. She made these cheese fish is kind of a It's a bread, small bread thing that's cooked in olive oil and has either meat or cheese on the inside. And what it's made in a cast iron frying pan that's been around for forty years. It's fantastic. And remember one time I was driving home from her house. I picked up a blue earthenware container of this of these things and around the seat of the cars cars at fifty four Plymouth. It was my uncle Sam's car that he let me drive the car. There was a lot of traffic on California Avenue and I was driving back to tour house and uh so I took a hard light on Catalpa and took a left out an alley and hit a gigantic pothole in the alley and in the way time slows down. I saw this earthen where container of my grandma's conditions start to fall off the seat and slow motion, and as I saw myself had to get to a telephone pole and in a unthinking moment, it was either saved the conditions or saved the car, so I reached for the conditions and just crashed the car into the pole. This to die for Candish might not have been a great death, but that's how much it meant. It's got all the important early themes of basically immature life at that point forward, which is driving cars and and and so your grandmother was the cook, She made the conditions, but she the one that overcooked the beef. Or was that your mother? Oh, she over a cooked the beef. I don't know. I think it was. I mean it was a standing joke in the family. My brother and you know, you would shoot it until you your jaws ache. You couldn't mastigate this. What else did your grandmother? Did she live with you? By the way, your grandmother she no, she didn't. So you would go to her house, and that an event to eat in her house. And my father was my father stopped and saw her every day. And later in life when I knew more about like, I realized there's because it's probably the ten years that they were alone together. There was a certain bond there. Because while my grandfather was gone, came the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Civil War, and there were programs in the area from the the Civil War, from the white Russians, So you know, there are hard times. If your grandmother brought her food, did your mother did they move towards American food? My mother was born in the United States, Okay, so mothers, my grandmother, my grandmother cooked. You know, if you cooked the way they traditionally the way they did, you went, you went to the store, you bought alife chick and they killed the check and you brought the chick at home. You know, I'm not going back in the nineteen fifties. And what was it like in your house? Who did the cooking at your house? My mother? Yeah, did your father ever venture into the kitchen or yeah he did, and he had a real sensibility for cuisine for um fruit number one, but then also fine imported mushrooms from Poland, for example, a certain kind of mushroom barley soup. Or when I was working for my father when I was a kid, when I was like twelve to sixteen, he had a like supermarket, a small supermarket, and in the winter I was I was delivering groceries and it's templow when you're carrying groceries a wagon or something carrying a porsch that you got cold. And he always had some gigantic pot with some kind of a mass of stew, you know, cooking at it all day long in the grocery store. In the back of the grocery store. Yeah, it was a very family kind of a kind of affair um and exotic kinds of smoked fish from Eastern Europe would show up. There's there'd be something hanging in the basement, but he would sell that that was that's that's where, that's where we had. That's we had at home, and the grocery store sold. It was just a big Yeah, it was just a standard kind of supermarket, neighborhood superman market. What was the area. It's near the northwest side, it says, kind of a mixed kind of lower middle class, working class area, very very diverse population. Two waves of Polish immigrants, very upper middle class wave of Polish immigrations from the nineteen twenties, very sophisticated people, Jewish, Italians, some Irish. So it was quite mixed. I saw when they had we used to go to a church right after nineteen forty six forty seven, right after the right after the war, there was a neighborhood church a block away that had the showed movies in the basement, old black and white, sixteen millimeter movies. And I remember being taken that I was very young and I saw a movie. I just remembered certain things about it. In nineteen ninety one, when I cad, I couldn't figure out what to do next, what filmed to do next? I remember that railing around in my brain was this image of a of an Iroquois Indian head shaved, bold and comp mind with a red coat, a British uniform eighteenth century British uniform soldier. And that's such an anomaly because we always saw as your kid, you always saw American you know, Native Americans and cowboys or something. And that stuck in my mind, and also a corollary tragedy of the death of a young woman. And I realized that this has been rattling around in my head since I was about the three and so it was last of the Mohicans, as so one of you got to go to last Mohicans. So this, this old neighborhood really had this residence. I think things impressed themselves on your memory when you're very young and ways that are huge. And then at home, who is it you have a brother or sister? Had a brother? And did you sit down for meals? Did your father come backsolutely? We waited. My father came home. He took a bath and took a shower, and we formally sat down and he always had a shot of whiskey, and he had shot of whiskey and uh and we had a formal dinner every night. And that continued till you left home. I continued till I left home. When you left home, what was that like? Going from being cooked for every day and then being out there? Did you cook yourself? Where were you after I did? I went to I went to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and then after four years there, I went to London. And uh, yes, I did. I cook for myself. I also was working as a kind of a short order cook, doing breakfast at a girls dormitory in the morning and Wisconsin. So it was just interesting getting up at five three in the morning and Wisconsin in a winter and going to you know, a lot of from your grandmother to your mother, to the grocery store to working. Did you ever work in a restaurant? Yeah? I was cook one summer. Yeah, which is crazy. You will blanche at some of these stories from these places we used to because there'd be a massive rush and it was a memory tusk because you were having to remember all these orders at the same time. And somebody ordered a steak the way we would get a steak done quickly, somebody would grab it out of the freezer. They throw it down the kitchen. We would catch it and dump it into French friar in the fire. Absolutely horrible, Probably guilty of sub form of water or something, because there's probably regular diners who had earlier heart disease these things. Yeah, and that was Wisconsin. And then you went, this is but what about because I was in London in the sixties and it was kind of I always felt there was a kind of beginning