Welcome to Ruthie's Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and Adamized Studios.
Michael Man 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 an honor for if Michael was a fan of Richard's architecture. Richard was a huge fan
of Michael's movies. In fact, when watching Ali, 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 roasvelle fresh tomato. So five hundred grams of cold roast velle, two hundred and fifty milli liters of tomato sauce, six basil leaves, fifty grams of salted capers, two lemons and extra virgin olive oil. Slice of veal as fine as possible. Squeeze the juice of one lemon and mixt it with three times its 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 tomato 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?
Varied but mostly spent a little time in Naples Once upon a time, and then then Venice and drove around the Dolomites at different times, but mostly it's been in It's been in the Media.
Romagna, around Modena Maronello.
The Ferrari 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 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 Kavolino restaurant that has been there since the nineteen fifties, and the cuisine is modernation. So it's a big metal cart full of horribly boiled meats.
Alo that's right. Yeah, I actually really love it. But they do cook it a very long time time and you get the tongue and you get the yet everything.
Yeah, my grandmother hit the neck of totally destroying meats.
I think it came from it came from it came from Big Russia.
Living tell me about her, So just starting going back to your child. So your grandparents came, both of them from Russia.
My grandfathers came from Russia. They came from about seventy or eighty miles north of Chernobol.
Did they come from the same place or did they meet.
They came, No, they came from the same place. They came from over. My grandfather had to leave at the 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 in twelve, and then did he go directly?
He went to White Chapel, he was in a British army. Then he wasn't in a British army. Then he came. Then he went to Hartford, Connecticut. Then it was an American army.
In the First World War.
Then the First World War. Yeah, And then nineteen nineteen he lost his hearing and the flu epidemic and my.
Grandfather died in the fluid the same generation, you know.
And then finally in nineteen twenty two was able to get my grandmother my father out and then they moved to Chicago. But she was a spectacular woman, very very witty, very politically very progressive. But what she was she killed as a cork were COIs.
She made these cheese described finish.
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'd picked up a blue earthenware container of this of these things and around the seat of the car as car as a fifty four plymouth. It was my uncle Sam's car that he let me drive
the car. And there was a lot of traffic on California Avenue and I was driving back to to our house, and so I took a hard light on Catalpa, took a left out in an alley and hit a gigantic pothole in the alley, and in the way time slows down, I saw this earthenware container of my grandmother's condess just start to fall off the seat in slow motion, and I saw myself had to get to a telephone pole and I'm thinking moment, it was either saved the conditioners
or saved the car. So I reached for the conditions and just crashed the car into the pole.
To die for a kindish might not have been.
That's how much it's got all the important early themes of basically immature life. From that point forward, it was just driving cars.
And so your grandmother was the cook, She made the conditions. Was she the one that overlooked the beef or was that your mother?
No, she over cooked the beef. I don't know. I think it was.
I mean it was a standing joke and the family, my brother and I, you know, you would chew it and tell you your jaws ate you couldn't masticate this.
What else did your grandmother? Did she live with you? By the way, your grandmother, No, she didn't. So you would go to her house 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 life, I realized there was 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 progroms in the area from the through the Civil War from the white Russians. So you know, there were 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 my grandmother. No, my grandmother cooked. You know, if you cook the way they traditionally the way they did, you went, you went to the store, you bought a live chicken. They killed the chicken. You brought the chicken at home. You know, I'm not going back to 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.
Yeah, he did, and he had a real sensibility for cusine, for fruit number one. But then also finally imported mushrooms from Poland, for example, a certain kind of a mushroom barley soup. Or when I was working for my father when I was a kid, from when I was like twelve to sixteen, Uh, he had like a supermarket, a small supermarket. And in the winter I was I was delivering groceries and it's ten below and you're carrying groceries wagon or something carrying a portion that you got cold.
And they always had some gigantic pot with some kind of a massive.
Stew, you know, it all day long in the grocery store.
In the back of the grocery store. It was a very family kind of a kind of affair. Yeah, and exotic kinds of smoked fish from Eastern Europe would show up and there'd be something hanging in the basement, but he would sell that. That was that's where that's where we had.
That's we head home, you know, and the grocery store sold.
It was just a big Yeah.
It was just a standard kind of supermarket, neighborhood, supermar What was the.
Area was it.
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, a very upper middle class wave of Polish immigration from the nineteen twenties, very sophisticated people, a Jewish, Italian, some Irish.
So it was quite mixed.
I saw when they had we used to go to a church right after must have been nineteen forty six forty seven, right right after the War. There was a neighborhood church a block away that had showed movies in the basement, the old black and white, sixteen milimeter movies.
And I remember being taken that.
When I was very young and I saw a movie, I just remembered certain things about it. In nineteen ninety one, when I had I couldn't figure out what to do next, what film to do next. I remember that railing around in my brain was this image of a of an Iroquois Indian head shaved bold and lined 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 America, 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 three. So it was last of the Mohicans and so so well, you got to go to the last Mohicans. So this, this old
neighborhood really had this resonance. I think things impressed themselves on your memory when you're very young, in ways that are are are huge.
