You were listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership with Montclair.
Since Francis Ford Coppola agreed to do a podcast with me, I've been slightly overwhelmed. But good friends who know us, both Wes Anderson, Fisher, Stevens, Greta Gerwik assured me. Actually, Ruthie, the two of you are rather alike. Do they mean being a chef is like being a director, or producing a movie is like running a restaurant, or choosing the grapes for your vineyard is like choosing the herbs for your fish, or most of all, do they mean we
both have our family involved in everything we do. I'm happy to take any of the above. Francis and I are here together after a long lunch in the River Cafe to talk about food and wine, movies and families, menus and friends, and much much more.
Well, thank you for the lovely comments said.
You've made ruth So for lunch today, you had as a starter.
Pundarella, which a Roman salad which you only have certain times of year, and basically you Italians have a taste for bitter. Puntorella is really a bitter salad, and so it comes from a kind of winter chicoria plant which is divided and cut up in a certain way and served with olive oil and anchovy and capers, sometimes and sometimes not. And this is the famous puntorella salad that you get in a Roman restaurant.
It is a great way to start a meal, I think if.
We didn't need it when we were kids, because we ate food that was either Neapolitan from my mother's side or lu Canese Bernalda, the region in the extreme south of Italy, which is my mother's side. Well, it says here puntorella, it says two puntarella heads. The vegetable is chicoria,
and it's a winter chechorea. Twelve salted anchovy phil cut into small pieces, four tablespoons red wine vinegar, one gar of co peeled and finally chopped, one drud some dried red chili pepperonchina rosso and then six tablespoons of virgin olive oil. And you prepare. You slice the buds into these little thin stalks in your place in the water a bowl of ice water to crisp, but they'll curl up.
Combine the anchovy's garlic and chili and covered with vinegar leaf for fifteen minutes, had six table students of olive oil, spin dried the puntarella segments and then putting a in a bowl and spoon the stuff over it, and that's your puntarella salad.
So you grew up in a house that served incredible food. When a lot of Southern Italians.
Came father and grandfather from your.
Father and came to the United States. I grew up in upstate New York, one hundred miles north of New York City, and when we went out to an Italian restaurant, we would have veal parmechan we would have the meatballs and spaghetti. The food of the meatballs.
If you know what you're doing, they really make meatballs. Well. Number one, you have to have three components. A meatball is one third pork, one third veal, and one for a thief, and with bread a lot of breadcrumbs.
But the scene and the Godfather, if we can talk about that, I sadly I watched it again. I thought, you know what, the way he said, you know and then throwing this, and well, that's so nonchalant.
When I wrote that scene, I wrote it the way I knew how to do. It, and I said, well, take you first, you brown the sausage, and then there's a fry. And Mario said, Gangsters don't say brown, Franksters say fry. So we changed it to fry. Then he said, and then the secret is true, that the little the secret of a good meat sauce is a little bit of sugar. You added like a you know, a half a tablespoon of sugar to a meat sauce. So the recipes were authentic, but we tried to give them a
gangster type of vocabulary. Although I must say that the reason I'm convinced that The Godfather was successful because it was the first gangster film that had a lot of kids running around in the seats. Never were gangster pictures though they didn't have kids. But of course an Italian wedding was all the kids sliding around it.
So you grew up in a family that could Italian food, but in New York and New York speaking Italian. That's how we started. Did you know Italian?
No? I only heard some cursed. But my mother didn't want us to be like Italians couldn't live in certain neighborhoods. Yeah, and the Italians, you know, each immigrant group in America was bullied by the one that came before, and the one who came before the Italians were the Irish, and the Irish used to beat up on Theians.
The policeman and the Godfather.
Right, the police. The police were all Irish and they used to they used to pick. That's the way it works.
So you were restricted to this neighborhood. And did you experience food other than Italian food or did you was eating Hell, if you see.
The Godfather, you realized that I knew that Italians used to get takeout Chinese food. Yeah, every street corner in New York had a German delicatessen, a candy store what we call the candy store, which was a soda fountain where they sold coke which was five cents and they would make it to put the syrup and it wouldn't be in a bottle, and model airplanes, and a German delicatessen where you would buy cheesecake.