of that multicultural excitement of food rationing was you know, only fifteen years before, after the war, I think that and then and then in the sixties there seemed to be a lot more food of grease and Italy this it was much more vibrant. Did you remember the food of this totally absolutely my experienced with bigger shore of cooking all this stuff. This is in the this in your early sixties and the States, and uh, I talked about you're working for my father. This is in the nineteen fifties. But in sixty five I went to London to in a film school for two years and I stayed there for six years. And the cuisine was, you know, basically beans on toast and transport calf yeah, and chip sandwiches. Did you ever have? I wasn't big chip sandwiches. That was really big on transport calfs, beans on toast or you're having uh, you know, or eggs. I used to love every swimming in bacon fat maybe large. And the revelation was I couldn't afford it. But the revelation was was Greek food, particularly particularly there's a heavy influence from Cypriot food, so it's like Chef Taja sausage and those kinds of things. So there's these little funky kebab stands around Charlotte Street just north of Oxford Street, and an Indian food, which is a revelation. Yeah, where did you live? I lived all over. I lived in Queen's Way very briefly, and then we're on New King's Road. Then I lived in Balham and clap up of South and back in South ken Did anybody ever take you to a restaurant that was Yeah? I started actually started baking a little bit of money and then and then the thing was so attractive? Was I think on Fulham Fulham Road there was an Italian restaurant and I was living on ten pounds a week. Literally it's five pounds for rent, five pounds for but the ambiance of a nice Italian restaurant on a spring or a summer day and you know, a Saturday or Sunday with families kind of which to me was kind of was so touching about the River Cafe because that ambiance is there and its fullest, most technicolor for him in your restaurant and this whole extended family that you created. So were you taking when you were in film school? Then? Was that in London? Outside? It was in London, it was in Covent Garden, It's on Charlotte Street. Then the move to Covent Garden. Yeah, it's a London film school. Yeah, and what was that like? That was great? Yea. For the first time in my life, I was doing exactly only what I wanted to do, which is make film, which is a revelation to me when it happened. When in my junior year at Wisconsin, I took a film history course. For a kind of cynically, I thought, oh, we're gonna there's gonna be three credits for looking at movies. And I didn't expect to get completely mugged and hijacked by this whole notion which occurred in a flash of light, like the skies parted and the bolt of lightning came down and said you will do this, you will become a film director. And from that point out, that was it. That's what I wanted to do with you. It was Ridley Scott there, and was Alan Parker and Ridley Scott. Were they in the same Did you know them? Then? I knew Ridley. Yeah, I didn't know Alan Alan Parker years later, but I knew Ridley. And you know, in the late sixties, I started the small production company after I got out of film school in London, and we made some commercials and documentaries and I shot some of Paris. After Majorn sixty eight, I was politically pretty involved. Yeah, and so life, life was changing and evolving. Um At one point I worked at twentieth Century Fox towards sixty nine in production, and by that point I was making enough money. It's got to live reasonably. And I had a production manager I worked with whose wife was fresh and he was quite a spectacular cooking. That was probably the first serious exposure I had two really good Cuso home cooking. Yeah, it was home cook French food. And then we were spending a lot of time in France at that point, in trailing to Morocco in Italy, and so the world was getting to be a much larger place. In France was a huge few. Being in Paris being well sixty eight was pretty wild. Well, we got there much later. We got there in sort of seventy one, but there was still the buses full of police and Daniel kombend I interviewed kombend Alan jam Alan Cravine. You have that footage. It wound up. It wound up in the bowels of NBC News Telling someplace and I tried to find it years and years ago, couldn't find it. Did you make a documentary about from beginning to end it? Where you just is it footage for the news to documentary about the focus of documentary was that the sixth May June had happened, and what's what's going to be the after effect? And that's what it was really focused on. And the production at the time, which was partially true, partially or not, was that the major impact was going to be amongst teenagers into these stays, and that there was a radicalization of the young workers, particularly young workers at the Renault factory who were CGT, and they started to look at the CGT in a very different light as being basically reactionary. But the idea that you're in a country at forty percent of the population is on strike, and if you turned on RTF at six o'clock to watch the news, there'd be some girls she might or might not reading the news, sitting on a desk. She may may not have a shirt arm. I mean, it was everybody. A youth generation had taken over, and it was wasn't just students who was students and young workers. Yeah, but then you know, and they say that the gold that he had a plane ready, it was very very close to him leaving. He was, Yeah, he was basically a prisoner in the Laza Dallas. And then he made a deal and he couldn't count on the French army in France because they would deploy and then some you know, girls would show up with some flowers and the soldiers would walk away from the APC's. It was complete chaos. So he made a deal with the French Army of the Rhine, because Germany still occupied at that point, to come in and support him, and they extorted from him, in effect, the release of Salon, who was a right wing of French or general who over the war in Algeria. It was part of a plot to a sassinated the Gall and was in prison, and that that was the quick pro quo of the Gal getting support from the military. And so you think that then they marched in from Germany and so that a kind of diver in and everything dissipated, so that the military quashed it, right, Yeah, I was because there was always theories that the working class didn't you know, that it was a student led revolution and that it just didn't have the backing of well but every but the people who were intellectually on top of it, who are at the heart of it, knew nothing serious was actually going to happen in the real world right then and there. It's very sophisticated. The irony is that is that is sitting in London prior to Major and sixty eight, everybody dismissed the French as Cafe Marxist or something, and that, ironically, that sort of sixty eight was just extraordinary. You're in Czechoslovakia, Mexico City. I was in Grosvenor Square in October twenty fifth. Yeah, that was there, you were there, was there, Rika, he was there. Y have a picture. By the march. It was