Being Cast In Burnt It Means Eating Well For Stars Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller
by Brad Balfour
October 29, 2015
In Burnt, Oscar nominee Bradley Cooper stars as Adam Jones, an adrenalized chef who was awarded two Michelin stars for his long-closed Parisian hot spot. Chef Jones had it all and lost it on drugs, women, and way too much gambling both in the casino and his personal life.
Two years later, this former enfant terrible of the restaurant scene, is in recovery and ready to make his comeback, challenged to not achieved his former status but hang a third star on his restaurant shingle.
Now scrambling to get back on his feet, he lands in London and convinces restauranteur Daniel Bruhl, to give him his own spot again. He staffs his kitchen with the best on his side, including the beautiful Helene (Miller) as a key member of his team. Alternately funny and painful a story of passion for food, meaningful love and redemption is told with a careening pace by veteran director John Wells.
Assembled before a group of both film and foodie journalists, this press conference commenced with and introductory discussion between cast and master TV chef and culinary advisor Mario Batali.
Before the room of journalists Batali moderated a Q&A session with Cooper, Miller, Bruhl, with Actors Sam Keeley (another cruical member of the kitchen team) and actress Uma Thurman as tough critic joining the conversation held at the London Hotel.
You do an amazing job of conveying your character’s complex inner life. How did you relate to him personally, and what got inside you to portray him?
Bradley Cooper: Well I did a tremendous amount of research. I was able to speak with people in that world… Then, just having a script that was fantastic. If I had to relate to anything, it was that idea of trying to have a goal, setting out to [fulfill] an obsession, to go past what you can do. I can definitely relate to that.
I think more than any other character I’ve played, I really saw how different I was from this guy because he lost the joy in what he did, and that’s a hell of a thing to lose. I’m sure you’d concur, because food is so joyful, and if you’ve lost the joy in cooking then wow you are lost. That’s where he is at for so much of the movie. Then characters like Helene really sort of re-inject him with the thing that he lost back in Paris.
Besides the food, this film is about recovery and also about reinvention on many levels. There is emotional integrity to your performances. Could you talk about how you saw your character, going through different phases — particularly Bradley with his recovery, it was not just from substance abuse, it was from a lot of other things too.
Bradley Cooper: When we first find this guy, he’s white-knuckling it. He pitches to Tony [Bruhl] how he has all the answers and knows exactly what he’s going to do. But he actually has absolutely no clue really, because he’s the same guy he was, minus all the things he did to inoculate himself from his emotions. So you’re watching him actually spiral down even further and further in the movie. That’s the way that I saw it.
Sienna Miller: I really liked the humanity of this character, Helene, and how honest she was. She’s a single mother who is doing her best. She’s passionate about cooking, but she’s juggling a lot of balls and everything seems to be compromises at a certain point.
She’s trying to do her best, and I think it was that I wanted her to be a very real person. I didn’t want to wear makeup or portray her in any inauthentic way, possibly because the women that I’ve met who work in these kitchens — it’s a very male-dominated environment — they have to be really tough and strong. She’s got depth, she’s got pain, and that resonated with me.
What was it like to have to say, “Yes chef,” when everything inside you wanted to go, “F**k yourself?”
SM: I think that’s the nature of being in a kitchen. [You learn] a lot of lessons; anyone who is the head chef ought to experienced so, “Oui Chef…”
The movie is very much like a sports film in a way; it has that arc of the comeback story, with the competition, and such. Did any of you think about it in those terms? You of course have seen the chef television shows and all, what did you think about the competitive side of the film?
BC: It’s funny that you say that. In no way would I ever compare [this film] to Hoosiers, even though that movie is unbelievable. We were talking about how I loved when Gene Hackman moved to this town, living in Barbara Hershey’s house and helping her, sort of.
She walks out tilling the field, at one point, in the middle of winter and you realize that he’s not so much in his element where was he before. We talked about that specific aspect of this character because that character is a little similar to Adam Jones in a way, actually, with his arc, and I really love the idea of, what does he do at night?
