Welcome to River Cafe, Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and Adamized Studios.
There is much you can know about a person by the way they are in a restaurant. Will they be kind to a waiter patient if mistakes are made, say goodbye when they leave? Will the staff look forward to their arrival? When Kathy Kennedy, creator of So Many Movies, books a table, everyone in the River Cafe is elated. I've witnessed her be attentive and kind to the writers, directors, and fans that interrupt her meal, mostly with her husband,
Frank Marshall. And I've seen the expression that only a good food lover can make when she tastes something she likes.
Thank you, Ruthie, this is great fun.
I know that this sounds like I'm picking a flavor that people go, oh really, but I think great vanilla ice cream is just the best. So this is for serving fifteen. It's two liters of double cream. It's four hundred and fifty milli liters of milk, four fresh vanilla pods so important, split lengthwise, fifteen egg yolts, three hundred and fifty grams of castor sugar in a large saucepan.
You'll combine the cream and the milk. You'll then scrape the vanilla seeds very carefully to get every single seed out of the pods into the pan, and then the pods too, and you cook until just below boiling, because you don't want it to boil that'll actually ruin the custard. And you then remove from the heat, beat the egg yolks and sugar together until pale and thick. Pour a little of the warm cream into the egg yolk mixture. And this is something that you want to do very slowly,
so that you can blend everything and stir. Return this to the rest of the cream in the saucepan, and cook gently over a low heat, stirring constantly to prevent the custard from curdling. And when the custard has thickened enough to coat the back of the spoon, strain it into a bowl and leave to cool, Pour into an ice cream machine and churn until frozen. And then you have perfect vanilla ice.
Cream that's beautifully red. And also, I did not know how good a cook you are, because you know, you said it with confidence, with authority, and with knowledge, So you do make vanilla ice cream.
I do make vanilla ice cream. I don't.
You know.
The thing is, I don't really get a lot of chance to cook.
I wish I did, because I think I would really enjoy it. But when I do, when I have the time and I can really focus and pay attention, then I find it very relaxing and fun.
And what about when you started working, what was food like? Well?
I think the great thing when I started working, I immediately started traveling because we've made so many movies all over the world, so food is something I really connected with because we for instance, with Raiders of Lost Arc we were in Tunisia, so I remember one of the first scouts we ever did. We were taken to this tent basically and they were making pork and lamb in the ground, cooking and heating it with fresh vegetables and cous goose, and I never had anything like that.
It was really spectacular.
I love that food. I haven't been to Tunisia, but Morocco very sophisticated.
You know. That's the great thing about movie cruise. I think people assimilate very very quickly. As recently as the Last Star Wars with JJ when we were in Jordan, and that was the first thing we were all talking about was.
What we're going to eat and where would we go.
And we were based out of Acaba and so we were treated to some pretty amazing meals.
I think in any work environment, you know, taking care of the people who work for you, and the way they're fed, the way they are given time off. But it's interesting because when we talked to Wes Anderson, he said that he loathes stopping for lunch. He did tell the story that he tried to just give everybody soup and that worked for about one day. Said yeah, maybe maybe. He said that actually going out at the end of a day with the people who was working with was crucial.
That time around the table, that time to relax.
And do you think that's one of the things that people are missing right now with COVID is you know, so much of what we're doing to be pre prepared and handed to people, and that sense of being able to gather at the end of the day, usually over food, whether you go to somebody's home, like for instance, we're shooting one of the Star Wars series and we're up in Scotland and Diego Luna is the star of that show, and he had about fifteen people who were all vaccinated.
That was one of the things we had to find out. But he had about fifteen people come over and he fixed this amazing paiea and everybody was just raving about what he had done. And he has his two kids with him, and his ten year old daughter is actually, from the sounds of it, becoming quite a wonderful cook and really enjoys it. And she was in there helping him, and you know, I think everybody was realizing how great it is to get back to that.
Yeah, And when you were saying about making vanilla ice cream and having time to cook, there is something about cooking that is both relaxing and engrossing and apart from you know, it takes all your attention. I remember when I before I was a chef, I worked in a publishers and everybody'd come back and everybody say, don't cook, just sit down and relax, But actually it was much more relaxing to go and cook. Do you think that's something that because it's.
Complete focus, the same reason some people play golf, you know, it's what is it that takes you your attention away from the rest of the world and gives you something that creative to immerse yourself in. I think, you know, it reminds me of one of the things that my mom taught me. I'm very particular about how the plate looks.
You know, whatever it is you're cooking, it really is important to then look at the plate and say, well, you know, what's the relationship with color and garnish, and just how pleasing is it when you set it down in front of somebody. And I think that all of those little details are what makes it, you know, such an enjoyable experience that you.