heavy times and as I said, when Richard won the Pumpetoon, we went which still there would be go to the cinema on a Sunday night and it was scary coming back because so just they would lock the police when they just just lock them in these fans for hours and you just can imagine the tension and the fear, and you know the horror of having to sit in there. That's trying. And then you did when did you go to Morocco? Why was that? I went to Morocco just to be in Morocco. Went to Costa blanc on because I'd seen in a movie called Costa blanc On. You had to go to Costa blanc and great food, now, great food, food marvelous dysentery. In some it's looking at some hot on the coast and some healer. A woman came in and gave me something. I don't know what it was. It must have been some opiate, because I suddenly felt great, got all bound up, and then kind of continued on tour through the endless mountains. A bit. When you were on a movie set, did you think about how to feed the crew? Did you eat yourself? I do, and I make sure that the food on the set is really, really great and they have great catering. Is a guy named Mario in Miami who I used all the time, and I couldn't tell you. He's by Miami Vice and other pictures. I just bring them with me. I think that's kind of unique because I've talked to various directors and people who've worked on film, and they say it can be a disaster for lunch. You know, there's just they're just terrible food, and people eat unhealthy food. And then the amount of time it takes to stop for lunch and eat, it's pretty it's pretty tough. Japan was interesting because because the catering was not great, it's kind of, you know, kind of you know, cardboard, bento boxes and stuff, and we improved it when I shot the Tokyo Vice Pilot in Tokyo, did you tell me about food in Tokyo food and to spectacular. You can't get a bad meal if you're trying to get a bad meal. Within We're living in Dakayama, and within one hundred and fifty meters of our apartment, we're probably half a dozen spectacular restaurant, any one of which would have been the best sushi restaurant in Los Angeles. Did you eat anything else other than Japanese? Yes, Italian. There are the you know, like literally one hundred and fifty feet outside the front door was the Princey Bakery from Milan had an outpost next to Staya, the big Setaya bookstore. So there was fantastic Italian bakery, goods every morning, the French food with spectacular in Tokyo. Yeah, people in Tokyo they spend money in a different way than they do in the West. It's they don't spend money on living spikes. They spend money on clothes, on food, on cars, but not on living space. Yeah, it's funny. I once spent morning in a cafe in Milan, and I just kept seeing all these people coming in rest immaculating, beutifully and young people, and I said, how do they afford to buy that product shirt that Gucci's fetter? And they live at home? You know, Yeah, they live at home. They don't pay rent, and so they stay until they get married or they really leave it. And that gives you, you know, a lot of money to spend, as you say, on food, on clothes, and on the culture, you know. And so when you're going tomorrow to Milan, where is unflat him Alan, they were driving right to motor know, yeah, and tell me about that. What are you doing? We're doing a very early pre production on a feature film about three months of the life of Enzo Ferrari in nineteen fifty seven, when all of the all the dynamics of his life that had happened to him at that point come into collision in those three months, which will determine the fate of everything. He's going to be calm. His son Dino had died by the year earlier. His wife sent warning. He had another child in a legitimate son named Piero Piero Lardy, who was starting to wonder why his name is Lardy and not Ferrari, and this company was going bankrupt, so is his rival Maserati. They were both competing to see who could get financing. His wife Laura, who was kind of a Maria Callis figure, was about to find out what the whole town knew, which is that there was another family living in custol Betro. So it's all of these things come into collision. And the opera house, one of the two opera houses in Mode that was right next door. So opera was a huge plays a huge role in this. Early on, wanted to be an opera singer. Then he wanted to be a sports writer, yeah, sports writer. Then he wanted to be a race car driver. And she was a race car driver in the early twenties, and then he raced one or two times against Nuvalari and knew he had no future as a race car driver and started managing the Alfa Romeo racing team and then started his own scooter Rio within Alpha, and that that was the that's that's the origins of the company, which he then began at forty seven with Laura. And they started with absolutely nothing. So if you think of racing and what is racing, which is an interesting question. Why is it so appealing. I think it's so appealing because we have a basic human impulse to exceed limits. I think it's primitive and drives or everything we do, whether it's going out of space or doing research, or of going building machines to make us go faster. So that's why I think it taps into I think that's why it's appealing. Are there food scenes in the movie. Not yet, but I'm allment to suggestions. Okay, tell me about food in your movies, because there's obviously in heat when they met in the diner or there's another diner. Does that interest you the kind of language or the kind of intimacy you can have in a restaurant as opposed to it's such an important thing in life. And there's two fantastic restaurants that talk about heat. There's there's one of the Broadway Dell, which Sadley is no longer there. It's where de Niro picks up Amy Brennaman and head. And the other's the coffee shop scene that Katee Mandelini, which is spectac Cape. Mandelini was a carfee with a big coffee shop restaurant with wonderful modern architecture and contemporary architecture, and right on Wilshire Boulevard, about a block block west of the Academy, and everybody in Los Angeles, on the west of Los Angeles loved this restaurant. Whoever owned the building decided they should double the rent, and the restaurant went out of business, and there was so much animosity that nobody would open another restaurant there because they knew that nobody would go out of hostility to its presence. So it's seven or eight years later, it's still vacant. It's a sitting. There's no one ever went in there. I always think, you know, I say over and over again that people do very private things in a very public space in a restaurant. You know, do you think that's interesting as a scene that you could have filmed, perhaps in somebody's kitchen, that you would film in a restaurant? What is the restaurant to me? For some reason, I don't know why, it's always strukes me as it's it's social, it's warm, and when I don't be honest, is working as it does in your restaurant? You feel that you the phrase extended family, which which you use the way you view it. You really feel that presence. And so it's both intimate and it's and you're in amongst humanity at the same time, and you're doing safety around