So there there would be a mix that would be a German.
And always a Chinese restaurant. In the neighborhoods. There were a lot of Polish people and Italians because they were both Catholic, and there were a lot of Italian Polish weddings because they were both Catholic. And I went to a lot of Polish weddings, and I knew Polish food was like they had Kebbasa whereas we had sazich. It was America. It was a wonderful a mixture of cultures.
And we want to keep that. We want to keep we want to keep that. And then should we talk about polio?
If anything, you ask your question, I'd be.
Interested in the fact that as a child you had polio and spent how long invent.
I spent the whole sixth grade, so a whole year year and little more than a year. And in those days polio, you know, of course it had also affected adults. President Franklin Roosevelt had polio, but there was an epidemic for children in nineteen forty nine. And I was a cup Scout and I went on a cup Scout camp out and it was raining, and the next morning I had the symptoms. And you know, polio only affects you
one night. In other words, it's the night of the fever, is the night you have it, and then you get over it. But the damage is to your spinal cord, and Napolio destroys the nerves selectively within the spinal cord, so that I mean literally when I woke up, I woke up in a ward with like eight hundred kids piled up everywhere crying, a whole row of iron lungs because the kids whose lungs were affected couldn't breathe, so they had to be in a machine that breathe, and
they were crying for their parents. It was a nightmare. And then I felt so sad for all these kids. And then I got out of bed. I tried to get out of bed. I just fell on the floor and I realized I couldn't walk. And I was never too scared at first. But I stayed there for about a week more and then finally they took me home, and my father was very sharp the method they took me to this. I remember a French doctor who gave me a big speech of like I was a soldier
and I was going to be a good soul. And then he told me the prognosis, which was he says, well, you'll be able to do everything a normal person could do, but always in a wheelchair. And I was just I hadn't realized that it was that serious. So I remember being very emotional and we all went to have my favorite We all went to have Chinese food and crying in the Mugoogai pen and they took me home, my father, and they pinned me in the bed so I couldn't move.
That was the way they thought you should treat it. And it didn't make sense to my father, and he heard about another method, which was the Sister Kenney method. A Sister Kenny was an Australian nurse who had decided that rather than make them the paralyzed victim immobilized so they don't damage their muscle, and instead you did therapy.
He did the opposite. My father went and talked to them and got the folio Infant how Paralysis Association to pay for a Sister Kenny therapist came and this lady came. Her name was Miss Wilson, wonderful lady, and she worked on me, you know, and it was very gentle exercises, but they were. And I was in this room, I just watched television all that had puppets. I played with puppets.
The puppets is interesting because did that make you think about film? Do you think that.
No, it made me think about having friends. I wanted. I wanted to be with the kids. I wanted. There was a show on television in those days, sponsored by Horn and Hart, do you remember the Automatic And it was called the Children's Hour and it was all these talented kids singing and dancing, and I just wanted to be part of that.
When I grew up in the fifties, there was how do you duty?
Well? How do you do? I can tell you how do duty? Stories? Too.
My parents took me. I was actually they knew somebody who worked on the how do you do? We were in the audience. I was in the Peanuts Peanut again, really lucky.
It's how do you do? Time? It's how they dude the time Bob if I aroused here, because how they do it's time to start the show. Well let's go.
God, I haven't satten that song for a love.
But he didn't look like that. One night I said to my parents, look, I went like that and I couldn't do that with my left arm, you know. And they were shocked. And then eventually I was able. I never could run fast though after that, but I was a good wrestler. I went to the same military school as Donald Trump went to. I went to many high schools and I went to New York Military Academy.
And when did you study film?
I was a theaterist student and I was very successful in college. I directed a lot of plays and I was slated to go to the Al Drama School. And then one afternoon I saw a movie in a theater by the great Rush director, sirge Eisenstein. And I saw that and came out said, wow, I know, say anything like that. I'm going to be a film director. You know. It was October the Ten Days that shook the World. And I went to the UCLA Film.
School and so California then, so that was in what that would have been.
I was in nineteen sixty.
Yeah, so that was the time when you went to the LA Film School.
I went to UCLA.
Yeah, And what was that like?
