Tag Archives: Nobu Matsuhisa

Entertainment

A Glowing Portrait of the Japanese Chef and His Empire

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A topic’s appeal can take a documentary a great distance. That’s the case in Matt Tyrnauer’s newest challenge, Nobu, a glowing portrait of Nobu Matsuhisa. The Japanese chef is finest identified for his empire of luxurious sushi eating places (and extra lately, resorts), the place company can expertise his medley of dishes impressed by his Japanese roots and early foray into Peruvian delicacies. In Nobu, primarily based on Matsuhisa’s memoir of the identical identify, Tyrnauer (additionally in Telluride this yr with Carville: Profitable Is Every part, Silly) anchors the worldwide phenom’s identify to a persona. 

Nobu is an easy and admiring portrait of its topic. The movie will seemingly enchantment to followers of the chef (particularly since this yr marks the thirtieth anniversary of the primary Nobu restaurant), however it might not fully satiate the culinary-curious. Much less process-oriented and extra wide-ranging than David Gelb’s shiny doc Jiro Desires of Sushi, Nobu appears to be like at Matsuhisa as a person and a model, providing bits of biography alongside insights into the chef’s steadily rising empire. 

Nobu

The Backside Line

A tasty appetizer, if not a full meal.

Venue: Telluride Movie Competition
Director: Matt Tyrnaeur

1 hour 50 minutes

Tyrnaeur shapes Nobu round prolonged interviews with Matsuhisa, who generously particulars his early years rising up in Japan, his need to turn out to be a sushi chef and the minor successes and main failures of his early ventures. These conversations, supplemented by interviews with Matsuhisa’s spouse, Yoko, and his two daughters, Junko and Yoshiko, type a comparatively candid biography and showcase Matsuhisa’s persona. His humor — characterised by Dad jokes and deadpan supply — enlivens his storytelling and makes the early a part of the doc really feel extra intimate. Tales about Matsuhisa’s childhood reveal a childhood marked by untimely grief and a fascination with sushi-making. He likens the method of watching a chef delicately press items of fish onto rice and serve it to prospects to seeing an actor on stage. To Matsuhisa, sushi is not only a delicacies however a efficiency. 

When the chef talks concerning the inspiration for standard dishes like black cod miso or experiments within the kitchen, Nobu nears its full potential as a documentary. Anecdotes about Matsuhisa’s early years in Peru, the place he encounters cilantro for the primary time, and restaurant ventures in Anchorage and later in Los Angeles affirm the inventive thread that undergirds his multi-million greenback enterprise. These moments enrich the portrait with tactical proof of an artist at work. It’s once we can witness the genius as an alternative of simply listening to about it from the movie’s varied speaking heads. A standout sequence comes close to the top of the documentary, when Nobu, in a uncommon transfer, decides to host shut buddies at his house in Japan. Right here, the chef’s theories about sushi-making as efficiency are distilled into motion. Whereas shaping bits of saltwater eel onto a plate, Matsuhisa regales his company with jokes and tales about his early culinary days and his more moderen ones as a global celeb. 

And what a star Matsuhisa has turn out to be. Tyrnauer dedicates a good portion of Nobu to the enterprise of operating a worldwide conglomerate. With dozens of eating places worldwide and a handful of resorts, Nobu is now a luxurious good. Tyrnauer travels with the chef — all the time personal, hardly ever industrial — to his varied eateries with a particular deal with Nobu Los Cabos and Nobu London. He additionally sits in on board conferences with Matsuhisa and his Nobu co-founders Robert De Niro and Meir Teper, the place the trio negotiate growth offers and visions of the model’s future. The filmmaking is direct right here, targeted extra on the switch of data than scoring fashion factors.

Every of Matsuhisa’s eating places adheres to Nobu’s modus operandi — intimate luxurious, high quality meals — whereas additionally utilizing native elements to mirror cultural appetites. Tyrnauer contains interviews with writers like Ruth Reichl and cooks like Wolfgang Puck to assist map the chef’s affect on the culinary world. A few of these strands are launched and deserted at a quick clip, contrasting with the regular tempo established within the biographical part.

With a lot to cowl and such a flattering sheen, the documentary largely sidesteps areas of potential rigidity. When the company tradition is described as familial, questions on labor practices, together with some recent-ish lawsuits, are left unaddressed. And a second of disagreement between De Niro and Teper concerning the path of the corporate — increase quickly in pursuit of capital or transfer slowly to keep up excessive requirements — is noticed however not assessed. It’s because of this that Nobu features finest as a primer, a tasting menu for all issues Nobu — man and model.

