RATATOUILLE — Brad Bird cooks up the ultimate food film

The animated classic about an adorbs rat chef… spent nearly 7 years in the oven. Director Brad Bird (THE IRON GIANT) and producer Brad Lewis (ANTZ) tell Rico the whole multi-course saga, including gut-busting tales of Michelin-starred “research” meals that were so good they hurt.

Just in time for holiday eat-a-thons, the award-winning MUBI Podcast is back and celebrating its tenth season with a four-course serving of stories about food on film. Titled "A Feast For The Eyes," the season digs into the ways filmmakers use food to provoke hunger, thought, nausea, political action...and sometimes all the above.

Joining host Rico Gagliano is a sampler platter of luminaries from the film and culinary world, including directors Brad Bird (RATATOUILLE), Mira Nair (MONSOON WEDDING), and David Gelb (JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI), former New York Times food writer Alison Roman, and more. Gluttons for great cinema stories can start chowing down on episodes weekly, starting Thanksgiving Day.

Let's Eat! Food and Film collection is now streaming on MUBI globally. 

Subscribe to NOTEBOOK, MUBI’s biannual print magazine, at mubi.com/magazine to get the food-themed Issue 8. 

To stream some of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.

MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI makes, acquires, curates, and champions extraordinary films, connecting them to audiences all over the world. A place to discover ambitious new films and singular voices, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs. Each carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.

Transcript

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Heads up, this episode contains no obscene language, lots of obscenely heavy meals and spoilers. Wait, I have to have some. Oh yes, I got the double potato. That's always the best. Two crispy potatoes stuck together. Alright, let's bring it back to the table now. That is my six year old grabbing a handful of oven fries straight out of the baking pan, the other night at dinner time. Like me at his age, he loves pounding down food. Dad, look. Four! Four chunks of potato all welded together. Does it taste better than all the others? Yeah. But what's not like me at his age is the way he can talk about food. They're delicious. A soft, lightly seasoned, spicy texture. What do you think we could do to make it taste even better? Add more rosemary. He's right. The potatoes were lightly seasoned and short on rosemary. He actually insists on fresh rosemary from the bushes that grow wild on our street. He can also do a pretty good imitation of the judges on cooking competition shows like MasterChef, because he watches clips of them every night on YouTube. How do you think Joe Bastianich would describe these potatoes? Joe would say,"Well, you cooked the burger perfectly."I like that. But the potatoes are off." I don't think he would cackle maniacally at the end. But you got it pretty good. I mean, don't get me wrong, he'll totally scarf down a bag of Lay's, but in ways I sure wasn't, the kid is fascinated by how something just tasty can be made delicious. I actually know a few kids like this, and if you ask their parents, we will all trace it back to a movie we played them almost as soon as they had an attention span. A family film, I think, gave kids and their folks a grown up appetite for artistry. I'm Rico Gagliano. Welcome back to the MUBI Podcast. MUBI's the global film company that champions great cinema. On this show we tell you the stories behind great cinema. Today we launch season ten. We are calling it a feast for the eyes for the next four episodes, just in time for your holiday eat-a-thons, we are going to talk about great films that focus on food, starting with what's kind of become the unlikely king of food movies. Pixar Studios computer animated classic <i>Ratatouille,</i> about a rat who rises from the literal gutter to the top of the restaurant world in Paris. It's a story that took more than half a decade and two different directors to cook up, one of them reluctantly. The last thing I wanted to do was a project that had taken five years that Pixar couldn't crack, based on three things that I know nothing about, rats and cooking and France. That is Brad Bird, the man behind beloved animated movies like <i>The Iron Giant</i> and <i>The Incredibles</i> and I spoke to him and his producer, Brad Lewis, about how, despite it all, they managed to serve up a work of art about making works of art. My feeling is that <i>Ratatouille</i> is perhaps the only independent movie that Pixar ever made. You'll also hear behind-the-scenes stuff about ex-Pixar bosses Steve Jobs and John Lasseter, and one of the film's