Oh it was I was a graduate student. I was very poor. I ran away from military school, so my father was not going to help me very much. He was very angry because when I ran away from military school, he had to pay anyway for that year and he didn't never forgive me for that. So when I went to UCLA, I had about a dollar twenty five a day to live on, so I had twenty five cents for breakfast, fifty cents for lunch, and fifty cents for dinner. So I pretty much ate every night craft macaroni and
cheese dinners. And I just got fatter and fatter and fatter and fatter, and I was very depressed. I had no money, I had no car, I had no girlfriend. I was pretty miserable, and there was a time when I thought I would quit. And I had a wonderful directing teacher, a woman who was the only woman director in Hollywood during the thirties. Her name was Miss ars
the Dorothy Orsner. She was great, she was she was so smart, and we we all everyone who studied with Miss Arsener just and we call her miss ars there because we respected her so much, and she was just What happened was I was there one night and very depressed that I was pretty much decided that I was going to go back to New York and get a job as a stage manager because I would get a salary and I could. And she said, what are you doing here? And I said, I'm miss Arsdre. I'm just miserable.
I'm going to go back at the side. I'm going to quit and I'm going to get a job as a stage marcher. And she looked at me and she said, you know, I've been around and I know you'll make it. I know. And she left because she told me that, and we looked up to her so much. She was you look her up. She was a great woman. I miss Ardas said, you'll make it. I've been around, and
I know. I stayed, and ultimately I stayed at UCLA and I won this Goldwiner prize, which was a writing award, and it was two thousand dollars and that was a big turning point in my life.
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Now, there were two schools that were competing. There was USC, which was considered more of a technically oriented school, and there was more UCLA, which was more sort of artsy FARTSI kind of directors who wanted to be the new
Felini and the new this and that. So there was a competition between USC and UCLA, and I emerged as a star of UCLA because I won the gold Wooden Prize And then I made as a thesis feature film, which was unheard of a commercial film as my thesis film was a movie in New York CLD You're a Big Boy Now. And I got married. I had two kids, and you know, I always thought that being married with kids was good for me because instead of you know, going out having fund screwing around, I was concerned with
supporting my family. I had a wife and two kids. I loved my kids. Geo was my first John Carlo and Sofia in Roman. Sofia was born during the Godfile. So what happened was I got a job to direct Fred Astaire at a big musical called Finian's Rainbow. And as I was directing this, I was a young guy with a crew of adults all wearing suits and ties. I noticed there was a skinny kid watching what was going on. And I went over to him and I said, I ain't I what you're doing. What are you looking at?
He said nothing much. I said, well, you know what are you doing here? He said, well, I'm a USC student and I won a scholarship to observe. I came over to look at the Warner Brothers Adomation department. But I heard there was a UCLA student directing this movie, so I thought i'd watch. I said, oh great, what's your name? He said, George Lucas And I said, well, you want to come every day and watch the film? He said sure. I said, well I'm one condition you can't.
He says, what's that. I said, well you got to come up with a brilliant idea every day. And he said, I'll do that, and he did. And so I met this wonderful kid, who of course.
Became a well that.
Would be Finean's rainbow. So and I had a little boy, like about two. So that must have been about nineteen sixty five at the worst. And that made a marriage between UCLA because then not only did I meet George, but I met all of the USC guys, and they met all the UCLA guys. So that we began. Then we went off and made a film. I said, if you come off and help me with this film, I'll sponsor your first film. And we made a film called The Rain Peaceeople where we actually rode across the country
at a bus at editing. And then he made a film called THHX The thirty eight and we founded that's when it became American Zorchra. We founded a company and we decided to put it in San Francisco.
My San Francisco away from Los Angeles. Y studio is yeah.
But by being in San Francisco with no money, it determined that we, as we always knew, picture and sound equally contribute to a movie being being good, but sound is much cheaper. So we made a big investment in sound. And that really changed because there was a company in San Francisco called Doby that was very that was very nice and liked us. It always helped us, but they benefited because they saw everything we were doing and we
changed movies both in terms of the sound. And then when George made Star Wars, he just I died that if we could shoot in a digital format, they wouldn't have to convert from film to digital for effects, back to film. So we really, because of our poverty, we changed the face of cinema around the world through Dolby.