Entertainment

Matt Tyrnauer and His Doc Subjects James Carville and Nobu Matsuhisa Are Fest’s “Odd Throuple”

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“The oddest throuple in Telluride,” joked the filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer, whereas driving from his Beverly Hills residence to the movie fest in Colorado, will probably be Tyrnauer and the colourful characters on the middle of the 2 verité documentaries that he’s premiering within the Rockies this Labor Day weekend: the legendary Democratic political strategist James Carville, topic of Carville: Successful Is All the pieces, Silly, and sushi chef and restaurateur extraordinaire Nobu Matsuhisa, topic of Nobu.

Tyrnauer, 56, a longtime Vainness Truthful editor-at-large and particular correspondent turned prolific filmmaker of quite a few critically and commercially profitable nonfiction works — amongst them 2009’s Oscar-shortlisted Valentino: The Final Emperor, 2017’s Scotty and the Secret Historical past of Hollywood, 2018’s Studio 54 and 2019’s The place’s My Roy Cohn? — beforehand had a movie on the fest in 2022, his Benington Faculty doc The Finish of the World. However coming with two docs, each of that are nonetheless searching for U.S. distribution offers, and their movie star topics, neither of whom can have seen the movie about them till their premiere, makes for a really completely different expertise, he acknowledged.

Tyrnauer is one in every of just a few filmmakers who’ve ever had multiple movie in a single yr invited to display at Telluride, a fest with a small and thoroughly curated lineup. (This yr, the documentarian group of Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk are additionally coming with two works, In Waves and Conflict and The White Home Impact.) That’s largely as a result of few individuals can end up two docs of actual high quality inside a brief period of time of one another. But it surely’s additionally, Tyrnauer says, the results of “the magical rhythms and cadences of filmmaking.” The 2 tasks began across the identical time and have been shot overlappingly. “Nobu’s by no means residence — he’s jetting round to 55 eating places and resorts in far-flung locations — and we hopped on the non-public jet with him to try this. And Carville is on and off Delta flights each week, and we might meet up with him, too. So it was a few years of lots of sprawling journey.”

Carville and Matsuhisa will meet for the primary time on Saturday, when Matsuhisa jets into city from Japan, becoming a member of Carville, who, alongside along with his spouse, the esteemed Republican political strategist, Mary Matalin, will already be on the bottom; Carville and Matalin, the epitome of a D.C. energy — and odd — couple, plan to attend the fest’s patrons brunch on Friday morning, after which the primary screening of Carville on Friday night time. Nobu will display for the primary time on Saturday. After which Carville will display once more on Sunday — similtaneously the LSU Tigers soccer recreation, to Carville’s consternation. “I wouldn’t know a soccer recreation, or when it occurs, to avoid wasting me,” chuckles Tyrnauer. “However he has been informed that he can’t have a corridor move for that.”

In some methods, the topics of Tyrnauer’s docs couldn’t be extra completely different: Carville, nicknamed “The Ragin’ Cajun,” was born, raised and continues to stay in Louisiana, whereas Matsuhisa hails from Japan. Carville talks loudly and a mile-a-minute, whereas Matsuhisa is usually soft-spoken. And Carville is aware of little about sushi, whereas Matsuhisa doesn’t observe American politics notably intently. However in different respects, they’re rather a lot alike. Each are septuagenarians — Carville in 79, Matsuhisa is 75 — who first attained actual success and fame, after loads of failure, of their forties. Each got here to be thought to be the best practitioners of their respective professions. And now, of their third acts, each keep grueling schedules that replicate their need to stay lively and related.

Not like his topics, Tyrnauer, whose father was a TV author/producer, discovered his calling — and a constructive response to his work — early in life. “I used to be form of like Woodward and Bernstein with a reporter’s pocket book going round once I was in elementary faculty,” he stated with amusing. “I had a newspaper within the third grade. I used to be a movie main. I knew what I wished to do.” At and after attending Wesleyan College in Connecticut, his many and diverse pursuits — which embody American arts, tradition and politics — led him to a number of of the topics of previous profiles he composed in print and on movie. And so they finally led him to Carville and Matsuhisa.