consultants, the legendary chef Thomas Keller. But the story starts back at the turn of this century, when Pixar poached Brad Lewis from a pioneering computer animation company called PDI. It was shortly after I'd produced the movie <i>Antz</i>. I had friends that had gone up to Pixar to do <i>Toy Story</i> that I used to work with at PDI, and they had told Steve Jobs and John and some of the folks up there about me. And so I got a call from Steve asking whether or not I'd be interested in coming up and talking. I did, and then I started at Pixar, late 2001. And your first movie that you produced there was <i>Ratatouille</i>. Tell me, what was your first encounter with the project? Well, when I met with folks there, they said,"Why don't you talk to Jan Pinkava," who was the director on <i>Ratatouille,</i> he had just begun in development on it. Jan and I had a nice long conversation, and they ultimately offered me the opportunity to be the producer on <i>Ratatouille</i>. I still remember Jan's last question to me in my interview, he said, "What's your pet peeve?" And I said,"People who panic under pressure." And it couldn't be a more apropos theme for the next six and a half years of my life. Your typical Hollywood feature takes about three years to make. At Pixar, they can spend three years just developing a movie story. But <i>Ratatouille</i> was an epically long production, even by their standards, which apparently just meant there was more time for the pressure to pile up at the end. Yeah, I started working on it 2001. It didn't come out, as you know, into 2007. And it just-- It became one of those... I'm not sure if you've ever skydived, but I did a brief amount of skydiving and they described this thing as ground rush, and that is, you're up in the air and everything is beautiful, right? The chute opens up and you're looking around, it's beautiful. And then that last 200 feet is just like, wham! You know? It hits you in 2.5 seconds. So that was another thematic for the production.- A theme of the production.- Yeah. We'll get to how I'm sure the last couple of years of this project gave you a lot of ground rush. So you interviewed with Jan Pinkava. Tell me about him, first of all. What kind of dude was he, and how did this project come from his brain? Jan, he previously had done the short film <i>Geri's Game,</i> the chess match where the guy plays against himself, which was an incredible short film. And Jan is, like, literally one of the most energetic and genuine and sincere artists that I've worked with. You know, he just exudes enthusiasm. And he described <i>Ratatouille</i> really as the simple question, what if a rat became a chef?<i>This much I knew,</i><i>if you are what you eat, then I only want to eat the good stuff.</i> For the two of you out there who haven't seen this movie, here's the basic premise. The hero is Remy, voiced by Patton Oswalt, who, unlike any rodent in his colony, has incredible taste. Literally, he's got the palate of a gourmet. Much to his dad's chagrin.<i>Food is fuel.</i><i>You get picky about what you put in the tank,</i><i>your engine is gonna die. Now shut up and eat your garbage.</i> But then Remy catches a rerun of an old cooking show featuring a storied chef named Gusteau.<i>Good food is like music you can taste,</i><i>color you can smell.</i><i>There is excellence all around you.</i> And starts to dream of working in a human kitchen. The last place on earth rats should ever belong.<i>So now I had a secret life.</i> It's a story about a rat who wants to become a chef and how would one achieved that impossible posit, if you will. Alright, Jan Pinkava-- So Pixar is notorious for encouraging its animators to draw from their own experience to come up with stories. So what was in his background that led him to that story? Well, I wouldn't want to speak too much for Jan, but, honestly, for a guy who comes from Czechoslovakia and makes his way, somehow, to the United States, finds their way to Pixar and then ultimately contributes as a director and an incredible creative, is its own impossible story, right? And this is like Iron Curtain, Cold War era Czechoslovakia that he came from- is my understanding- 100%. So he is the rat.- To put it bluntly.