When director Nora Ephron began shooting a pivotal scene in
Julie & Julia, it quickly became clear the sole meuniere might become her food stylist's Waterloo.
Julia Child's first lunch in Paris was Dover sole in butter sauce. It was, she wrote in her memoir, "the most exciting meal of my life".
For that scene, Ephron - an accomplished cook who wrote the screenplay, directed the film and tested every recipe in the movie except the aspic - would accept nothing short of perfection. "I wanted that sole to look to the audience the way it had looked to Julia when it caused her famous epiphany," she says.
Ephron's food stylist Susan Spungen spent years as television show host Martha Stewart's food editor; she was a caterer before that. But she knew she was in trouble when she arrived at a Manhattan restaurant to shoot the scene.
For starters, the chef who was to cook the sole was instead pressed into service as the scene's waiter. The restaurant didn't have a nonstick pan and Spungen had only 10 fillets to work with. That wouldn't allow for many mistakes. Even if she cooked one perfectly, how was she going to make sure the fish sizzled enough so the camera would pick it up? She succeeded and the sole became Ephron's favourite food moment in her new film.
For Spungen, it's just one of several food miracles in a film where what the actors eat is as important as the actors themselves. Although fims have long relied on half-cooked turkeys coloured with motor oil, fruit made of plastic, and ice cream carved from shortening, food in film is increasingly edible, even delicious.
For food stylists, most of whom began as cooks, it's a welcome change. It's good for audiences, who have become more sophisticated about food and expect more realistic images. Directors say well-prepared food can improve performances and the look of the final scene.
"The challenge always is making it seem delicious and hyper-real," says John Lyons, president of production at Focus Features. "If it doesn't look hyper-real, it doesn't work in the movie." That means a dish needs to be fresh-looking and well-prepared to begin with, and then enhanced with a bit of oil here and a little fake steam there.
On films without the money for a stylist, the props department might rely on a local restaurant or even a crew member's friend who happened to be a good cook.
Lyons produced Pieces of April, about a dysfunctional family Thanksgiving. They had precious few turkeys in the budget. In cases like that, the camera doesn't linger too long, and the actors put as little food in their mouths as possible. But on films with a budget for food stylists, "food becomes very much the fabric of the movie", he says.
For stylists, it is all about reading the actors' appetites and knowing when to use a few tricks. But food styling for movies boils down to doing more prep work.
Colin Flynn, a chef and stylist who worked with Spungen on Julie & Julia, had to de-bone 60 ducks over the course of the film. Duck en croute becomes the crowning glory for Julie Powell, the New York administrative assistant whose 2003 blog about her year-long effort to cook all the recipes in the first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking inspired the movie.
A good stylist always has enough replacement food. That's not so easy to plan for. Often, no one knows what part of a dish an actor will eat until the scene is shot, or how many takes the director will want.
The food stylists try to keep it looking real. Two actresses in last year's cop thriller Pride and Glory were vegan, so a vegan chef styled a Christmas dinner scene that had a ham as the centerpiece. Slices of sham ham made from soya beans were piled near the real stuff.
"It really depends on what calibre of actor you are dealing with," says Valerie Aikman-Smith, who has styled food for Titanic, Vanilla Sky and Ocean's Eleven. "You find that someone like Diane Keaton will just do it and not make a big thing of it."
The New York Times