Because Adam Jones is not sleeping with women, not doing drugs, and well, definitely not getting 12 hours of sleep either, so what does he do…? That’s sort of what Hackman does in that house. So he’s walking around London looking in shops, constantly obsessed. And what made me think of that was, who is sure…?
With the Reece character you have this nemesis, this other guy who’s competing and hiding just how competitive [he is]. But then we see that little sort of slice of his personal life and he’s completely destroying his restaurant just because of a decent review his old partner got.
There was a beautiful connection made between creating a meal and creating a relationship that was really lovely in the film. Also there was a connection made of that sense memory you have when you eat a specific meal. What are your favorite meals that might draw a sense memory out for you?
SM: It’s so hard. We’ve obviously been answering a lot of food questions and there are so many different types of food, but for me there’s something really comforting about my mom’s roasted chicken…
Daniel Brühl: Yesterday I had a fried black rice. I’m half Spanish, from Spain, and my mom makes that a lot too and it was spectacular, at a restaurant called Estella. Crispy fried black rice is just [the best…]
Sam Keeley: I guess a classic Sunday roast is always going to be something that kind of reminds me of home and comfort and being a child again, which is lovely.
BC: The thing about food is that if you throw [shout] out any food, I’ll tell you what the memory is, that’s the great thing, it really is true…
Mario Batali: Sunday gravy…
BC: Oh yeah, Grandmother… Actually pulling it out of the freezer and freezing my hand because it was so cold, because we used to freeze the gravy for the week and make it on Sunday, then we just stack the freezer with it.
SM: That’s the thing about food though, it’s so much more than eating for me, and I think for anyone who appreciates it and lives to eat — which somehow all of us pretty much do. But the idea of everybody getting together around food and what that does for relationships and friendships, it’s the most joyful thing about being alive. So it’s a difficult question to answer because of that.
MB: Well [that scene with him] sharing a family meal [with his staff] was probably the most crystallized moment when you are finally on the team. That was when everyone realized, “Oh yes, he’s going to have dinner with us,” and there was a satisfaction of the whole team — very much like when you have dinner with your family and everyone all of a sudden shows up, “Oh wow, we’re all here.”
It can be really remarkable and nutritious. It becomes more than just comestibles, it becomes emotional and there’s something to that. It’s a shared experience, particularly when you go through a dinner service and have worked so hard together with people who you don’t even have to love every day, but you need them and at the end, you can look back at each other and say, “Yeah we did it.”
BC: Do you do that in your restaurants?
MB: Yeah, always…
BC: Because I’ve never had that experience, we never had the family meal [when I worked in restaurants].
MB: In all of our restaurants. because we’re lunch and dinner [company], we have breakfast, lunch and dinner family meals and you can just stop in. The late dinner family meal is like [made of] the 12:30 left over bits of steak put in the pasta with everything and that’s the best one…
After an entire day of working with very expensive ingredients and all sorts of fancy techniques, what does a chef like to eat when he goes home and cooks for himself?
SM: That’s a good question…
MB: I like very simple things and it’s almost always based on product as opposed to technique. So a simple duck egg from the farm market, over easy with a slice of fontina and — as it is in season right now, some shavings of white truffle — just makes you feel, “Yes, I’m alone, but I’m the king of Alone.
For me, it’s the simple stuff; you make a quesadilla and you put some interesting stuff on it and, you’ve got it. Leftovers play a big part of my favorite things to eat because you’re not going to sit there and grill a whole steak at one o’clock in the morning. But if they had steak at the dinner table at the house — because I’m home at 6 o’clock every night for dinner and then I go back to work — I know what there is in the fridge when I’m thinking about what I might make when I get home.
What do you think about chefs being rock stars these days? Are any of you enamored with any chefs so that you felt like, “Oh my god, this is somebody really cool that I’d like to meet”?
MB: When I became a chef in 1978 in New Brunswick, New Jersey, at a stuff-your-face restaurant, cooking was what you did after you got out of the army, before you went to jail, because it was a task that anybody could do. Peeled potatoes would be a part of that world.