- Yeah. And look, if you want to look at the original Pixar directors and creative founders there, they were some of the, you know, greatest "animation chefs" in the world. Do you know why to reflect it through food, though? There's a million different ways that you could tell the story of an artist coming from an unlikely place. Why pick through the food world? I think it's just that a rat is anathema to a kitchen, not to mention a restaurant. If you want to start a movie idea with the idea of an oppositional statement, this is probably as oppositional as you can get. I see. The only other one that sort of comes to mind is <i>Billy Elliot,</i> right? That movie where a working class kid in the countryside of the UK, finds his way to the ballet in London. That's another, you know, way to make it extreme, but I think make it as extreme as possible. What was your kind of draw to this story? There were a couple of different aspects of it. I can get behind a story that's going to be somebody that's like, you can't do this, and you have to risk everything in order to get it done. So I love the daring of it. I certainly spent years, I was-- Early days for me, I was trying to be an actor, right? I went to New York and sort of struggled, which meant that I had waited tables, I had bartended, I had busboyed, I spent, as a trade, a lot of time in restaurants. And I loved all the relationships between the chefs and the cooks and the front waitstaff and all of that. So I-- That also, sort of, appealed to me. So you were an aspiring actor, but it sounds like maybe you were into your work in the food world. Were you ever like, maybe this is the industry for me? I think I loved having a captive audience. But then also the interplay with the kitchen and trying to get that food right and everything. To me, getting something right is important no matter what you're doing. Yeah, there is a sense of camaraderie that's very similar to actually making a collaborative piece of art, like theater or a film where it's like, every night you get together and you put on a show. Exactly and the personalities... There's some crazy people that work in those kitchens, man. So in 2001, Brad Lewis signed on as producer on <i>Ratatouille</i> and Jan Pinkava and his writer Jim Capobianco dove into the story, trying to weave together those crazy, food world characters with an invented world of rats. In the early days, we were into this parallel storytelling. What I mean by that is, Remy has a life with his family in the sewers, and then he starts to develop relationships of his life in the kitchen. And so we had a whole family set up in the sewer 'cause we felt like 50% of the movie was gonna take place there and 50% in the kitchen. Remy had a mother who was a cabaret singer. And the father was kind of working class and it was gonna be a big life down there. But the cool thing was, we had Bette Midler cast as Remy's mother. Oh, man. Right? As a cabaret singer. And I'm such a Bette Midler fan. And I got to go and actually pitch her the movie in New York, and she and I had these great conversations. It was one of my life's dreams come true. Which ended in the most dramatic fashion possible. We're down in the lobby after the presentation and her husband's waiting for her outside the lobby, to pick her up, take her home from the meeting, and she just, in mid-sentence as we're talking, she just puts her arm on my forearm and says, "I'm horrible at goodbyes." And she turns and walks away. The most Bette Midler thing you could ever imagine in your life. Sadly, though, it was all for nothing because after years of writing and production, most of Pinkava's Rat World stuff fell out of the story. And in 2005, so did Pinkava himself. You're developing this thing. Ultimately, Pinkava doesn't last. What happened? We had had a lot of shots at trying to get the story right. Going back to the oppositional statement of, a rat wants to become a chef. There's lots of little hurdles in this. Like, animals don't talk to humans. We can't do the whole movie in pantomime. So how do we solve those issues? Rats are dirty. How do we solve those issues? Inside a French kitchen, these places are military machines of cooking, and then you've got rats and rat colony, and they live in a sewer. So it's just the enormity of all the issues that we're going to have to solve, both in production design and storytelling and just raw surfacing. And I think, honestly, Jan ultimately was exhausted by the process of really trying to find it. So enter the new director, which was Brad Bird, who had just had this big Pixar hit with <i>The Incredibles</i>. First of all, describe him. Tell me about that guy. Brad Bird is equal parts Sammy Davis Jr, Frank Sinatra, football player and guy standing on a soapbox yelling about his political opinion, turning red-faced on a corner.- Oh, I don't know.- That's Brad Bird again. I ran Brad Lewis's description by him, and while he doesn't quite agree with it, he admits it sounds familiar. One thing that I find funny is that when people draw me, they draw me short. And I'm not short, I'm average. I'm like five nine and they draw me angry. Like I'm just exploding with wrath and I'm like, oh, come on. I'm as harmless as a kitten, you know?- You're passionate, that's all.