Do you remember have memories of food at that time? Why Lucas? Did you like good food?
I was a good army cook. I could cook for fifty people, and I always used to cook for everyone.
But I have youone on the set.
Yeah, I can cook dinner for fifty sixty people with no trouble at all. I have done it.
Yeah.
I once went to the I went to teacher at Cuba. I was invited along with Terry Mallick and some people to go to Cuba and go at the Cuban Film School. And I said to them, I said, I like to cook for the students. And they said, well, what do you want to cook? I said, well, I don't know what. Do you have tomatoes? They said sure? I said, do you have a basil whatever it was? Golden said, below, you know they had basil. I said, do you have any pasta? No, no, we don't have pasta. Well do
you have potato? You have potatoes? You see, I had flowers. So I made yuki and they said, but you can't just make it for the students. You got. We're a socialist country, you have to make it for everybody. So I said, well, how many people would have to eat? They said five hundred, So we cooked yuki for five hundred people. But we did it. We did it, and it was great.
They they had the right potatoes because for yi you need those very dry.
Got whatever potatoes they gave me. There was no selection in Cuba. And then the next year I went. They said, are you going to cook again? They said yes, This time I brought pasta. We had a pasta coming. So I cooked that Cuba maybe three four times.
With all of you in Spielberg and Lucas and who was part of that other? Did you all have meals together? Was eating out? What did you?
All of them? Yes? But of all of them, the only one who were my kind of Italian was Marty Is. It was his parent, his mother. He wrote a very good cookbook which you can still get and it's hard, missus. Catherine Scorsese.
One thing for moving ahead to the Godfather is that we all know the scene. Of course, we know the scenes we were just talking about of cooking the sauce, so the getting the cannoli but for me, it's about citrus as well. Yeah, because you know the two scenes that I thought and I that was an accident.
I always had someone bring an orange, but the orange became going.
To talk about the two scenes, one of them which was in the market when he's choosing the oranges. Yeah, and then he then he's shot right when Brandon is That was right across the that's the premonition that he's when he's going to be He realized he's going to be killed.
There was this orange motif that was not true. It's just that I had always said, you know, we'll bring an orange as a gift from Florida or something nice. I didn't know that it became a symbol. But I didn't know what.
About the scene at the very end when he's playing with his child.
That scene they cut out of the script because they felt.
We didn't describe that scene. That's the scene.
Why, well, let me tell you the circumstance of it. That that scene was cut out of the script because they figured if we just cut to the graveyard, you'll know he died. So what did you have to see him die? But I wanted to shoot him dying in the tomato patch. So when I was shooting the wedding, I had got this little tomato patch developed. In fact, we had to bring the tomatoes fly them in a
great expense from Chicago because we had no tomatoes. And during lunch, I was over there trying to get the shot of him with his grandson and the minder that they had on me. He said, you can't do this, the scene's been cut. I said, well, let me just get I can get one shot and I'm going to go to you know, you have to go to lunch, I said, And I did the one shot, and then I went to lunch and the kid was We didn't
we didn't want to do it. So Brandon said, let me do something I do for my grandkids, and he cut he on his own. I didn't know what he was going to do.
It is true.
He cut the orange and he did it, and he did it like a monster, and the kid cried. So it became memorable and it got put in the picture. And then I shot the rest of it of him running around stuff. So that was a scene that they had tried to cut out that because of Brando's ingenuity, it became ended.
In running around and playing a game and the child actually thinks that him falling down and dying is part of the gang, isn't he You know, he doesn't.
It was the movie. It's just it's luck that that Brando did that and the kid, because they were there were standing there wanting me to cut. When Brando did his first day, everyone saw his first day and they said, all this stuff is too dark and he's mumbling and we hate it. One of the people who was sort of on my side, you know it, said to me, you know, France, they're going to fire you this weekend. Because they never fire a director in the middle of
the week. They always fire the director on the weekend so the new director has time to come in and get everything organized. So he said, they're going to fire you this weekend. So knowing that I just that day that I heard that, I fired the fifteen people that were in on the cabal that were going to fire me, and no one knew that I even had the authority
to do that. I just did it. And because I wanted to reshoot the shot of Brando that they didn't like, and when I said I want to do it, they said, no, don't do it. That's when he said, they're going to fire you. So I fired everyone. I went up and I reshot the ste It was the first scene where he comes in and sits and has the meeting with Solotso in the dark in the Hollive oil factory. So they thought it was too dark and Brando was mumbley,
so I reshot it. So then everyone had to wait and see in the weekend, and everyone was saying, can he do that? You know, maybe he can't, and is he fired? I didn't know. I thought they were going to fire me anyway, so but they waited and then they decided that the reshoot was much better, and so they said they worked and fire me. And the head of the company brought me to the Palm Steakhouse and bought me and my father dinner and said that, you know, they were going to back stay with me.
