Production company Zero Point Zero produces Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown,” the popular food and travel television show. Among other television and film projects, ZPZ also produces documentaries, including “Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent.” “Explore Parts Unknown” editor Kaylee Hammonds sat down with director and ZPZ co-founder Lydia Tenaglia-Collins to talk about the film, her creative process, and how she got her start in the business.
“Explore Parts Unknown:” I know that Anthony Bourdain brought the idea to you all, but what attracted you, as the director, to the project?
Lydia Tenaglia-Collins:
Tony [Bourdain] had read Jeremiah’s memoir, he put it on my desk, and I read the back cover. And when I read the book, I thought, Oh, you know, this could be an interesting biopic, I guess maybe sort of in the vein of our series “The Mind of a Chef,” where we do a very deep dive in looking at all of the formative influences and experiences that a chef brings to the table, whether they’ve started a restaurant or they’re cooking a meal. It’s not about the plate or putting together a plate. It’s everything that came before that informed that process. It’s really more about memory and experience and sort of formative influences. That’s the nature of that show.
When I read Jeremiah’s memoir, just from the top line, I thought in the back of my mind it was going to be kind of more of a biopic about a chef who had had an interesting impact on the way we eat and we sort of look at his restaurant experience. So going into the project, I had that preconceived notion.
I was very unsure, frankly, that it could be made into a real documentary feature. That really shifted when I met Jeremiah in person. He’d been living in Mexico in this tiny little town, basically had kind of removed himself from the whole food scene. When I met him and I began talking to him and really started to get a sense of his life and his formative experiences and his memory, both painful and positive and everything in between, then I really started to get excited.
He was very guarded in the beginning. It was definitely a process of trying to get down to the real stuff, the real nitty-gritty. I think once I knew, Holy mackerel, this guy had such an unusual upbringing, it was filled with so many incredible and painful memories that he obviously doesn’t like to talk about, I think that’s when I got excited. That’s when I thought, There could be a film here, really, about a man. This is about an artist and the artist’s journey. It’s not just a chef and the food he made and the restaurant he created. It’s really about the person behind all of that.
Yeah, it was really incredible. I had read about him, of course. I went into the documentary kind of expecting not to like him very much. But by the end I wanted to call him, and I wanted him to be my friend.
Yes! I had the same experience! In the beginning, he came in – he was very imperious. I remember it was wintertime when he happened to come to New York. That’s when we met first. We had talked on the phone, and then finally I met him in person. He swung in in this beautiful coat with his big fur collar. He’s a very regal-looking person. He definitely had very strong opinions about who we could talk to and what we could see. He was steering us towards certain things, and I thought, This is going to be really hard.
But at the same time I was completely fascinated. He was so strangely charismatic that you kind of get sucked in. Then once you get sucked in, the nature of our relationship evolved, and he really did show me a kind of vulnerability that just made me fall in love with him. Like you just said, you can’t help falling in love with him, because he’s got this kind of outer arrogant, imperious shell, and then he’s got this underside that’s just unbelievable. There’s a vulnerability there that he doesn’t want or like to show people but that I truly fell in love with.
How do you even start to plan for a project like this? Where do you start?
That’s such a great question, because I think it’s really at the heart of every documentary project. Documentaries by their very nature are amorphous. At the very beginning of the project, when I read his memoir and then I looked at his life, there was really nothing current happening. He was living in Mexico. He wasn’t on the scene. So in my mind I was able to kind of organize it very strategically and in a very structured way, because physically it was initially outlined as sort of a three-act structure.
Act 1 would be looking into his childhood, his formative experiences and memories that shaped him. Act 2 was going to be his time at Chez Panisse, and Act 3 was going to be his time in Mexico, you know, where he lives now, and what he was doing. And that’s how I had structured the film. So Act 1 and Act 2 and even, quite frankly, Act 3 were told very retrospectively. There were going to be archival photographs. The whole idea of the re-creations really kind of sprang out of the idea that we did not have any film of his life to deal with at the time.
So what I had was archival photographs, a guy living in Mexico, and then these stories about his childhood. It was going to be based on an anchor interview with him, interviews with people who knew him, and then the story was going to be told through a combination of archival material and some very limited re-creations to help just sort of build memories that were extremely important and formative. And those were going to be done in a very limited way. And that was the film in my mind. It was very structured. From a production sense, it was actually very easy to execute, because it was mostly based on anchored interviews, an interview with him, and then four days with him in Mexico. In my mind it was very manageable.
So we shot our way through that production schedule. In a six-month period of time all of the interviews were done. We had retrieved all of the archival photographs, and we had begun working towards the re-creation schedule. The only thing I had left to shoot with him was four days in Mexico, where we were going to kind of follow him around, something that would give it sort of current-day texture.
Well, that entire thing got blown out of the water two times. The first was that, unbeknownst to me, Jeremiah had taken a job at Tavern on the Green as the executive chef, and he had moved to New York. He hadn’t told me, and he had started this job. I learned along with everyone else via newspaper headline that he was now the executive chef at Tavern on the Green. That sent me down a rabbit hole I can’t even describe, spiraling like, Holy crap. What am I supposed to do now? We had run out of money. We were basically already two-thirds of the way through our edit. I was moving towards a deadline.
Then suddenly I was faced with, Do I follow this? Do I not follow it? Is it important to the story? Is it not? If I see him at Tavern on the Green and nothing happens, it will be a tremendous waste of time and energy. Then, in the back of my mind, I thought, Well, at the very least, Tavern on the Green is then just sort of more b-roll to watch Jeremiah, present-day kind of doing what he did for many years, so maybe it’s useful to shoot there for a week.”