you don't safety, And you're also part of a context, you know, so you're as sentimate and you're part of the human context, the social context simultaneously. Uh. And you're doing something as essential as eating and it's appealing to all your sensory intake. You know, it changes your mood. I mean, it's do you think you can tell about a person by the way they are in a restaurant? Are they nice to the waiter? Do they say thank you? Do they share their food? Does it tell you something if you were going to hire somebody, would you want to take them to a restaurant first or would you rather bring them home or or disinterview them across the table. Well, I'm a bad person to ask, because as a film director, I'm constantly find myself in an involuntary way. It's like it's like I'm like an MRI. I see what people do, and I just you know, and I'm probably in my mind thinking if I had a cast or direct an actor to be this kind of person in a scene. Would I'd be telling him to wear that shirt or he's eating with the wrong fork, or the way he wipes his mouth, or he doesn't put his napkin in his lamp, or the way he picks up a glass. And one of the things you notice right away is that you can pick up a glass, but if you're a convict and falsome, this is how you pick up the glass. Why is that every gestion gas that way? Because it's a possession, it's a movement, it's an action, you know, and everything is telling. And so people in restaurants are both totally self conscious and self aware and a totally unconscious and unself aware depending on who they are, what's going on. So it's both revealing and what they're hiding, or it's revealing and what they don't know they're feeling. Yeah, I think there's something romantic about restaurants. There used to be a restaurant here called Ladome, Yeah, and we went to La Dome. It was our family restaurant. Every occasion was at La Dome. You know, be a gigantic roundtable. We have a very large family, four daughters and sometimes extended boyfriends and what have you. And so every time we went out to dinner, it was like seven or eight nine people going out to dinner, and all important family occasions were there. And then it was Toscano over here at the last twenty five years as a family place, and you get to know the waiters so well, and then there's a party because you know, Alberto's retiring after twenty years, so you know, and then we meet people who are part of my daughter Aaron worked at River Cafe for years. Even a walk in there, there's still people say, oh, say hi to they do they do they remember her? And I think there is a sense. I always think that when you walk into a restaurant you want to feel somehow whatever you've been through, you know, traffic getting to the restaurant or mark amen a phone call, that when you walk in you're safe, you know. And I say that too to the people who work there, that you just have to remember. People might have saved up to come here. This might be a big date, it might be a problem, and we just have to say, yes, why is it exciting? It is? It is exciting to walk in the river Craft. It is exciting to walk into a restaurant you love and people say hello. It's just in the simplest of human interactions. It's very common human, it's very you know, but exciting. I think you elicited as well, because there are people who walk into a restaurant and don't get that kind of welcome. But I think when Michael Mann and Summer and Aaron come into a restaurant, you look people in the eye, you say hello, you greet them, you know, you look up when you're choosing, you know, something from the menu. And so I think that it's a two way street, you know. I do think that you get what you give, you know, And speaking of getting and what we give, because I know you have to start packing for Italy. If food is love and food is something that's creative to cook, it's also and be comfort. So my last question to you, Michael Man, is if you needed food for comfort, is there a food that you would reach for? Probably pastidium brotal o nice one for me. It's like you know, culinary five milligrams of morphine. I can't explain it. It was just it's wonderful, mellow. You probably all kinds of old sense memories for my grandmother. I mean, it's probably all kinds of things all together, because it's it's chicken broth and the pie and the cheek. I mean, it's just I don't know, that's just you asked me about comfort food, that that's it. Well, you're gonna have it in North and Italy. He'll have it. That's where it comes from. Thank you, Michael, Thank you. The River Cafe Look Book is now available in bookshops and online. It has over one hundred recipes, beautifully illus traded with photographs from the renowned photographer Matthew Donaldson. The book has fifty delicious and easy to prepare recipes, including a host of River Cafe classics that have been specially adapted for new cooks. The River Cafe Lookbook Recipes for Cooks of all ages. Ruthie's Table four is a production of iHeartRadio and Atomi Studios. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Ruthie's Table for a production of iHeartRadio and Adami's Studios. Michael Mann and I met about twenty five years ago through architecture. On a trip to London, he asked to visit the Lloyd's Building, designed by my husband Richard Rogers. For us, it was a manner for if Michael was a fan of Richard's architecture, Richard was a huge fan of Michael's movies. In fact, when watching Alley, Miami, Vice, Collateral, my arm would be constantly squeezed, not due to a dramatic moment of fear or tension or mystery, but at the way the buildings, streets, airports, bridges, and interiors, even elevators were portrayed on screen. Over long dinners, Richard and Michael often compared making a movie to making a building. Michael once said, while at least Richard, in a building, you can say to a client, if you remove a column, the building will fall down. Try saying that about a scene to a producer. Of all the movies Michael has made, though, the one that I consider the greatest is sixty seconds long shot entirely underwater in a swimming pool. Michael and summer with their children swimmingly, wishing a happy birthday to Richard. No architecture in this movie, just love so Michael, would you read the recipe for sure? This is a Southern Italian version of a tello tonato cold rose veal. First tomato, so five hundred grams of cold rose velle, two hundred and fifty million leaders of tomato sauce, six basil leaves, fifty grams of salted capers, two lemons, and extra virgin olive oil. Slice of veal is as possible. It squeeze the juice of one lemon and mix it with three times his volume of olive oil, and season. Lay the veal slices over each plate, season with sea salt and drizzle with the dressing. Spoon over the tolato sauce, and scatter with the capers and basil leaves, and then drizzle with olive oil. This dish Fatello tonato is very northern, and this is a southern version. And I wonder whether you have traveled from north to south in Italy? What is your Italian traveling experience? Very but mostly spending a little time in Naples once upon a time, and then a Ventice and drove around the Dolomites at different times, but