I'm always interested in meetings that take place in restaurants, So they took you to a restaurant.
They took me to the Palm Restaurant, which I think he Charlie Bluto a own part of and my father too, and they said they weren't going to fire me. But the truth of the matter is that in the movie. It's the first scene. In other words, they didn't know what they were talking about. The Godfather was dark, that was its style. Brando in an oscar for The Godfather,
and you know, he always mumbled. He told me he mumbled deliberately because it was easier to add to what lines later he wanted to his mouth didn't live.
Michael Kaine said to me that almost every movie that was offered to him, or that he thought of from being offered a pardon, was done in a restaurant. So I'm really interested in restaurants and work and restaurants, how people go to restaurants, and how they use restaurants. People do I always say very private things in a very public space, So fire people in a restaurant.
There were a bunch of famous restaurants, show business restaurants. Sorry sorry. One of the famous Elaine's in New York. Elaine was a lady much like you. If you did you know Elaine.
No, I never met her.
She conducted a sort of salon. Yeah, it's more like a so long.
But in Hollywood would people.
I used to write with Mario Puzzo, and I would go with him because he loved the gamble I would go with him to the pepper Mill casino in Reno and we would work in the pepper Mill because in a gambling casino you can order you know, ham and eggs at three in the morning or anything else and then you can go. It's twenty four hours a day. And all the work I always been with Mario was always in a gambling casino in.
Reno, feeding people. You were telling me at lunch that you wanted to tell me the story about having to give the crew lunch, and if you don't.
We always gave. We wanted to give. I tried to give the crew because you know, a crew worked so hard that their only entertainment, their only amusement is at lunch.
You know, their mutan the people who are not actors.
Well everyone including the actors. I mean, they have no loather, working sometimes twelve hours a day. So I had lunches and I would have two kinds of wine, which now was illegal, by the way, but I would. You can't not now you can't in France they do. I had two kinds of wine I had. I was famous for wonderful lunches and on Friday I would always have a
special treat because it was a final thank you. So I doubled the meal budget so that they could do something really wonderful on Fridays as a thank you, because that's the only entertainment the crew gets.
Yeah, and what you said that you were punished if you were late for giving them lunch.
Oh that was there's not the thing called the meal penalty. When you're on a movie set and it's time to say lunch has to be at one o'clock. It all depends on what time the day starts one o'clock. If it's one fifteen, everyone gets one hundred dollars for the fifteen minutes. And then those are penalties and where it comes from. In the twenties, there was a Hungarian director
named Michael. He was a gentleman, so he would have them work and they'd bring a table and serve him at the four course dinner while everyone else was working was eating nothing. So because of that, the union put in a meal penalty.
And what about the famous canteens. Meilbrooks always talked about seeing carry granting was.
In a lot of the studios had, Like I remember Fox had a big area where they would have lunch. That's where I saw when me and Farrell in a tough cut off all long hair and went in there angry about something. But I don't know which canteen he saw. Carry grant was extraordinary.
The stars of the of the early days. Whether it was well, I know that.
Well, I know one thing. It's true that Jack Warner used to have a private dining room and he would require that the directors and stuff come into his private dining room. And that's where and then he next to it, he had a room with all his awards, and you had to go in other words, you had to go. You were expected to be in there at least three times a week. That's where I first had Matsa. And I liked Matza a lot, so I was always happy
to go in Matsa. But I brought with me once into the dining room Patula Clark, and I didn't realize that there was no women had ever been in the private dining room Jack Warner.