In the subsequent 30 years as we’ve watched, food has become more than just something you ate on your way to the theater or after the game or between something in the opera. Food has become the centerpiece, whether it’s because it’s entertaining to watch people cook or entertaining to go to their restaurants.
We’ve elevated the players, whether it’s the wine maker or the chef or the maitre’d or the bartender, or mixologist or whatever. They’ve been elevated because it’s really fun and relaxing to watch someone who really knows what they’re doing, doing it even if you’ve never intend to ever do it yourself. It’s just like that, like porn — you just happen to watch it and might never do it like that, but you’ll probably watch it again.
It’s the same thing with food — like the whole fascination with nutrition and satisfaction which comes together in one place and it’s a fascinating thing.
So of course chefs are, but I think the next rock stars are going to be the farmers who allow the chefs to be the greatest… It’s the one who produces that particular gem of a lettuce or that kind of oyster or this delicious kind of beef or this magnificent chicken that tastes so much better than all of the chicken you’ve ever tasted.
Their ascendency, I think, is imminent, because we need to understand that we need to get back into our agriculture a bit, and that heroism will be remunerated by paying them the proper amount to get a really good chicken.
BC: But do you think also the term rock star? When I was doing research, you know White Heat, that cookbook? The photographer had taken a bunch of photographs of this young chef, and there’s that one photograph where he looks like Jim Morrison with the cigarette dangling and you think, “Oh, there’s this sort of mythical figure” so really it was like a moment in time.
MB: When people saw that, they suddenly thought, “Hey maybe being a chef is kind of cool.”
BC: Right, exactly, it all changed.
MB: Before that it was in the back of the house. It was ugly, dirty or the guy, you know that Italian guy in the t-shirt smoking a cigarette out by the dumpster.
BC: Right, and to have a guy like that talk about food in such a passionate way, you’re like, Oh, that was like a whole new thing.”
MB: Well, that was like my first new mentor, Marco Pierre White, and I remember thinking the world is now suddenly something far more interesting. He would take little tagliatelle and oysters and put them in a little bit of the broth and a little bit of butter, then caviar and some raspberry vinaigrette, and put it back in the shell and put it under the [broiler]. And you’re like, “Mom never made spaghetti like that.” It was so intoxicatingly interesting.
BC: And this is a guy who got three stars and at that time, had never cooked in France and he was making French cuisine…
Mario Batali: English born, had never been to France! And yet he got three stars, and the youngest…
For the movie cooks on the stage, being around food so much while you were making this movie, did any of you gain weight? And if you did, what did you do to lose the weight or to not gain it in the first place?
SK: I think we all had to be pretty careful about the amount of butter that was on the set and all that kind of stuff, but you’re constantly like eating… They’re constantly eating, the chefs — constantly tasting, you know. Sienna [and I] were by a particularly tasty station…
SM: I was drinking that beef sauce, it’s basically butter but I just had a spoon.
SK: So we just had to be careful with it, yeah…
SM: At the same time, you’re working so intensely and it’s so physically exhausting to be in that environment, and it’s boiling hot. So that kind of anxiety and adrenaline and focus that takes place is probably burning off the beef sauce [laughs]…
BC: I was in the process of losing weight to do a play. I was trying to lose like 40 pounds for The Elephant Man, so it was kind of a nightmare to do a cooking movie in between.
But if you watch the film again, you’ll see scenes where my face is like two inches wider than other times, since we shot out of sequence. But it was kind of nice, it was lumbering, I’m glad that I had that weight. Actually, I thought it kind of worked.
MB: I gained two pounds just watching the movie…
Sienna, Bradley and Uma, what scene or part of the movie did you think was the biggest challenge and what was the most fun?
SM: The biggest challenge for me was the scene where Bradley and I had that confrontation where he called me an infection. There was something about the atmosphere on that day and I think, having worked together so intensely on American Sniper, we had sort of gotten to a level of trust with each other as actors where we could just get quite deep, quite quickly and it felt very intense and very real.