- Yeah. I guess maybe that's it. And it was that Remy-like passion and the fact that he'd already been giving Pinkava notes on the <i>Ratatouille</i> story that made Bird the obvious choice to take over the movie, like, right away. You know, I had built up all this vacation time on <i>Incredibles,</i> and I was finally taking that break. I went to Vermont, and me and my wife and my three sons were driving in a van,- and suddenly it was John on the line.- John Lasseter. And my wife quickly pulled over and hustled the kids out of the car, and one of the boys said,"Is Daddy gonna get fired?" And, Liz said,"I think it's just the opposite." And I had meetings after that with Steve, and he was using all his, Steve Jobs reality distortion fields and make it sound like it was a really good thing for me to do. And I was sitting there feeling like I'd just gotten out of movie jail because<i>Iron Giant</i> wasn't a financial success. So I was really happy when <i>Incredibles</i> showed that my projects can be commercial, and the last thing I wanted to do was a project that had taken five years and they couldn't crack, that Pixar couldn't crack. Of all people. Based on three things that I know nothing about, rats and cooking and France. And I said, "Steve, I don't know anything about this stuff." And he said,"I think you can make it your own." Because, Jobs reminded him, the movie really wasn't about any of that. It was about an artist and the importance of making art no matter what. And that I can relate to. And, just like Steve said, within a certain amount of time, it became a movie that I very deeply connected with. Look, if you know anybody who's met Brad and as I described him before, what Remy was all about is what Brad's passionate about. He-- And we really got this through Patton Oswalt and the performances, I think, you can hear Brad's voice in those Remy rants.<i>I brought you something to. No no no no no, spit that out right now.</i> By way of example, witness the scene where Remy tells his rat brother Emil to stop eating literal garbage and appreciate the more artful, beautiful flavor combo of olives and cheese.<i>See?</i><i>- Not really.- Creamy, salty, sweet and oaky nuttiness.</i><i>- You detect that?- Oh, I'm detecting nuttiness.</i> There's a resistance to art in small towns. Art seems like a completely insane thing to say that you want to do for a living. People just don't believe you. They're like, "Yeah, yeah, but what do you do to make money?" You know. Seeing art as something distant and only for deluded people. I related to that.<i>Now, imagine every great taste in the world being combined</i><i>into infinite combinations, tastes that no one has tried yet.</i><i>- Discoveries to be made!- I think...</i><i>You lost me again.</i> And Brad Lewis also hears Brad Bird's ethos in the final confessional speech of the movie's fierce food critic, Anton Ego. The critic, and how critics even judging something as unsuccessful... The person that made that stuff is what's important.<i>But the bitter truth we critics must face is that in the grand scheme of things,</i><i>the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful</i><i>than our criticism designating it so.</i> These are Brad's deeply held beliefs. Yeah, but then that character goes on to say that the one way a critic is valuable is to discover the new and champion the new. Yes, original stories are new. Like right now, I think what's overwhelmed the movie industry is this idea of preexisting IP and sequels and all of these things. And it's like there's fear of embracing something new and that's-- It just goes to the core of people who want to make something original. It is not lost on me when I was re-watching the movie recently, that this is a movie about originality and not selling out, and it's being done-- I'm watching it on Disney Plus, which is full of Disney sequels, and they're like the literal kings of merchandising. They'll take any aspect of a film and merchandise it to within an inch of its life. Was that ever, you know, a discussion? Did anybody go, "Hey, maybe you're kind of crapping on Disney right now?" Fortunately not. My feeling is that <i>Ratatouille,</i> in a way, is perhaps the only independent movie that Pixar ever made. And I'll explain that by saying there was renegotiation of the original deal that Pixar had done with Disney, and <i>Ratatouille</i> was gonna be the first movie outside of Disney's purview. Oh, so they were they were like between deals with Disney. So they didn't have to give this one to Disney. Yeah, as opposed to previous movies, we never had to screen story reels or get approvals or screen anything for Disney in the process of making the movie. That is unbelievable. Did you understand at the time how rare this opportunity was? Yeah, so everybody