And then at home, who is it you have a brother or sister?
How many brother?
And did you sit down for meals? Did your father come back?
We waited. My father came home.
He took a bath and took a shower, and we formally sat down and he always had a good shot of whiskey and a shot of whiskey and uh and we had a formal dinner every night.
And that continued till you left home.
That continued until I left home.
You know, 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 it?
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 ordered cook, doing breakfast at a girls dormitory in the morning in Wisconsin.
You know.
So it was just interesting getting up at five thirty in the morning and Wisconsin in a winter and going to you know, a.
Lot of clue from your grandmother to your mother, to the grocery store to working. Did you ever work in a restaurant.
Yeah, I did. I was a short cook one summer in front of Yeah, which is crazy. You will blanche at some of these stories from these places. We used to because there'd be this massive rush and it was a memory test because you were having to remember all these orders at the same time. And if 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 in the French frar.
In the fire.
Yes, absolutely horrible.
Probably guilty of some form of order, manslaughter or something, because there's probably regular diets who had earlier heart disease because they ate these things.
Yeah, And that was Wisconsin. And then you went to this is about but what about London? 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 then and then in the sixties there seemed to be a lot more food of Greece and Italy. This it was much more vibrant. Did you remember the food of this.
Totally absolutely my experience with bigger short of cook and all this stuff. This is in the this in your early sixties and the States and h I talked about, you're working for my father.
This is in the nineteen fifties.
But in sixty five I went to London to a film school for two years and stayed there for six years. And the cuisine was, you know, basically beans on toast, yeah, and transport.
Calf yeah, and chip sandwiches.
Did you ever have chip sandwiches?
That was really big on transport caffs, beans on toast or you're having you know, or eggs.
I used to love.
Yeah, every swimming in Greece, 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 cheftalia 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 Queensway, very briefly, and then we were on New King's Road. Then I lived in Balum, then clap himself and back in South ken.
Did anybody ever take you to a restaurant that was Yeah?
How did I start actually started making a little bit of money? And then the thing was so attractive was on Fulham Road there was an Italian restaurant and I was living on ten pounds a week, literally is five
pounds for rent, five pounds. But the ambiance of a nice Italian restaurant on the 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 form in your restaurant and this whole extended family that you created.
So were you taken to when you were in film school? Then? What was that in London?
I was in London, it was in Covent Garden, It's on Charlotte Street. Then the move to Covent Garden. It's a London film school.
Yeah, and what was that like?
That was great?
For the first time in my life, I was doing exactly only what I wanted to do, which is make film, which was a revelation to me when it happened in my junior.
Year at was Scott's.
So I took a film history course for a kind of cynically, I thought, oh, we're going to 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 curded a flash of light, like the skies parted and bolt of lightning came down and.
Said you will do this, you will become a film director. And from that point on and that was it. That's what I want to do with you.
Was Ridley Scott. There was Alan Parker and Ridley Scott. Were they in the same Did you know them?
Then?
I knew Ridley.
I didn't know I met Alan Parker years later, but I knew Ridley, And you know, the late sixties, I started a small production company after I got out of film school and London. We made some commercials and documentaries and I shot some of Paris after Major in sixty eight. That was politically pretty involved. Yeah, and so life was
changing and evolving. 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 going to live reasonably. And I had a production manager I worked with whose wife was fresh and he was.
Quite a spectacular cook.
And that was probably the first serious exposure I had to really good cuzin home cooking. Yeah, it was home cooked French 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.
And France was that huge few Being in Paris.
Well sixty eight was pretty wild.
Well, we got there much later. We got there in sort of seventy one, but there were still the buses full of police and Daniel Combandi Well.
I interviewed Combindi Lan's mar Alon Cravine.
Wow have that footage?
No, it wound up.
It grown up in the bowels of NBC News 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?
Well?
You just is it footage for the news documentary?
About the focus of documentary was that the sixth May JUnit happened, and what's what's going to be the after effect,
And that's what it was really focused on. And the prediction at the time, which was partially true parsonally not, was that the major impact was going to be amongst teenagers into these says, and that there was a radicalization of the young workers, particularly young workers at the Renaul 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 and 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 may not still reading the news, sitting on the desk, she may may not have a shirt on.
I mean, it was everybody.
A youth generation had taken over, and it wasn't just students. There was students and young workers.
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 basically a prisoner in the palace, 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 so
it's complete chaos. So he made a deal with the French Army of the Rhine, because Germany is still occupy at that point, to come in and support him, and they extorted from him, in effect, the release of Ceylon, who was a right wing of French general.
Who over the war in Algeria.
It was part of a plot to sassinate the Gall and was in prison, and that that was the quid pro quo of the Gall getting support from the military, and that they they marched in from Germany and that so so better kind of dived and everything dissipated.
So that the military cushed 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 were at the heart of it, knew nothing serious was actually going to happen in the real world right then and there. It was very sophisticated. The irony is that is that sitting in London prior to Major sixty eight, everybody dismissed the French's Cafe Marxist or something, and then ironically that's where sixty eight was
just extraordinary. You're in Czechoslovakia and Mexico City. I was in the Grosvenor Square on October twenty fifth.