Now suddenly Jeremiah was dealing with a situation where he was being asked to execute someone else’s vision of what a restaurant should be for the first time. I could see pretty quickly that there was going to be a tension there. But I was able to follow the process from day three of his job there until basically he was fired, as the film shows, because he ended up walking out and threatening to leave. They called his bluff, and then they were like, okay, you’re out of here. So that was an additional three months of shooting, which, if you watch the film, really ended up being the most robust part of Act 3. If you want to call it 3A and 3B, 3A is really exploring his time at Stars, and then 3B is watching this old lion try to bring back the old glory and failing miserably.
It was kind of heartbreaking.
Not because he didn’t have the talent to do it, but because of all of the issues in his personality, which were there from the get-go, from Chez Panisse to Stars going forward – that inability to play nice with others, because his vision of what was beautiful was so all-encompassing and so wholly his that it was inevitably going to conflict with anyone else’s.
That was a big turning point in the shooting of the film. We suddenly moved from an historical-based project, based on archive and some limited re-creations and a couple interviews, to suddenly something that was happening vérité, in real time. It brought this incredible energy to the film, and it brought this incredible energy to the story at the penultimate moment.
Then the second thing that happened is that two-thirds or three-quarters of the way through the edit, I unearthed all of that footage of him as a child, that actual film material of him as a child.
How did that happen?
That didn’t come until very late in the process. His nephew, who’s interviewed in the film, called me one day, and he said, “Hey, I’m cleaning out my mom’s basement.” His mother was Jeremiah’s brother’s wife. He had found a box of old 16 milimeter films marked “young JT, young Jonathan.” And he said, “Is this useful to you?” It was another “Holy crap, I can’t believe this is happening” moment. Once we saw all those films, it suddenly was this other incredible piece of the puzzle that corroborated all of the re-creations we had done, corroborated all the stories, gave you a real kind of tone and texture for his life. That was just another tremendous layer to the film that came at the last minute.
That’s incredible. There’s a little bit of magic there, right?
Oh, yes, totally.
I wanted to ask you if you had any advice for people looking to break into making documentaries? How did you get your start?
I started 25-some-odd years ago. I would say, to answer that question very specifically, I can just reference a point in my own career where I really wanted to associate myself in the world of film and television and I took a starting position, entry-level position, at Maysles Films, which was kind of the preeminent vérité documentary filmmakers at the time, with this incredible legacy. Basically, I had a reception job there. But while I was there, I became friends with the guy who ran the equipment room, and I became friends with the guy who was a longtime editor there, and I kind of created my own internship. That’s how you do it, because just trying to burst into the scene and trying to find financing for a project, that’s really hard for a first-time filmmaker. I’m 25 years in the business. It’s still really hard for me to go out and pitch stuff and get money for stuff in television and film.
I think you cannot underestimate the power and the importance of seeking out good mentors, attaching yourself to them, and then making yourself invaluable and indispensable to the process. That’s how this industry works. Like many artistic industries it’s like an apprenticeship industry, so seek out those situations. So that’s Part 1 of my answer. Part 2 is, if you find a really good idea for a documentary, if you’re just starting out, you do whatever it takes to get the project done. You have to be very, very scrappy. Find young people who are willing to put in long hours. Learn how to shoot something yourself.
Those internships are invaluable.
Another experience – I was 21 years old, I moved to New York. I was working as a receptionist at a post-production house, so I was the first point of entry when people got there. But then in the evenings I interned at this place called the New York Center for Visual History that did documentary projects, and I worked there for free. I did whatever I needed to do: catalog stuff, file, whatever. But I wanted to be around filmmakers and the filmmaking process.
I met this woman there who was working on a project about Luciano Pavarotti. There was going to be a documentary film about him. They were going to shoot it in Modena. I told her, “I speak Italian. My parents are from Italy.” She said, “Well, interestingly enough, I need a production coordinator who can also speak English and Italian,” and I got hired on that job. It was my first job in the world of film. They flew me to Italy, and I’m sitting there meeting Luciano Pavarotti. I grew up with his music because my mother sang opera.
Wow!
I went from being a receptionist and working an internship to suddenly being on a full-fledged, full-crewed documentary-film production in Modena, Italy, with Luciano Pavarotti. I was working during the day. I was interning at night. That experience—and showing people that you’re indispensable—it led to a real job.
That’s amazing! So tell us, what’s up next for you?
We have a film making festival rounds right now. It’s called “Fermented.” We made it with Ed Lee. He basically kind of leads us through that whole world of fermented foods, both historical and otherwise. It’s really incredible, and it’s unbelievably textural. That film is done. There’s a guy here at ZPZ named Jon Cianfrani who directed that film.
We have a slate of about five or six – well, six, but five [are] documentary film projects– that are in various states of undress here. One that we did with a guy that we’ve been working with for about six years named Steven Rinella – we did a series called “MeatEater,” and we did a film with him, a feature film called “Stars in the Sky.” It’s really about the philosophy and the ethos of hunting. It’s really a beautiful film—an incredible film. It’s probably the antithesis of that film that just made it into the market last year, called “Trophy.”
Then we have other documentary projects that have really interesting packaging around them as well that are kind of marching forward. We’re looking for financing for those projects now. That’s on the film side. On the television side we have a whole bunch of projects that are happening. We continue to move forward with “Parts Unknown,” thankfully – knock on wood. The train keeps moving forward.