mostly it's been It's been in the Media Romagna around Mona Marnello with a Frari factory is then in Bologna Milan where all the great design is, and it's very different. You know, we're just describing northern Italy. I don't know what you ate in Naples and this dish being so southern that it is, it's not even region to region or city to city. It's can be village to village town, you know, family to family. The way that people eat in Italy. First time I visited the Ferrari factory went across the street to Cavellino, Russia, mont that has been there since the nineteen fifties and the cuisine is moderns. So it's a big metal cart full of horribly boiled meat. Butlito misto, that's right. Yea, yeah, I actually really love it. But they do cook at a very long time and you get the tongue and you get the get everything. Yeah. My grandmother hit the neck of totally destroying meat. I think it came from Okay, from bigger Russian. Ever tell me about her. So just starting going back to your child. So your grandparents came, both of them from Russia. My grandpas came from Russia. They came from about seventy or eighty miles north of Tcherno. Did they come from the same place or did they meet. They can't know. They came from the same place. They came from over. My grandfather had to leave a very traumatic circumstances in nineteen twelve, and it took him ten years to get my father, who was one at the time, and my grandmother to the United States. Your grandfather came first and twelve, and then did he got direct editions. He went to White Chapel, he was in the British Army. Then it wasn't in a British army. Then he came. Then he went to Hartford, Connecticut. Then he was an American Army in the First World War. Then First World War. Yeah, and then in nineteen nineteen he lost his hearing and the flu epidemic. Yeah, and my grandfather died in the the same generation, you know. And then find nineteen twenty two is able to get my grandmother my father out and then they moved to Schaggle. But she was a spectacular woman, very very witty, very politically, very progressive. But when she killed as a cork were condicianus. She made these cheese fish is kind of a It's a bread, small bread thing that's cooked in olive oil and has either meat or cheese on the inside. And what it's made in a cast iron frying pan that's been around for forty years. It's fantastic. And remember one time I was driving home from her house. I picked up a blue earthenware container of this of these things and around the seat of the cars cars at fifty four Plymouth. It was my uncle Sam's car that he let me drive the car. There was a lot of traffic on California Avenue and I was driving back to tour house and uh so I took a hard light on Catalpa and took a left out an alley and hit a gigantic pothole in the alley and in the way time slows down. I saw this earthen where container of my grandma's conditions start to fall off the seat and slow motion, and as I saw myself had to get to a telephone pole and in a unthinking moment, it was either saved the conditions or saved the car, so I reached for the conditions and just crashed the car into the pole. This to die for Candish might not have been a great death, but that's how much it meant. It's got all the important early themes of basically immature life at that point forward, which is driving cars and and and so your grandmother was the cook, She made the conditions, but she the one that overcooked the beef. Or was that your mother? Oh, she over a cooked the beef. I don't know. I think it was. I mean it was a standing joke in the family. My brother and you know, you would shoot it until you your jaws ache. You couldn't mastigate this. What else did your grandmother? Did she live with you? By the way, your grandmother she no, she didn't. So you would go to her house, and that an event to eat in her house. And my father was my father stopped and saw her every day. And later in life when I knew more about like, I realized there's because it's probably the ten years that they were alone together. There was a certain bond there. Because while my grandfather was gone, came the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Civil War, and there were programs in the area from the the Civil War, from the white Russians, So you know, there are hard times. If your grandmother brought her food, did your mother did they move towards American food? My mother was born in the United States, Okay, so mothers, my grandmother, my grandmother cooked. You know, if you cooked the way they traditionally the way they did, you went, you went to the store, you bought alife chick and they killed the check and you brought the chick at home. You know, I'm not going back in the nineteen fifties. And what was it like in your house? Who did the cooking at your house? My mother? Yeah, did your father ever venture into the kitchen or yeah he did, and he had a real sensibility for cuisine for um fruit number one, but then also fine imported mushrooms from Poland, for example, a certain kind of mushroom barley soup. Or when I was working for my father when I was a kid, when I was like twelve to sixteen, he had a like supermarket, a small supermarket, and in the winter I was I was delivering groceries and it's templow when you're carrying groceries a wagon or something carrying a porsch that you got cold. And he always had some gigantic pot with some kind of a mass of stew, you know, cooking at it all day long in the grocery store. In the back of the grocery store. Yeah, it was a very family kind of a kind of affair um and exotic kinds of smoked fish from Eastern Europe would show up. There's there'd be something hanging in the basement, but he would sell that that was that's that's where, that's where we had. That's we had at home, and the grocery store sold. It was just a big Yeah, it was just a standard kind of supermarket, neighborhood superman market. What was the area. It's near the northwest side, it says, kind of a mixed kind of lower middle class, working class area, very very diverse population. Two waves of Polish immigrants, very upper middle class wave of Polish immigrations from the nineteen twenties, very sophisticated people, Jewish, Italians, some Irish. So it was quite mixed. I saw when they had we used to go to a church right after nineteen forty six forty seven, right after the right after the war, there was a neighborhood church a block away that had the showed movies in the basement, old black and white, sixteen millimeter movies. And I remember being taken that I was very young and I saw a movie. I just remembered certain things about it. In nineteen ninety one, when I cad, I couldn't figure out what to do next, what filmed to do next? I remember that railing around in my brain was this image of a of an Iroquois Indian head shaved, bold and comp mind with a red coat, a British uniform eighteenth century British uniform soldier. And that's such an anomaly because we always saw as your kid, you always saw American you know, Native Americans and cowboys or something. And that stuck in my mind, and also a corollary tragedy of the death of a young woman. And I realized that this has been rattling around in