In the film, actor Jon Favreau cooks his way through fancy Delmonico steaks and caviar to find his Zen making Cubanos on a beat-up food truck. He follows a recipe from Roy Choi, the chef whose Korean taco truck helped launch the street food movement in LA. As food stylist, McSorley's job was to get Choi's recipe on screen, assembling pork, ham, Swiss cheese, mustard and very crunchy dill pickles on a crisp baguette.
5 comments:
I’ve read about this before actually, how they make food for pictures look so good. Did you know that the thanksgiving turkeys on magazine covers are actually raw? Then brushed with dish detergent and a blow torch till they look delicious? How about that the majority of white or melty stuff is just lard? Honestly I’d go into food styling if costuming wasn’t an option any more. It’s just so cool what kind of deliciously deceiving things you can make out other junk. What I didn’t know was how many takes it took to eat food on stage. I mean I guess I get it, it makes sense, but it never just crossed my mind that stage food could get old. I know I won’t be jealous when I see people eating those wonderful meals in movies and more. Also, whose job is it to throw out all the leftovers? Or do they just feed it to the interns…?
The art of food props does not get as much credit as it should. When people watch a movie or a show and see people eating they do not think about the amount of times the actor actually had to eat it and how long it needed to last. Scenes with ice cream are usually not ice cream at all because it would melt and become a mess very easily. I would hope if I were the actor eating the ice cream that it was not butter because that would not taste good to eat over and over again. Food prop makers need to be very clever with what they substitute foods with depending on how long it needs to be used for and dietary restrictions of the actors. Sometimes it is not worth using real food at all, if they do not end up eating any of it. In many scenes at restaurants, the actors are talking the entire time and they do not actually eat any of the food. There is a lot of tricking going on when it comes to food props in movies and tv shows.
This is really interesting. Like Alex (below), I had heard about some of these tricks, but mostly in the context of advertisement. I had never considered how food would act differently in the context of movies. Making foods that look real and are also edible is a challenge that hadn't even crossed my mind. It also must be an issue to take actors' dietary restrictions into consideration. I remember Jon Ward talking to us about making normal, sugar free and gluten free cake for Three Sisters. The difficulties must only increase when the food must be used for repeated shots, repeated angles, and while negotiating a bigger crew. It also must be difficult to make fake foods with the same qualities as real ones. Cake needs to be soft, jello needs to wobble. Steak needs to be veiny. I would kill to pick these food artists brains a little more and learn their secrets.
I, like the above commenters, also read a lot about the tricks advertisers use to make their food appear much more appetizing than it actually is, making ice cream out of cream cheese and airbrushing styrofoam to look like a burger, but this is very different. It seems a lot harder to create a fake food that can last the whole day, but have it be made out of other food. It seems easy enough to spray paint styrofoam, but to have to create a cake or oyster that can be eaten by the actors take after take and last, while not actually being that food, would take a real pro. The more I think about it, the more work it seems like. Just like a designer needs to know their materials to decide what can look like what, this person needs to know this, but with food, which, in my opinion is so much harder.
I had no idea that this even happened. That must be a tell of how incredible these people are at their job. They really deserve so much credibility for their efforts. Sometimes food can be a crucial part of the story being told. It's also a tribute to the actors as well, when faced with "fake" food and they must imagine that it's the most delicious thing in the world. They must be so grateful for people like her that keep this consideration in mind as they make these huge portions. To know that the food in "Chef" is authentic, really motivates me even more to see it. Because I will know that as my mouth is watering as I look at this beautiful food, I know that it is real. I will really be able to submerge in that aspect of the story.
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