It really affected the environment, and was one of those things that was cathartic and very interesting and very dark, but hard to go through with someone that you know, with your friend. We had enough of a good relationship and understanding of each other to be able to avoid each other for the rest of the day without having to apologize or explain why.
But it was a pretty real moment, and then at the end of your day you’re like, “That was a great day,” because that’s the weird thing about being an actor: the horrible stuff is what makes you feel good. But the best part of it for me was the training, and learning these skills and being around this incredible cast.
We all became really close, we laughed a lot and worked in a kitchen, we were chefs and we really did it, there was no doubles, as Bradley said. And to have that experience of really living another profession is one of the most exciting things of our job.
Uma Thurman: I just had one scene, but anyway it was a pleasure. It was just fun, and I really enjoyed myself.
BC: Yeah, that scene was pretty brutal with Uma [everyone laughs].
UT: Yeah, we fight the whole time!
BC: I think the scene with Matthew Rhys was probably the most shocking one for me. That’s at the end of the movie when he shows up at his nemesis’ restaurant…
It was late at night, we didn’t have much time and the bag thing just sort of happened in one of the takes. And then, you know, it feels vulnerable when you’re doing something like that in front of 12 people that you don’t know at all —the chefs in Reece’s restaurant. But ultimately it was beautiful because Reece — Matthew Rhys — was incredible. We didn’t really know each other at all, and then the next thing you know he’s caressing me and trying to calm me down and it was really kind of, like we’re bonded forever.
[As a] matter of fact, I haven’t really seen him since. I look forward to seeing him tonight [at the premiere] because we just looked at each other after and were like, “This is why we both love doing what we do,” to be able to really put yourself in imaginary circumstances and hope that accidents like putting a bag on your head and realizing you’re going to kill yourself will happen…
Bradley, does the way your character treated his suite in the Langham, does that mimic how you are with your real hotel room, like room service everywhere [laughs]…
BC: No, I’m the opposite. I’d feel horrible if I had left the room like that. We were talking about this yesterday. I always thought a spoon was the sort of the bastard child of the utensils, but it’s the optimal, most worthwhile and an essential element to any cook. I did not know that before.
And also I loved how Marco and Gordon talked about plating food and that, once you make a choice you live with it. If you ever see a chef, you know that.
You know it’s over. They were so clear about that when I was plating food in the movie, I thought that was really interesting. You have your vision, you know, improvise with it and then that’s it. Mario, would you agree with that?
MB: Oh completely, once you second guess yourself in any craft, you’re done.
SM: I think just learning… They taught us how to cook fish, which is a simple, delicious thing but really easy to get wrong. I now have a pretty solid and well rehearsed technique as to how to cook fish pretty well and it’s impressive. I’ll have a dinner party, so that’s nice.
There is a lot of emphasis placed on quiet respect and validation for one’s work in this film. It seems that chefs live and die by critics and judges, and actors have very different feelings about that. So who or what gives you validation or pride in your work?
BC: Personally, I’d say having a good day’s work. I would say feeling like I have given it my all and being with people like the people up here and feeling that we actually created something together, that gives me great fulfillment. And somebody like John Wells creates an environment where that can happen.
For example, I was just mentioning the scene with Matthew Rhys… You have to have a director who knows exactly what he or she wants and is really inviting the collaborative experience. For me, after all the years that I’ve worked, the best directors are the ones that are the most collaborative.
He was like that, and always willing to hear from everybody and treated every single person with the same value. If it was the guy who was the real cook in the back, if he had an idea, John would listen to it just as much as when I said something. With those aspects of a director, you want to gravitate towards people like that.
SM: Yeah, I think the validation question is complicated because it really has to come from somewhere in you. I’ve certainly had experiences in the past where I felt like on that particular day, maybe I didn’t show up to the degree that I wish I had, and it’s hard to feel fulfilled regardless of what the response is to that.
You really have to know that you’ve done everything you can to put everything into what you’re working on and that in itself is validation because ultimately it is a question of taste and these things do ebb and flow.