was cognizant. There was nobody else we were showing the movie to for notes. It was us, our notes, our team. Which did not mean it was gonna be easy. See, Brad Bird came on board in late 2005. The movie had been in production for four plus years. Now, it was ground rush time. We were 18 months away from finishing. We had to have it in the can, the movie done. And he's starting, you know, a page one rewrite. Why did it have to happen 18 months from now? Because we had a release date. Every producer's dream is a release date. That's what solves problems. It settles arguments. It means you have to make choices. You got to get the show on the road, man. We got a release date, and thank God we had a release date, because with the trouble that we had had just making the story, you know, seeing, in my opinion, we were lucky that we didn't get skipped. And Brad Bird says this movie not only had to come out on time, it had to deliver for the sake of the whole company. Pixar was looking for new suitors, and they were looking at Fox and they were looking at Warner Brothers. You know, they were looking around and I knew the one project Disney had zero involvement in was <i>Ratatouille</i>. But I also knew that if the one project that collapsed was one that had 100% Pixar money and no Disney involvement, that Wall Street would think Pixar was not capable of standing on its own. So it was very important that <i>Ratatouille</i> work, because I felt like it was super important for Pixar to exist. The <i>Ratatouille</i> team get put in a pressure cooker, max out on fine food, and dream up new ways to animate it. Coming up in just a minute. Stay with us. Alright everybody, MUBI is the global film company that champions great cinema, bringing it to you wherever you are in as many ways as we possibly can. We stream movies, we produce them, we release them in theaters. Movies from any country, from legendary auteurs or brilliant first timers, we've always got something new for you to discover. And hey, since this episode is dropping on Thanksgiving Day here in the US, I wanna tell you something I just discovered, Alfred Hitchcock, master of suspense, titan of terror, had a fear of eggs, and he apparently cured himself with some aversion therapy because his favorite breakfast was his wife, Alma's, quiche lorraine. And here's the best part, we have that recipe in the next issue of MUBI's gorgeous print magazine, <i>Notebook</i>. Like the season of the podcast, issue eight of the magazine, which is titled "Shoestring Spaghetti", is going to be all about food and the many ways it intersects with movies. We've got filmmaker Courtney Stephens writing about Hollywood restaurants, we've got movie experts interviewing culinary experts, more vintage recipes from the likes of Clark Gable and Gary Cooper, and just for kicks, there's a cameo appearance by director George Miller, one of my favorites. I can tell you every issue of <i>Notebook</i> magazine is so beautifully and luxuriously designed, you're gonna wanna just eat it right up. And you can subscribe for just $40 a year for two issues at mubi.com/magazine That is mubi.com/magazine We've got all the info and links you need in the show notes of this episode. Speaking of which, let's get back to the episode. Quick flashback to the 1980s and '90s when Brad Lewis was working at PDI back then, they were one of the cutting-edge companies in computer animation, which at the time still meant they were using dishwasher sized computers that struggled with rendering images of some pretty typical things. Natural phenomenon were always the difficult thing. There's like, fire's difficult, smoke's difficult. Particle rendering like clouds are difficult. Hair is incredibly difficult. By the time Lewis got on <i>Ratatouille,</i> of course, the technology had come a long way, but there was still one natural phenomenon they had to conquer. The central thing is the food has to look amazing. The ultimate desire, and the thing that our lead protagonist is going to create has to be amazing, or the movie really won't work. And Brad Bird says the problem with that was... In CG, food tends to look plastic. The computer is happiest doing plastic, flawless plastic. If you came to a computer and said,"I want to make a movie of flawless plastic," it would say,"How many movies do you want?"I can do you 10 million movies right now." But the minute you start asking for imperfections or making food look like it's edible, suddenly the computer gets very cranky. Until Pixar's visual team figured out new ways of applying to food what they'd previously applied to fish.<i>Nemo, no!</i><i>Dad?</i><i>You're about to swim into open water.