Yeah, that was there.
You were there, Clinton was there, Tarika, he was there.
Illy have a picture by the march. It was heady times. And as I said, when Richard, when the Pampato we went, it would still there would be go to the cinema on a Sunday night and it was scary coming back because they just they would lock the police when they just just locked them in these vans for hours and you're just can imagine the tension and the fear and you know the horror of having to sit in there. That's true. 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 Blanco because I'd seen a movie called Costa Blanca.
You had to go to costap Bloc.
Great food, great food, I think, great 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. Toured through the Atlass Mountains a bit.
When you were on a movie set, did you think about how the feed the crew did you eat yourself?
I do, and I make sure that the food on the set is really, really great and have great catering. Is a guy named Mario and in Miami who I used all the time, and Miami 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 on a healthy food and then the amount of time it takes to stop for lunch and eat.
It's pretty it's pretty tough.
Yeah, 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 I spilot in Tokyo.
Did you tell me about food in Tokyo?
Food and Toki go spectacular. You can't get a bad meal if you're tried to get a bad meal. Within We're living in Daka, Yama, and within one hundred and fifty meters of our apartment were probably half a dozen spectacular restaurants, any one of which would have been the best sushi restaurant in Los Angeles.
Did you eat anything else other than Japanese?
Yes, Italian they're the you know, like literally one hundred and fifty feet outside the front door was the Princely Bakery from Milan, had an outpost next to Sutaya, the big Sataya bookstore. So there was fantastic Italian bakery, gooods every morning, fresh food with spectacular in Tokyo. People in Tokyo they spend money in a different way than they do in the West. They don't spend money on living space. They spend money on clothes, on food, on cars, but not on living space.
Yeah, it's funny. I went spent morning in a cafe in Milan, and I just kept seeing all these people coming and dressed immaculately beautifully, and young people, and I said, how do they afford to buy that Prada shirt, that Gucci sweater? And they live at home? 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, on the culture,
you know. And so when you're going tomorrow to Milan, are you to know where is.
I'NFL like to Milan? They were driving right to Modorna.
Yeah, and tell me about that. What are you doing?
We're doing very early pre production on a feature film about three months in 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 become. His son,
Dino had died by a year earlier. His wife sent warning he had another child, and illegitimate son named Piero Pierro Lardi, who was starting to wonder why his name is Lardi 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 Lara, who was kind of a Maria callous figure, was about to find out what the whole town knew, which is that there was another family living in Costell Meethro. So it's all of these things coming to collision. And the opera house one of the two opera houses in Mode and I was right next door. So opera is a huge plays a huge role in this. Fra 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 Neil Valeri and knew he had no future as a race car driver and started managing the Alfa Romeo racing team and then started his own scooterio within Alpha and that that was the that's that's the origins of the company, which he then began in forty seven with Lara, 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 everything we do, whether it's going out of space or doing research or 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.
I'm all with the suggestion, Okay, tell.
Me about food in your movies, because there's obviously in Heat when they become a 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 you.
It does because it's such an important thing in life. And there's two fantastic restaurants that nobody heat. There's one of the Broadway Dells, which sadly is no longer there. It's where Denio picks up Amy Brenneman and he and the others. The coffee shop scene at Cape Mandelini, which
is this spectacled glafi shop. Cape Mandellini was a coffee, a big coffee shop restaurant with wonderful modern architecture and a contemporary architecture, and right on Wilship Boulevard, about a block block west of the Academy, and everybody in Los Angeles and the West side 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.
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 does a restaurant mean?
For some reason, I don't know why, It's always strikes me is it's it's social, it's warm, and when the aunbiance 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.
Safety, and you're also part of a context, you know, So you're a sentiment and you're part of the human context, the social context simultaneously. Uh, 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 just interview 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 a 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 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 lap, 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.
Every gesture.
Why do you pick up a glass?
Because it's a possession, it's a movement, it's an action, you know, and everything is telling. And so people in the restaurants are both totally self conscious and self aware and they're totally unconscious and un self 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 I think there's something romantic about restaurants. There used to be a restaurant here called Ladome, and we went to La Dome. It was our family restaurant where every occasion was at Ladome. You know, a gigantic round table. 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 the last twenty five years. There is 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 the River.
Cafe for years and even walk in there, there's still people say, oh, say hi to Air 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 market. I'm in 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.
Really, why is it exciting? Is it is exciting to walk in the River cart for it is exciting to walk into a restaurant you love and people say hello, and it's just the simplest of human interactions.
It's very common human, it's very you know that I also exciting.
I think you elicted it 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 in 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 Pastinian bruto nice one.
To me.
It's like you know, culinary five milligrams of morphine. I can't explain it. It was just it's wonderful, it is mellow. You know, probably all kinds of old sense memories of my grandmother.
I mean, there's.
Probably all kinds of things roll together because it's it's chicken broth in the pie and the cheek.
I mean, it's just I.
Don't know, that's just if you ask me about comfort food, that's it.
Well, you're going to have it in northern Italy, you'll have it. You know, 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 illustraded 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
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