my head since I was about the three and so it was last of the Mohicans, as so one of you got to go to last Mohicans. So this, this old neighborhood really had this residence. I think things impressed themselves on your memory when you're very young and ways that are huge. And then at home, who is it you have a brother or sister? Had a brother? And did you sit down for meals? Did your father come backsolutely? We waited. My father came home. He took a bath and took a shower, and we formally sat down and he always had a shot of whiskey, and he had shot of whiskey and uh and we had a formal dinner every night. And that continued till you left home. I continued till I left home. When you left home, what was that like? Going from being cooked for every day and then being out there? Did you cook yourself? Where were you after I did? I went to I went to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and then after four years there, I went to London. And uh, yes, I did. I cook for myself. I also was working as a kind of a short order cook, doing breakfast at a girls dormitory in the morning and Wisconsin. So it was just interesting getting up at five three in the morning and Wisconsin in a winter and going to you know, a lot of from your grandmother to your mother, to the grocery store to working. Did you ever work in a restaurant? Yeah? I was cook one summer. Yeah, which is crazy. You will blanche at some of these stories from these places we used to because there'd be a massive rush and it was a memory tusk because you were having to remember all these orders at the same time. And somebody ordered a steak the way we would get a steak done quickly, somebody would grab it out of the freezer. They throw it down the kitchen. We would catch it and dump it into French friar in the fire. Absolutely horrible, Probably guilty of sub form of water or something, because there's probably regular diners who had earlier heart disease these things. Yeah, and that was Wisconsin. And then you went, this is but what about because I was in London in the sixties and it was kind of I always felt there was a kind of beginning of that multicultural excitement of food rationing was you know, only fifteen years before, after the war, I think that and then and then in the sixties there seemed to be a lot more food of grease and Italy this it was much more vibrant. Did you remember the food of this totally absolutely my experienced with bigger shore of cooking all this stuff. This is in the this in your early sixties and the States, and uh, I talked about you're working for my father. This is in the nineteen fifties. But in sixty five I went to London to in a film school for two years and I stayed there for six years. And the cuisine was, you know, basically beans on toast and transport calf yeah, and chip sandwiches. Did you ever have? I wasn't big chip sandwiches. That was really big on transport calfs, beans on toast or you're having uh, you know, or eggs. I used to love every swimming in bacon fat maybe large. And the revelation was I couldn't afford it. But the revelation was was Greek food, particularly particularly there's a heavy influence from Cypriot food, so it's like Chef Taja sausage and those kinds of things. So there's these little funky kebab stands around Charlotte Street just north of Oxford Street, and an Indian food, which is a revelation. Yeah, where did you live? I lived all over. I lived in Queen's Way very briefly, and then we're on New King's Road. Then I lived in Balham and clap up of South and back in South ken Did anybody ever take you to a restaurant that was Yeah? I started actually started baking a little bit of money and then and then the thing was so attractive? Was I think on Fulham Fulham Road there was an Italian restaurant and I was living on ten pounds a week. Literally it's five pounds for rent, five pounds for but the ambiance of a nice Italian restaurant on a spring or a summer day and you know, a Saturday or Sunday with families kind of which to me was kind of was so touching about the River Cafe because that ambiance is there and its fullest, most technicolor for him in your restaurant and this whole extended family that you created. So were you taking when you were in film school? Then? Was that in London? Outside? It was in London, it was in Covent Garden, It's on Charlotte Street. Then the move to Covent Garden. Yeah, it's a London film school. Yeah, and what was that like? That was great? Yea. For the first time in my life, I was doing exactly only what I wanted to do, which is make film, which is a revelation to me when it happened. When in my junior year at Wisconsin, I took a film history course. For a kind of cynically, I thought, oh, we're gonna there's gonna be three credits for looking at movies. And I didn't expect to get completely mugged and hijacked by this whole notion which occurred in a flash of light, like the skies parted and the bolt of lightning came down and said you will do this, you will become a film director. And from that point out, that was it. That's what I wanted to do with you. It was Ridley Scott there, and was Alan Parker and Ridley Scott. Were they in the same Did you know them? Then? I knew Ridley. Yeah, I didn't know Alan Alan Parker years later, but I knew Ridley. And you know, in the late sixties, I started the small production company after I got out of film school in London, and we made some commercials and documentaries and I shot some of Paris. After Majorn sixty eight, I was politically pretty involved. Yeah, and so life, life was changing and evolving. Um At one point I worked at twentieth Century Fox towards sixty nine in production, and by that point I was making enough money. It's got to live reasonably. And I had a production manager I worked with whose wife was fresh and he was quite a spectacular cooking. That was probably the first serious exposure I had two really good Cuso home cooking. Yeah, it was home cook French food. And then we were spending a lot of time in France at that point, in trailing to Morocco in Italy, and so the world was getting to be a much larger place. In France was a huge few. Being in Paris being well sixty eight was pretty wild. Well, we got there much later. We got there in sort of seventy one, but there was still the buses full of police and Daniel kombend I interviewed kombend Alan jam Alan Cravine. You have that footage. It wound up. It wound up in the bowels of NBC News Telling someplace and I tried to find it years and years ago, couldn't find it. Did you make a documentary about from beginning to end it? Where you just is it footage for the news to documentary about the focus of documentary was that the sixth May June had happened, and what's what's going to be the after effect? And that's what it was really focused on. And the production at the time, which was partially true, partially or not, was that the major impact was going to be amongst teenagers into these stays, and that there was a radicalization of the young workers, particularly young workers at the Renault factory who were CGT, and they started to look at the CGT in a very different light as being basically reactionary. But the idea