Carville, movie lovers might recall, was the star of one other documentary 31 years in the past, Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s The Conflict Room, which chronicled the 1992 president marketing campaign of Invoice Clinton that Carville oversaw. (Keep in mind “It’s the economic system, silly”?) The lengthy shadow of that traditional might have scared away different filmmakers from additional documenting Carville, however not Tyrnauer. “James was the protagonist of an important documentary that folks bear in mind a long time later, which may be very uncommon for any movie,” Tyrnauer acknowledges. “However we’re now 30-plus years on, and James Carville is a family identify, not an rising comet within the political universe. He has had a large, arching profession within the public eye, and a wedding that’s virtually distinctive in its political-public nature. And he hasn’t been checked in on for fairly just a few a long time, actually. So I believed that there was lots of fodder in there for this. After which the election of 2024 struck.”

Tyrnauer by no means imagined that his Carville doc would find yourself focusing closely on its topic main the cost to persuade Joe Biden to bow out of the 2024 presidential election, starting greater than a yr earlier than a disastrous debate led many different Democrats to undertake the identical place. However that’s how issues advanced. “I used to be taking pictures with him at his residence in New Orleans,” the filmmaker recounted. “It was Might 2023 when an ABC Information-Washington Publish ballot got here out and stated that Biden was dropping to Trump. James learn the numbers on digital camera, after which we went to movie him doing his morning spherical of cellphone calls — which he does on daily basis — to the identical group of people who find themselves the foxhole buddies from the ’92 Clinton marketing campaign. At the moment, one thing clicked in James the place he realized, with all his experience, that Biden was in actual hazard of dropping; that this can be a ‘change election’; and that nothing says extra of the identical than Joe Biden versus Donald Trump. So he started urgent, and that grew to become a serious storyline that I started following on this movie.”

Concurrently, Tyrnauer was jetting world wide with Matsuhisa, whose evolution “from a mother and pop restaurant [owner and chef] to spectacular in a single day breakout success to slowly scaling to one of many biggest restaurant empires ever recognized” fascinated the filmmaker, as did the truth that Matsuhisa’s hallmark eating places opened within the filmmaker’s personal Los Angeles group again within the Nineteen Eighties. “It’s the place I’m from, and I like that period,” he defined. “The punk meals revolution period of LA is absolutely fascinating, and I used to be somewhat learn in on it.”

What he was not acquainted with earlier than embarking on a movie exploring “what it’s in regards to the character of the person that permits him to be so profitable” have been most of the particular particulars of Matsuhisa’s life — least of all that he “was a spectacular failure for the primary half of his life.” However, Tyrnauer continued, “Once I started to debrief Nobu on the particulars of his life, I discovered a extremely soulful, considerate particular person, who was capable of entry his feelings, and was very beneficiant along with his honesty as an interviewee.”

That’s not all Matsuhisa was beneficiant with, Tyrnauer emphasised: “Certainly one of my issues with Nobu is that he’s so beneficiant that I needed to cease going to Nobu [restaurants] as a result of I couldn’t sneak in there with out being given an elaborate free meal, and I grew to become embarrassed after some time.” (Tyrnauer’s private favourite merchandise on the chef’s menu: the tuna tartare with caviar.)

Tyrnauer determined, he stated, that, “so as to perceive what it’s prefer to be Nobu, to look at Nobu, and to attach with Nobu as a sushi chef, I ought to in some way sit throughout the sushi bar from him, and that ought to in some way be within the movie. I wouldn’t be within the scene, however I might be the client, and he would do his factor, and I might interview him whereas he was in motion. So we did a shoot within the omakase bar of [the restaurant] Matsuhisa. We had cameras hanging from the ceiling and floating round and over my shoulder, and we shot him from lots of angles.” He added, “I sat there for hours on finish. The crew was extremely joyful, too, as a result of I couldn’t presumably eat every part that got here throughout the counter — I imply, there was caviar flying in all places!”

Spending time with Matsuhisa introduced again reminiscences for Tyrnauer of his first documentary characteristic, which was additionally informed within the verité model, and its topic: “I feel there’s some very clear parallels between Valentino [Garavani, the famed designer] and Nobu, the movies and the individuals. I feel they’re each nice inventive artists in their very own fields, on the prime of their area, in a really rarefied a part of the tradition, each with excessive worth factors and perfectionists.”

Now, as Tyrnauer prepares to reconnect along with his topics within the excessive altitude of Telluride, he’s not fairly certain what to anticipate, aside from a very good time. “They’re each nice guys and actually great to be with,” he asserted. “I haven’t actually talked to them about each other. I feel we’re simply all going to be content material to be thrown collectively within the surreal fishbowl of this good city within the mountains, within the midst of one of the best movie pageant conceivable.”