People like stuff that I don’t. I read reviews of films that they adore but then they’re terrible and vice versa. It’s not personal, you know, everybody has their own opinions so you have to turn down the noise on too much praise or criticism and just do your best
UT: I find that when another actor is nice to you, it’s very moving and you’re sort of surprised like, “Oh really, thanks!” People who really understand what it’s like, that’s sometimes most impactful…
SK: Finding truth in moments is always a lovely thing. You know it could be a look, it could be anything, but if it’s a genuine thing, you will feel that as a result and then the audience will feel it. I think that in itself, even if it’s not fireworks, it’s validation enough to make you do a good job.
For cast members, what kind of tippers are you?
MB: Let’s hear about the tippers first. I’ll bet you these are all very good tippers…
SM: England is really bad with tipping. It’s just not in any way a part of the culture that it is here and often it’s included in the bill. But it would be 10% — and if it’s not, you know you can be as generous as you want. But like in a taxi, you don’t have to tip.
It’s just different, I guess, that wages are maybe higher and that doesn’t balance out the same. But here it’s like, “Yeah that’s where people make their money, on tips, so you better be conscious of that.”
DB: It’s the same in Germany, It’s 10%. So it always takes me a day in to understand that [when I’m here in the States], I always get these strange looks.
MB: As soon as an American waiter hears a European accent, they’re like, “Here’s one for the house [laughs].”
So that’s why [restauranteur] Danny Meyers is taking this on, because [of] changing the minimum wage. It used to be that you could pay a waiter $4 or $5 an hour and they would still make 70 or 80 or 100,000 dollars a year because they would be remunerated by great tips.
The good side of that is that you’ll work hard because good tips are clearly a part of good service. The other side is that the whole team is working just as hard and a team player guy like Danny Meyer, it would seem that everyone should share in the upside and they should all be a part of it.
Danny is trying to get his head and hands around keeping the restaurant business sustainable — meaning that his business can profit and continue to do what it does in any way against the different kinds of things that are changing in the world.
We try to figure out how to equitably distribute any kind of money for people that are deserving of it, so it’s a double sided knife and a three-sided coin and a five-sided conundrum. He came out first, and that takes a lot of balls. I look forward to seeing how he figures it out.
Of course, my team has been working on this for five months, but we were not prepared to come out as the leader of the pack in this. We’ve got to really think this out and kind of do town hall meetings not only with our staff, but with our customers to figure out exactly what they need.
Will Del Posto follow suit?
MB: I would say if there’s a first one, that would be the easiest one to do because it’s a prix-fixed menu there. Del Posto will probably be the first one that follows some kind of a line, what we’re going to call servito incluso.
Bradley, you’ve come out in support of Jennifer Lawrence’s comments about wage equality for women especially in Hollywood, which actually parallels your character’s growth in his relationship to women, treating them as equals. Could you comment on that, on stepping forth? And congratulations to you on that.
BC: Thank you, but there’s nothing to really congratulate. If anyone is to be congratulated, it’s Sienna, who took a stand, a very huge stand — not to put you on the spot in ainy way.
All I was saying was that it’s a tricky thing to talk about money. I’m never aware of what anyone else gets unless you’re approached to give some of your money, because you know that to make a movie is getting harder and harder and people are paying less and less.
People are always taking pay cuts — that’s my experience — so the only time you ever find out [what] somebody else is making is if you have to divvy up the pie differently, so someone will come on and do it. But you know, you’re not aware of what other people are getting also, so why not just be transparent and say, “Ok, here’s the pie, lets divvy it up and let’s let’s talk about it.”
MB: Wage equality is unassailable, just like marriage equality is unassailable.
These are things that in 40 years we’ll look back and be like, “Wow that’s just like not letting people on the bus” so it’s inevitable that it’s going to happen. it’s just a question of who will take the heat on the first day or the first prize, and then it’ll all kind of settle out. It has to, it’s natural [that] it will be equal. Thank you all.
Trailer
Clip – He’s A Chef
Clip – Yes, Chef!
Clip – Regrets
Clip – You Lack Arrogance
Clip – Michelin Inspectors
Clip – Sick With Longing
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