Could be talking about a movie. Yes, you just exactly have something which could be a same from a film.
Because it's all in the details.
That's something that we say all the time, what is that That everything you're doing, all the creative processes in the details, and that's what makes it so personally enjoyable. My mom was actually an incredible cook. She was right in the middle of the Julia Child's you know, period of time, and so it's one of the reasons I think I kind of don't cook because my mom would have us out of the kitchen. She would take over
the kitchen, prepare everything. Sometimes she'd have us come in sort of her soue chef, but most of the time she was doing everything herself.
And did your father cook? No, never in the kitchen. What did he do.
We actually lived in a little tiny town in northern California, and my dad was a lawyer initially and eventually a judge, but he became a mining expert because gold mining was a big deal in northern California, and even when I was born in the fifties, there was still a lot of work to be done in mining claims and what not throughout that region, and so my dad became an expert in that area.
He also was very, very involved in a lot of the water.
Rights for the state of California, so the building of the dams and that kind of thing, and then there were probably thirty forty reservations in northern California at that time, and so he was also intricately involved in that. So as a kid, it was really interesting to travel with him and visit some of these places that were very remote, meet some real characters, and that's where I actually in terms of food, I was introduced to venison and lots of wild game, that kind of thing.
Pheasants, doves, fish doves.
You ateed doves.
They would cook, just very small doves. And then I learned how to fish and caught steelhead. Steelhead was a big thing at that time. You can't really find a lot of steelhead in that area anymore. Steelhead is a large trout. It's also a very fun fish to catch because it takes a long time to bring steelhead in.
So this is very northern California.
It's right near the Oregon border.
Yeah, and traveling and eating and exploring and fishing all were connected to adventure.
Yeah, connected to adventure, and frankly always connected to food because it was a question of how were you going to prepare something, whether you were outside or we even had friends that would hang venison down in the basement to make you know, homemade jerky and that kind of thing. How do you stuff a pheasant? You know, the cherries and fruits and things that were used for stuffings, the
making of wild rice, different kinds of rices. That was a constant conversation, a seasonal kind of conversation.
Was that from your mother or both parents, I.
Think both parents, but their friends, you know, everybody would always talk about food. There was always something in service to the preparation of food.
That's so because it doesn't you know, if you think of small town America and in the fifties, you wouldn't necessarily think that, would you.
Well, you know, I think it's it's interesting because I think it has a lot to do with people who comfortably hunt and a certain amount of agriculture. That part of northern California is right at the tip of the Central Valley in California, so there was a lot of fresh produce. I learned a lot about fish, even though we were inland. A lot of the fish would come in from the Bay area or the rivers, the nearby rivers. So there were different kinds of trout. There was petrolley's soul.
There was salmon because that would come from the Eureka area, which is up near Humboldt, you know, and different kinds of salmon, you know, the coho versus the Copper River.
And that kind of thing.
So you even the variations of the fish that was caught was something that I just remember as a kid being very aware of not to mention what you were catching yourself and bringing home.
Were you to go back there, now, do you think the culture would have changed.
Oh yeah, I think it's definitely changed. I think fast food has changed the culture in a lot of places, because when I was a kid, there just wasn't a massive amount of fast food, so people were cooking and eating what was available.
Yeah, you left home at what age to go to college.
I left right out of high school, so I was just seventeen going on eighteen, and I went down to San Diego. Of course, there was all the influence of Mexican food and Mexican culture. They even had these fantastic factories downtown where they made homemade tortillas and chips and that kind of thing. It was really fun when we were in college because we would go down and just have these freshly baked tortilla chips and homemade salsa and
tacos and burritos and and all. The food was just so fresh and great and very indigenous to the area. So you really felt like you were eating something that that was part of the culture, and it was.
How far San Diego.
It's very close. Yeah.
In fact, when you go to school down there, you're often going down into Rosata Beach and yeah, so that was a big thing during Easter break and that kind of thing.
Did your parents ever come experience.
They didn't really come down that much.
They were pretty much homebodies and my dad was so busy that they were pretty much confined to northern California. You know, there's a funny thing about northern California and southern California, and there aren't a lot of people north of San Francisco that are very interested. I think even today in visiting Los Angeles, it truly is like two very very different cultures.
I remember when Richard after the Pompado, he taught at UCLA, and I thought, as an American, we lived in the United States until I lived in LA and then it was like, why would you go to San Francisco for the weekend when where San Francisco was like why would you teach at UCLA when you could be at Berkeley.
Yeah, it's very much divided. Everybody has strong feelings about the state.