The River Cafe Winter said lunch is now running from Monday to Thursday. Reserve a booking on www. Rivercafe dot co dot uk or give us a call. We have too some there people who met six hours ago, four hours ago. We have both lost our life partners. You're your wife, Eleanor.
And about the loss of a child.
Tell me what we both have shared that.
You lost your son. What happened to me, and maybe it didn't appen to you is but to me it was thirty years before the first thing I thought of was what had happened? And then finally, after thirty years, if you can imagine, I woke up one morning and it wasn't the first thing I thought of, and I realized that it was the beginning of getting past it. So that for me it was a thirty year sentence.
When was that thirty years? Well it was thirty years How many years ago?
Well, I mean he died and his daughter is thirty four years old, so she that was New Year's on the year he died, so thirty four years ago, so it was four year years ago. Every morning, the first thing I thought of was, oh did that happen? And it was that was like terrible? Did that happen for you? How long? Every morning did you? Was it the first thing you thought of?
Well, for me it was thirteen years ago, and.
You still wake up and it's the first thing.
I don't know if it would be the first thing I woke up with. But I certainly would be buying an orange in the market and think of it. Well, I'd walk into his room and think of it. I'd see something that reminded me. Here here music. So for me, it.
It takes Yeah, well my sentence was the first thing. Oh did it happen?
How are you feeling that about your wife? Now?
No, No, my wife is funny because I just just all the time I think, you know, there's someone I got to tell something, and I got to tell her that. But no, I don't have to tell her that because she's so It's different because your son, you don't expect to get that news. Whereas she I knew I was with her when she died. I was holding her hand, and I knew she wanted to go because she was so so in such discomfort and pain. So I mean it was it was the whole family was there holding her,
and we did it deliberately. She did for her, for her, But a child, you you don't expect that news. It was just a horrible news. I couldn't believe it when they told me.
And you were making a film.
I started to make a film. Yeah, I was I did, but I continued. They said, you don't have to will abandon. I said, no, he'd want me to finish it. But that was what I noticed, is that it was like a sentence, a thirty year sentence of that of being harper. I woke up every morning. Yeah, but there's that beautiful Eschylus, how it drops on you, drop by drop until by the awful grace of God, you're given you're given a break, you know, Eschylus. Can you imagine Eschlus? How long ago that is?
Death of a child.
It's not something Fortunately, there aren't many people today who've experienced that. It's it's it's rare.
I remember thinking that that would be how I was defined, that I would be the woman whose child had died.
You know, it used to be years ago, when when families were bigger, you know, people would have seven, eight kids. They always lost one or two. It was part of having a lot of kids. But that's it's rare now that they're not. Yeah, those people who lose their child, thank God, is a small minority. It's a terrible group to be part of.
And if we need comfort, we find comfort. I find right now. And we talked about this for a moment as well, about when my husband died, that I find comfort in being active. My comfort is to keep working and being here. You know that you have well other people. I have a friend whose brother died in an accident in French and her mother went to bed for six months, and that's whatever it is. People find their own way, But for me, it's being active and for comfort. We
find comfort in different ways. And I suppose my last question to you today, though I think we should do another one of this because there's so much more to talk about. Is if you had to find comfort in food, if there was something that you could eat before you die that you would find that it would give you comfort. Would there be a food that you would define as comforting? What would that be?
Halva?
Halva? Yeah, that I would not have expected.
Why I love it? I always loved what I was a little.
Can you describe what halva is?
Halva is Middle Eastern peoples of different origin. It's made of ground sesame seeds and egg albumen and sugar probably honey.
I think it has honey in it.
Well Eastern foods as I love Middle Eastern.
I do too. You're going to make a movie. What is it about?
It's about a time in the thirties when marriage and marriage ability was in very test related. In other words, you had to be in your crowd or your set in order to consider marriage. And then people would marry, and then they would get the worst and marry upwards. And the marriage was the marriage was sort.
Of for gain and you're gonna film it here.
Well, no, it's I'm gonna base it here and then do it all over. They go to all the they go to Anna, they go to bay Ritz, they go to all the places rich people go to.
Well, we want we want you here, We want you to be here to the future.
Thank you for listening to Ruthie's Table four in partnership with Montclair