“There’s a fun freedom when you’re making a small film and no one’s telling you what to do” says Jon Favreau, with the air of a man who has had his fill of making comic book movies by committee. It’s been 18 years since the 47 year old’s breakthrough Swingers, and since then, he’s directed two Iron Man movies (that combined grossed over $1208.9 millioninternationally), overseen both Elf and Cowboys & Aliens and may even be the only actor to appear in both Friends and the Sopranos. This week, Favreau releases Indie food truck comedy, Chef, which he wrote, directed and stars, that also features cameos from friends Robert Downey Jr, Scarlett Johanssonand Dustin Hoffman. To mark the release, Favreau cooked up answers to GQ including the secret to preparing the perfect steak, advanced BBQ prep and where to go dancing in Miami.
GQ: Your character travels all the way to New Orleans just to get some beignets. Which regional dish would you travel huge distances for?
Jon Favreau: The barbecue from Franklin’s in Austin, Texas. It’s pretty world-renowned now and people line up from early in the morning. It’s just salt, pepper and brisket but it’s the way they smoke it, the type of wood that they use and how they cook it all night long. When it’s just off the grill and rested off the smoker, I have it with pickles and white bread – it’ll rival any homemade meal anywhere, I guarantee you.
There are a lot of barbecue meats in the film: what should we do to upgrade our barbecue this summer?
The big thing is patience. There’s a few things you gotta do: you want to temper your meat first which means bringing it up to room temperature before you throw it on the grill. You want to cook it [differently] depending on what the cut is. With a brisket, you want to cook it low and slow, keep it at 120C for hours, cooking it for 1 hour 15 minutes per pound. You can put a rub on it like a bit of salt and pepper and spice and then you want to rest it. After you’ve been waiting all that time, you want to cut right into it and eat it, but don’t. Once you got it to 90C internal temperature, you take it off the grill and you let it sit there for up to an hour, covered because there are all sorts of chemical reactions occurring and then at that point, cut it against the grain, pencil thick slices, and serve it up. It’s amazing.
Which question are you bored of answering already?
On this one, I’m not. It’s a little film that could’ve so easily disappeared and been my little palette cleanser before big movies. Instead it’s just turning into something that’s a very important project in my life and creatively in my career and reading people’s reactions either on Twitter or reviewers, its interesting to see that it’s making people talk about everything I’ve done in the last 20 years. I’m very flattered to have people consider my career so much, because you forget that the world is watching you this whole time. And they tend to be rooting for me, which is really nice and really encouraging!
Which food trend do you hope dies out soon?
The idea of the exclusive nature of food culture and having a few restaurants that are very expensive and hard to get into. You talk to David Chang, who’s a very established chef in New York, and his whole thing is to do fast food that takes a long time to prepare but a short time to cook on the spot. People who buy it might not expect something that special but then it stops them in their tracks and it creates a better mindfulness towards ingredients and towards food.
Can you describe how you dance in real life?
Well, of course I danced a lot when I was makingSwingers, the swing music scene was big in Hollywood and I went to places like The Derby. And, after I wrote it and was trying to get it made, I would go every week so I’d be good at dancing. Then, for this one, I had to learn salsa, which was very different, but of course with Sofia Vergara, it’s good because no one’s looking at me anyway – not the way she moves! She’s pretty riveting. But, I had been to that club in little Havana [that features in the film] called Hoy como Ayer when I was working on Iron Man 3 and one of Robert [Downey Jr’s] friends was from Miami and I wanted to go hear some real Cuban music so he took me to this place. The website was completely in Spanish and there was no way I would’ve been able to find it, or know where to go, as a non-local. We were there all night and I thought to myself, what a great backdrop for a scene in a movie.
Dustin Hoffman fires you in the film. Have you ever been fired from a job?
I’ve never been fired. Usually it’s more like a bad relationship ending where it’s sort of like a mutual decision but I know I left some waiting jobs unceremoniously. I’ve always just lost the desire to be working some place and then moved on but I’m usually a good employee. I’m not always the hardest working guy, that’s why I like working in the movie business because I’m so motivated as it’s so exciting to me. It’s very hard for me to do something I’m not excited by. I wasn’t a good student in classes I didn’t connect with but I was an A student in classes that I liked because I get very obsessive, and that’s what’s fun about playing a chef because they’re such obsessive people.
What’s the most macho food dish you’ve ever encountered?
Macho? Wow. I’d say the high-temperature when cooking steaks. You need really high temperatures on the broiler, the hotter the better because you want it to be medium rare on the inside but you want the outside to caramelize and get a char. And, when you’re working around fires that hot, it’s almost like being a blacksmith because you burn and singe your hands and knuckles and you have to wear heavy leathered. The real chefs are throwing their hands right there, testing how pliable the meat is so their hand is over this 800°C fire and there’s definitely a machismo to that! Even making a grilled cheese sandwich in the movie, the chef is touching and moving it with his hands and you know, that’s hot. I had to look like a real chef in the movie and I’m really cooking the food and my hands are killing me, you know chefs have dead nerve endings on their hands so we would do all the tricks [to make it look like I did too] so I would put my fingers in ice water and go back and forth, but at night, I’d still be pretty raw.
What do fictional chefs always get wrong on screen?
They tend to make kitchens happy, friendly places where people are like the Swedish chef from The Muppets. That’s not what I found. It was a very rough and ready crew. Almost like reading Moby Dick, when you read about the crew of the ship and there are people from all different parts of the world and it’s a heavy. The kitchen crew culture is primarily Latino so the main language in the kitchen is Spanish. And, you often get people from all walks of life like ones who didn’t do well at school, or who have spotted pasts with either drugs or crime and who just haven’t found their way until much later in life. But, when they find food as a calling, they end up getting very serious about it. And as rough as that crowd is though, they’re extremely sensitive to the food and are very nerdy about the ingredients. So there’s a dichotomy where they’re very rough but they’re also very delicate in what they do and when you watch them plating a dish, or putting micro greens as a garnish, or putting a salad together, theres almost a delicacy of doing a zen flower arrangement, so its interesting. There are more and more women in the kitchen now but the culture still tends to be a little rough around the edges which is why my movie has an R rating [over 17s only in cinemas]. R movies don’t do well commercially (unless they’re like Bad Neighbours with a kind of shocking body of humour), but with a film like this, or like Swingers, I just wanted to use colourful language! This film is a little soft for that rating but I really didn’t want to depict the chef world in an inaccurate way. Kitchens are R rated places!
Chef is released on 27 June.