When you are producing a movie, tell me about that day in terms of how you start with the breakfast. Do you think about what you're going to have to lunch or do you well, I think it's.
Very much the same way of looking at what are your ingredients for the day, What is it you're trying to accomplish, and how are you bringing it all together in order to present something at the end of the day, which our presentation are the dailies and the eventual present is the editorial process.
But in that moment, it's the same.
Process where you're isolating all the things you're going to need, and whether that's the detail around set dressing, the detail around performance, the detail around the look of the lighting, the detail around a stunt being choreographed, really well, all of those details are important and you're doing it. Oftentimes with sometimes the size movies we're working on, we have hundreds of people, and even in that core team that's actually working around the camera, that's usually at least fifty
or more people. So communicating to everybody what it is you're trying to achieve is much like a restaurant. You come in at the beginning of the night or the day and you have a pretty good idea of what you're going to try to accomplish. You know how many reservations are there, what's going to be prepped, what's going to be ready, what do you have to anticipate, what do you have to be ready for? That's something we're
doing all the time. I always say as a producer, seventy five percent of my job should be done by the time the director says action, and then I'm problem solving. Yeah, that's pretty much what I'm doing in the course.
Of the day.
I always say that. Also, you know again in common ground, that a restaurant is a very good place to work in. You know, if you're out of school, because if you don't do your work, you don't necessarily get in trouble with your boss, but with your colleagues. So if a chef is preparing a salsa verde and a way to because all the waiters in the River Cafe come in
in the morning and they don't lay tables. They do the jobs of being of helping the chefs, so they know, chop the chili's, they they grill the peppers, they dessult the anchievies. But if they haven't done their job, then when he goes to make the sauce in the PARSI hasn't been he said. It's very it doesn't work.
You're working on a schedule and.
Exactly, yeah, yeah, and that's very, very similar to the process of working on a movie, because if everything is in prepped and ready to go, then the directors standing around waiting hours.
Sometimes, Yeah, it's not knowing your lines. Yeah, have you ever worked in I did.
I did little bits here and there, but nothing, you know, nothing I could really describe in any detail. It was one of my early jobs, actually one I think I was sixteen, sixteen years old. I worked in a little restaurant. It was scared me to death, actually.
It was. It was a great way to start, do you work.
When I interviewed Michael Caine, he said that he had never done a deal in Hollywood that wasn't done in a restaurant. When I asked JJ, he said, no, that was old school. Yeah, you would you take somebody out to a restaurant to finalize you know.
I take somebody out to a restaurant to get to know them. Certainly for key people that you're trying to bring into a movie, you're trying to build a relationship, and there's no better way to do that than to do that over food, you know. I I look at relationships based on a phone call, breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Are you going to go to dinner with somebody that's a commitment. That's a significant commisment. Are you going to go to lunch with somebody a little less breakfast, little less?
And so it's.
I'm not very worried, Okay, Kathy. If I come to and you say Ruth, no, no, no, no, I might be really.
We're already we're already friends. We'd have tons of pots.
But if you're trying to meet somebody and you're just doing it with a phone call, that's a lot different than committing to having dinner.
Dinner is a commitment and it does teach you. But that's why I started out by saying that I do see the way you are in a restaurant, and it tells you something, doesn't it. Whether people look the waiter in the eyeo whate that they say thank you, well, I.
Think it comes from a level of appreciation. You know, some people, food is not something they think a lot about and it's just, you know, another box to tick, as opposed to walking into a place where you appreciate what's gone into the preparation, the service, and the love of creating something like this.
When you travel, it depends on where we are.
And maybe this comes from my background of having eaten lots of different kinds of things.
I always want to know.
Like, for instance, when we were up in Scotland just the other day, had venison because I haven't had venison in a long long time, but they had it on the menu. We also went and got a platter of what they called a lock seafood platter, so it's all the different kinds of shellfish and fish that come out of the locks. I'll usually gravitate right away to something like that when you're in a restaurant where you feel that they're paying attention to what's around them.
And so, you know, we talk about food memories, we talk about food as adventure. We talk about food is taking care of the people we work with and the family that we love. But also food is a comfort. What would be Kathy Kennedy your comfort food?
My comfort food?
I would say that it's probably a really good hearty soup and a great homemade, thick piece of bread to go with it or corn bread. That's my comfort food.
Thank you well, thank you for giving us, as I said the movies, thank you for coming to the River Cafe tonight, and thank you for doing this well.
Thank you, Rauthie. It was a real pleasure.
To visit the online shop of the River Cafe, go to shop Therivercafe dot co dot UK.
River Cafe Table four is a production of iHeartRadio and Adami Studios. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.