that you're in a country at forty percent of the population is on strike, and if you turned on RTF at six o'clock to watch the news, there'd be some girls she might or might not reading the news, sitting on a desk. She may may not have a shirt arm. I mean, it was everybody. A youth generation had taken over, and it was wasn't just students who was students and young workers. Yeah, but then you know, and they say that the gold that he had a plane ready, it was very very close to him leaving. He was, Yeah, he was basically a prisoner in the Laza Dallas. And then he made a deal and he couldn't count on the French army in France because they would deploy and then some you know, girls would show up with some flowers and the soldiers would walk away from the APC's. It was complete chaos. So he made a deal with the French Army of the Rhine, because Germany still occupied at that point, to come in and support him, and they extorted from him, in effect, the release of Salon, who was a right wing of French or general who over the war in Algeria. It was part of a plot to a sassinated the Gall and was in prison, and that that was the quick pro quo of the Gal getting support from the military. And so you think that then they marched in from Germany and so that a kind of diver in and everything dissipated, so that the military quashed it, right, Yeah, I was because there was always theories that the working class didn't you know, that it was a student led revolution and that it just didn't have the backing of well but every but the people who were intellectually on top of it, who are at the heart of it, knew nothing serious was actually going to happen in the real world right then and there. It's very sophisticated. The irony is that is that is sitting in London prior to Major and sixty eight, everybody dismissed the French as Cafe Marxist or something, and that, ironically, that sort of sixty eight was just extraordinary. You're in Czechoslovakia, Mexico City. I was in Grosvenor Square in October twenty fifth. Yeah, that was there, you were there, was there, Rika, he was there. Y have a picture. By the march. It was heavy times and as I said, when Richard won the Pumpetoon, we went which still there would be go to the cinema on a Sunday night and it was scary coming back because so just they would lock the police when they just just lock them in these fans for hours and you just can imagine the tension and the fear, and you know the horror of having to sit in there. That's trying. And then you did when did you go to Morocco? Why was that? I went to Morocco just to be in Morocco. Went to Costa blanc on because I'd seen in a movie called Costa blanc On. You had to go to Costa blanc and great food, now, great food, food marvelous dysentery. In some it's looking at some hot on the coast and some healer. A woman came in and gave me something. I don't know what it was. It must have been some opiate, because I suddenly felt great, got all bound up, and then kind of continued on tour through the endless mountains. A bit. When you were on a movie set, did you think about how to feed the crew? Did you eat yourself? I do, and I make sure that the food on the set is really, really great and they have great catering. Is a guy named Mario in Miami who I used all the time, and I couldn't tell you. He's by Miami Vice and other pictures. I just bring them with me. I think that's kind of unique because I've talked to various directors and people who've worked on film, and they say it can be a disaster for lunch. You know, there's just they're just terrible food, and people eat unhealthy food. And then the amount of time it takes to stop for lunch and eat, it's pretty it's pretty tough. Japan was interesting because because the catering was not great, it's kind of, you know, kind of you know, cardboard, bento boxes and stuff, and we improved it when I shot the Tokyo Vice Pilot in Tokyo, did you tell me about food in Tokyo food and to spectacular. You can't get a bad meal if you're trying to get a bad meal. Within We're living in Dakayama, and within one hundred and fifty meters of our apartment, we're probably half a dozen spectacular restaurant, any one of which would have been the best sushi restaurant in Los Angeles. Did you eat anything else other than Japanese? Yes, Italian. There are the you know, like literally one hundred and fifty feet outside the front door was the Princey Bakery from Milan had an outpost next to Staya, the big Setaya bookstore. So there was fantastic Italian bakery, goods every morning, the French food with spectacular in Tokyo. Yeah, people in Tokyo they spend money in a different way than they do in the West. It's they don't spend money on living spikes. They spend money on clothes, on food, on cars, but not on living space. Yeah, it's funny. I once spent morning in a cafe in Milan, and I just kept seeing all these people coming in rest immaculating, beutifully and young people, and I said, how do they afford to buy that product shirt that Gucci's fetter? And they live at home? You know, Yeah, they live at home. They don't pay rent, and so they stay until they get married or they really leave it. And that gives you, you know, a lot of money to spend, as you say, on food, on clothes, and on the culture, you know. And so when you're going tomorrow to Milan, where is unflat him Alan, they were driving right to motor know, yeah, and tell me about that. What are you doing? We're doing a very early pre production on a feature film about three months of the life of Enzo Ferrari in nineteen fifty seven, when all of the all the dynamics of his life that had happened to him at that point come into collision in those three months, which will determine the fate of everything. He's going to be calm. His son Dino had died by the year earlier. His wife sent warning. He had another child in a legitimate son named Piero Piero Lardy, who was starting to wonder why his name is Lardy and not Ferrari, and this company was going bankrupt, so is his rival Maserati. They were both competing to see who could get financing. His wife Laura, who was kind of a Maria Callis figure, was about to find out what the whole town knew, which is that there was another family living in custol Betro. So it's all of these things come into collision. And the opera house, one of the two opera houses in Mode that was right next door. So opera was a huge plays a huge role in this. Early on, wanted to be an opera singer. Then he wanted to be a sports writer, yeah, sports writer. Then he wanted to be a race car driver. And she was a race car driver in the early twenties, and then he raced one or two times against Nuvalari and knew he had no future as a race car driver and started managing the Alfa Romeo racing team and then started his own scooter Rio within Alpha, and that that was the that's that's the origins of the company, which he then began at forty seven with Laura. And they started with absolutely nothing. So if you think of racing and what is racing, which is an interesting question. Why is it so appealing. I think it's so appealing because we have a basic human impulse to exceed limits. I think it's primitive and drives or everything