</i> A breakthrough that was had at Pixar during <i>Finding Nemo</i> was subsurface scattering. And what that is, is light, when it penetrates any living thing, it penetrates the outer layer and it bounces around on the sublayer, and then that radiates back out and gives it this wonderful glow. But it's subtle. And they did it for the first time on <i>Nemo,</i> so that the fish looked like light was penetrating and taking on color that was under the surface.<i>- Has anybody seen a boat? Please!- Look out!</i> That very same thing in <i>Ratatouille,</i> you could use on a grape. Or after a lot of technical refinements on something even more complicated... like the food at a Michelin starred restaurant. But you know, you can't animate that kind of food or that kind of restaurant unless you go there and experience it. And so Brad Lewis and his production team jetted off on what you'd think was the greatest research trip in the history of motion pictures. It's one of those things, if you've ever done something that was so amazing and good, and then you try to say, "But this part was hard," people just go, "Get out of here." So this movie takes place in Paris, right? So we contacted four of the three star restaurants in both Paris and south of Paris. We reached out to Lucas Carton... Guy Savoy, which was amazing. We basically spent two to three days at each restaurant and we would observe everything they did, talk with all of them, interview them a little bit, and then we would ultimately have dinner at that restaurant. And what I quickly learned is they... They want to kill you with food at that point. Yep. Like, it's horrible. It's wonderful and it's horrible. When you've eaten to the point where you're nauseous and you think, "I can't have any more." You're about halfway through. And the first signal of that is new utensils go down.'Cause at the end of every course, they take them away, right? All of us are sitting there going,"Oh, God, I think we're done." That was our second meat course or whatever. And then all of a sudden boom, boom, boom. Utensils go down, another plate comes down and we're just like, "Oh my God." I think we had no less than 21 courses and probably as many as 30 to 33 courses at each one of these restaurants,- at the end of our time there.- At each one?- Oh, man.- God, I can't even-- I've only had one chef's table experience and it really is like that. And I have to-- There is something-- This is really for a different episode where we want to talk about the excess of food and how it's portrayed on film, but there is a point in these things where you're kind of like,"Why are we doing this?" What is the rationale for this? I will say that the best chefs do want to respect the food. They don't want there to be waste. They just want to prepare it in its finest extrapolated fashion that they can do. But on the other hand, in our experience, by the time we got to this dinner, it was like an expression of gratitude. And let's really show you what we can do. I'd say, "I have to go to the bathroom," go out in the parking lot and try to hyperventilate in ten deep breaths so I could get back in there and finish another course.'Cause they also tell you little things like, by the way, if you don't finish something on your plate, they take it to the chef and the chef looks at it and they ask questions,"Why didn't they finish it?" It's like, "Oh, I don't know. Maybe I'm about ready to throw up." Yeah, there's no technical thing wrong with it. I've just reached my limit as a human being. Right. So that was probably the most spectacular research phase. But Brad Bird says in the years before he signed on, the <i>Ratatouille</i> production team had a lot of runners up. Hugely influential and wonderful people talk to them over the years. They had had top chefs come and speak to them in detail. Anthony Bourdain came in. Thomas Keller was involved. And yet when Bird started digging into the script. I was startled to discover that very little of the cooking stuff got in the movie. And it's like, wait a minute, there's nothing about cooking in the film. How's that work? But the funny thing was, is by the time I got on it, all the money had been spent, and I was left with Google, you know.- To find out about cooking.- Yeah. And so I went to Google and I also asked within Pixar, is there anyone who has worked for a restaurant? Has anyone worked in a kitchen? Has anyone worked in preparing food professionally? And there were, because Pixar is a big company. So if I'm getting this right, everybody else got to go to France and eat at three Michelin star restaurants. You like, got to take a guy out to coffee. I got to Google and have a beer with some Pixar guys. To be fair, he did also get a truncated three-day tour of Paris, but then it was time to start knocking out script pages with his actors recording the dialogue almost as soon as he'd written it. He whittled down the scenes with Remy's family, and amped up the time Remy spent eating and working with food.<i>- Colette, I--- Don't say a word.</i><i>If I think about it, I might change my mind.</i><i>Just tell me what the rat wants to cook.</i> All of it building to the movie's climactic dish, the ultimate culinary artwork Remy puts together with the help of both his rat family and his kitchen family in order to sate Anton Ego.<i>Ratatouille? It's a peasant dish.</i><i>Are you sure you want to serve this to Ego?</i> It's an entrée Bird had strong opinions about since way before he joined the project. I had gone to five years of <i>Ratatouille</i> meetings as part of the Brain Trust, which is the group of directors and story artists that go over all the Pixar films. And one of the thoughts that I myself had mentioned to them was Americans have no experience of ratatouille. So this is not gonna mean anything to them. It kind of looks like a vegetable dog food to me. It doesn't look particularly appetizing.- It's rustic, let's say.- Yeah. Jan had it in the movie that that was the thing that blew everybody's mind. And that became Thomas Keller's task. How do you make a ratatouille that someone who has never had ratatouille wants to eat, just on the basis of how it looks? Thomas Keller had been involved with <i>Ratatouille</i> almost from day one. In fact, Brad Lewis had spent a few days interning at his restaurant, The French Laundry, as part of his research. We knew over the course of, I think it was probably five years. Thomas and I were together that, at the end of the day, the ultimate dish Remy was going to create had to be something that was spectacular, made out of something common, because that's the ultimate artistry. So every once in a while, I'd say,"You know you're gonna design the ratatouille, right?" And he goes, "Yeah, but I don't know what I'm going to do yet." So eventually, Thomas, he said,"Can you come by next week?"I think I have it." I went over to French Laundry early and I think it was Saturday morning. He pulls out a full tray. Not not a quarter tray, not a half tray, but a full baking tray. And it's just got this circular, beautiful ratatouille that you see from the movie. Yeah. A kind of multicolored rainbow of different vegetables. Yeah. And it almost looked like-- What's the artist, Turnsworthy? That does these crazy puzzle-like things in nature. Yeah, Goldsworthy. Andrew Goldsworthy. That's it. Right. And then he said,"And here's how it needs to be plated." He puts down one little stack and then another little stack, and then he cubes it on top. And it was absolutely cinematic and beautiful. And it's really what he does in many ways. If you see his food and his cookbooks, they're-- The presentation itself is part of the experience. I love it when they dramatically open a bowl and you look at it and it's like, "Oh, my gosh." That theatricality is sort of also in his heart and soul. And I will say, I'm not the biggest vegetable guy in the world, right? And it was delicious. It wasn't just vegetables. It was vegetables. The movie had its main dish and its ending. But before release, it sounds like tensions were high about everything... Starting with the title. It flunked marketing 101, right, which is if you can't spell it and you can't read it and you can't pronounce it, then you can't tell anybody about it. And Steve Jobs in particular really didn't like it. So across over a couple of weeks, we got together lists and lists of different titles for the movie. And it was funny. Steve, I think, called me and he said,"I have good news and bad news."My sister and I went to Hawaii and we stayed up really late one night"and we solved it."We had the perfect title for the movie, but when we woke up the next morning,"neither one of us could remember it."That's the bad news."I know there's a better title out there, but I can't remember it." So we decided to go with it and of course we added, every time you see it, it has the phonetic underneath it. So at least we could help with the pronunciation. Oh, that's right, it is on every-- Even on the poster. It helps us dumb Americans pronounce it. Yes, yes. But I don't know about expectations. And I don't know how much of this is in my mind, and how much of this is what you start to come to believe as you go through the marketing pipeline. You first pitch it to them and their face kind of scrunches up and they kind of go, "Really?""I don't think there's anything in this for boys."I don't think there's anything in this for girls."Who does it appeal to?" And then contrastingly, Pixar has nothing but Grand Slams in all of their movies to the degree that the Monday morning after every release, the lobby of Pixar and all 800 employees or whatever, there's bottles of champagne ready to toast the incredible success of setting the next box office record.