we do, whether it's going out of space or doing research, or of going building machines to make us go faster. So that's why I think it taps into I think that's why it's appealing. Are there food scenes in the movie. Not yet, but I'm allment to suggestions. Okay, tell me about food in your movies, because there's obviously in heat when they met in the diner or there's another diner. Does that interest you the kind of language or the kind of intimacy you can have in a restaurant as opposed to it's such an important thing in life. And there's two fantastic restaurants that talk about heat. There's there's one of the Broadway Dell, which Sadley is no longer there. It's where de Niro picks up Amy Brennaman and head. And the other's the coffee shop scene that Katee Mandelini, which is spectac Cape. Mandelini was a carfee with a big coffee shop restaurant with wonderful modern architecture and contemporary architecture, and right on Wilshire Boulevard, about a block block west of the Academy, and everybody in Los Angeles, on the west of Los Angeles loved this restaurant. Whoever owned the building decided they should double the rent, and the restaurant went out of business, and there was so much animosity that nobody would open another restaurant there because they knew that nobody would go out of hostility to its presence. So it's seven or eight years later, it's still vacant. It's a sitting. There's no one ever went in there. I always think, you know, I say over and over again that people do very private things in a very public space in a restaurant. You know, do you think that's interesting as a scene that you could have filmed, perhaps in somebody's kitchen, that you would film in a restaurant? What is the restaurant to me? For some reason, I don't know why, it's always strukes me as it's it's social, it's warm, and when I don't be honest, is working as it does in your restaurant? You feel that you the phrase extended family, which which you use the way you view it. You really feel that presence. And so it's both intimate and it's and you're in amongst humanity at the same time, and you're doing safety around you don't safety, And you're also part of a context, you know, so you're as sentimate and you're part of the human context, the social context simultaneously. Uh. And you're doing something as essential as eating and it's appealing to all your sensory intake. You know, it changes your mood. I mean, it's do you think you can tell about a person by the way they are in a restaurant? Are they nice to the waiter? Do they say thank you? Do they share their food? Does it tell you something if you were going to hire somebody, would you want to take them to a restaurant first or would you rather bring them home or or disinterview them across the table. Well, I'm a bad person to ask, because as a film director, I'm constantly find myself in an involuntary way. It's like it's like I'm like an MRI. I see what people do, and I just you know, and I'm probably in my mind thinking if I had a cast or direct an actor to be this kind of person in a scene. Would I'd be telling him to wear that shirt or he's eating with the wrong fork, or the way he wipes his mouth, or he doesn't put his napkin in his lamp, or the way he picks up a glass. And one of the things you notice right away is that you can pick up a glass, but if you're a convict and falsome, this is how you pick up the glass. Why is that every gestion gas that way? Because it's a possession, it's a movement, it's an action, you know, and everything is telling. And so people in restaurants are both totally self conscious and self aware and a totally unconscious and unself aware depending on who they are, what's going on. So it's both revealing and what they're hiding, or it's revealing and what they don't know they're feeling. Yeah, I think there's something romantic about restaurants. There used to be a restaurant here called Ladome, Yeah, and we went to La Dome. It was our family restaurant. Every occasion was at La Dome. You know, be a gigantic roundtable. We have a very large family, four daughters and sometimes extended boyfriends and what have you. And so every time we went out to dinner, it was like seven or eight nine people going out to dinner, and all important family occasions were there. And then it was Toscano over here at the last twenty five years as a family place, and you get to know the waiters so well, and then there's a party because you know, Alberto's retiring after twenty years, so you know, and then we meet people who are part of my daughter Aaron worked at River Cafe for years. Even a walk in there, there's still people say, oh, say hi to they do they do they remember her? And I think there is a sense. I always think that when you walk into a restaurant you want to feel somehow whatever you've been through, you know, traffic getting to the restaurant or mark amen a phone call, that when you walk in you're safe, you know. And I say that too to the people who work there, that you just have to remember. People might have saved up to come here. This might be a big date, it might be a problem, and we just have to say, yes, why is it exciting? It is? It is exciting to walk in the river Craft. It is exciting to walk into a restaurant you love and people say hello. It's just in the simplest of human interactions. It's very common human, it's very you know, but exciting. I think you elicited as well, because there are people who walk into a restaurant and don't get that kind of welcome. But I think when Michael Mann and Summer and Aaron come into a restaurant, you look people in the eye, you say hello, you greet them, you know, you look up when you're choosing, you know, something from the menu. And so I think that it's a two way street, you know. I do think that you get what you give, you know, And speaking of getting and what we give, because I know you have to start packing for Italy. If food is love and food is something that's creative to cook, it's also and be comfort. So my last question to you, Michael Man, is if you needed food for comfort, is there a food that you would reach for? Probably pastidium brotal o nice one for me. It's like you know, culinary five milligrams of morphine. I can't explain it. It was just it's wonderful, mellow. You probably all kinds of old sense memories for my grandmother. I mean, it's probably all kinds of things all together, because it's it's chicken broth and the pie and the cheek. I mean, it's just I don't know, that's just you asked me about comfort food, that that's it. Well, you're gonna have it in North and Italy. He'll have it. That's where it comes from. Thank you, Michael, Thank you. The River Cafe Look Book is now available in bookshops and online. It has over one hundred recipes, beautifully illus traded with photographs from the renowned photographer Matthew Donaldson. The book has fifty delicious and easy to prepare recipes, including a host of River Cafe classics that have been specially adapted for new cooks. The River Cafe Lookbook Recipes for Cooks of all ages. Ruthie's Table four is a production of iHeartRadio and Atomi Studios. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.