<i>Ratatouille</i> had its premiere in Paris, followed by a reception along the Seine. Brad Lewis told me Guy Savoy catered and I'm guessing there was lots of champagne, but that Monday they couldn't toast a record breaking weekend'cause it was one of the worst Pixar openings ever. And then, surprisingly, over time, people started actually hankering for Pixar's rat of a movie. Essentially, it did okay in America. It did great overseas. And it's because it's a slow food movie and America is a fast food nation. America had to, kind of, hear about it from other... More sophisticated tastes, let us say. Yeah, but we did notice that late shows, without kids, parentheses, were doing really well in big cities. And so word was getting out among adults that this weird movie with a rat that cooks was actually, might be a good date night.<i>Ratatouille</i> went on to gross over 620 million bucks, won the Oscar for best animated film, and inspired some of the strangest fandom ever.<i>Remy is trying to turn on the flame, which A I don't think is a good idea,</i><i>and B does not seem to be working.</i> My kid loves this YouTube chef Nick DiGiovanni,<i>Ratatouille</i> is the guy's favorite film. So in one video, he taught an actual rat to help him make an actual ratatouille.<i>There comes the olive oil and keep it going, Remy.</i><i>Keep going, keep going. And that's perfect.</i> And then there's the designer, Brad Bird told me about who made a viral piece of wearable tech, riffing on one of the film's plot points that by pulling a human's hair, Remy can guide them as they cook like a puppet. She's an engineer, and she designed a little animatronic Remy to pull on her hair, and then she's doing what it commands, and the fact that she did that of her own volition is just, incredibly wonderful to me. And to me, this sort of thing is especially amazing because as whimsical as<i>Ratatouille</i> is, its message isn't really. Your final, you know, point in a way I think is misunderstood by people. I think they think of this movie as being like, anybody can do it. They remember that line, anybody can cook.- We all have this in us.- Right. But that's not where the critic lands at the end. And I'm assuming you. It's kind of like, not everybody can cook. Anybody can come-- You can come from anywhere and be great but you still have to have innate talent. It feels like an unusual message for a Disney movie. It feels true to me but why was that an important message for you to get across? That's why it's important, is that I think it's true. And I think that when you say you can do anything, it's a great thing to say to a child. But when you get a little bit older, you start to go, it's a little more complicated than that. Just like we tell you to always tell the truth and it will always be rewarded. Well, you grow up a little bit. No, liars prosper. You don't get rewarded every time you tell the truth. And yet it's still worth telling. And maybe the nice way to read it too, is that if you strive for excellence and you don't achieve it necessarily... You will benefit from striving. You will benefit from striving. Absolutely. Most mornings my kid really wants to help me make eggs. Mostly when he tries, egg gets everywhere. I really want to encourage him, but most times I sigh and roll my eyes at him. Then the next morning we try to do better. There's an art to this. And that's the MUBI Podcast for this week. Follow us to fill up on more stories about food and film. Next week I talk with ex-chef and current best selling<i>New York Times</i> food writer Alison Roman about the archetypal movie chef. A man, a man. A man and mean. We also talk about the opposite, the cooking couple from the Cannes-winning foodie romance,<i>The taste of Things.</i> Follow us so you don't miss it. Till then, if you've got questions, comments, or a favorite recipe, seriously, send it to us. Our email is podcast@mubi.com And now let's roll credits. This episode is written, hosted, and edited by me, Rico Gagliano. Ciara McEniff is our producer with help from assistant producer Kat Kowalcyk. Jackson Musker is our booking producer. Stephen Cullen mastered this episode. Our original music is composed by Martin Austwick. Thanks this week to Ron Musker, Andrea Cutcher, and Tunes Recording Studio in North Carolina. The show is executive produced by me along with Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman and Mike Tacca. And finally, to watch the best in cinema. Subscribe to MUBI at mubi.com Thanks for listening and happy Thanksgiving to my American brethren! Hot tip for leftovers, layer it between tortillas drench with enchilada sauce and bake. Boom!