Chef Jamie Oliver’s story, at least in terms of his rise to fame with “The Naked Chef,” is a story about filmmaking. He and the BBC Two documentary crew behind the series broke with the studio-based, locked down and orderly conventions of cooking shows to shoot Oliver a lot more in the style of a documentary — lots of handheld, verite footage and the sense, well before ring-lit YouTube tutorials and Twitch muckbangs, of cooking with a mate.
It’s a fitting detail to come up during Oliver’s episode of “Chef’s Table: Legends” because over the course of its 10 seasons, the Netflix series has itself reshaped the landscape of documentary food programming. “Chef’s Table” embraces a visual approach that owes more to narrative-style cinematography as it does to the conventions of documentary. The goal was to give every plate and the environment surrounding each subject the same visual intention and passion that chef has for their food.
This meant Will Basanta and Adam Bricker, the DPs for “Chef’s Table: Legends” and the two main cinematographers for “Chef’s Table,” couldn’t just sit back in a corner on a zoom lens, and try to be a fly on the wall the way documentary crews might be used to doing. Both Basanta and Bricker came from features work, and were game to adapt the film language that series executive David Gelb had honed in “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.”
This means “Chef’s Table” shoots on cinema primes. The camera team takes the time to find the perfect angle (given the space and lighting limitations of whatever kitchen they were working in), to do multiple takes, and to stage moments in line with the emotion of a chef’s story.
“[We’re] telling the story arc of a dish. The next level of that is thinking about where that story arc falls into the chef’s narrative structure and thinking about how we can make choices to support the story. If it’s a lower moment, maybe instead of picking the tomato at sunset, it’s an hour later, and it’s almost dusk, and it’s a cool blue,” Bricker told IndieWire. “We’re trying to think of things, while remaining true to the naturalism and the documentary truth, [that still impact] the emotions of the chef’s story.”
The choice to be more evocative and emotional in the filmmaking wasn’t a radical one to the makers of “Chef’s Table,” since they had all come from a narrative filmmaking background. They found that involving the chefs in that shot planning and emotional scaffolding doesn’t negate the documentary story each episode is after. Film storytelling only helps it along.
“I think that can be really beautiful and evocative. I think we’ve gotten some really amazing moments from doing that, from [the show] being a little bit more abstracted from a pure verite world,” Basanta told IndieWire. “On the other hand, if it’s not handled with a lot of care and time and understanding [of] the chef you’re working with, it can feel too staged or commercial. So it’s always, even in this current ‘Legends’ season, kind of about finding multiple modes of shooting.”
Controlling as much as possible and creating a perfect, beautiful-looking moment takes time, lighting, a lot of setup; so with only limited shooting time, particularly with the subjects of “Chef’s Table: Legends,” being too wedded to creating something perfect may cause the camera to miss out on the kind of spontaneity or magic accidents that also run through the documentary series. Basanta told IndieWire they end up doing a fair amount of verité, even if the show isn’t known for it. Whatever mode they’re shooting in (often multiple at once), the goal is always to find the best visual way to tell the story.
“When I walk into a kitchen, honestly, the rule of thumb is that it’s actually more important what lights you turn off than what you add. “David and [executive producer/director Brian McGinn] are really after a very clean, intentional aesthetic, echoing what a lot of these chefs are after as well,” Bricker said.
From a cinematography perspective, that means controlling shadows and light so that there aren’t multiple shadows or multiple kinds of light — the dread combination of a fluorescent bulb and a heat lamp, for example — in the shot, to make everything look clear and single-sourced. “You strive for something that’s just really beautiful and soft and ultimately filmic. I think that same approach is what I take on ‘Hacks’ or in my other narrative work,” Bricker said.
Sometimes the “Chef’s Table” cinematographer is merely trying to shadow the chef, and sometimes that chef is a very active partner in the filmmaking. “Francis Mallmann, from Season 1, is a huge cinephile. I think the first night we were all hanging out — the director Clay Jeter and I, some of our other crew, our first AC Alex, and Francis — and we watched ‘Death in Venice’ which is this beautiful movie,” Basanta said. “He was meeting us in a place of wanting to collaborate almost as an additional filmmaker.”
That collaboration led Basanta to send a B-unit crew up hiking up a mountain for four or five hours to find a view of the island they were based on, so that the camera could look back on it and viewers could get a sense of scale and place. But when there’s the inspiration to do something like that, “Chef’s Table” leaps at the chance — and Basanta pointed out that drones have made that sense of scale a lot easier to achieve.
“We have a huge amount of scale in the show. We’re going from very close-up textural shots that are evocative and telling their own story to big environments; there’s a lot of scope,” Basanta said. “I think placing humans in specific environments, understanding those environments, feeling the dimensions of those environments from the detailed textures all the way to the wide expansive environment shots, is one way [we express our style].”
Wherever a subject lies on the filmmaking spectrum and whatever scope is required, the cinematography team tries to celebrate the effort they put into cooking with a shooting style that is precise and intentional. Although both Basanta and Bricker came back to the show to helm the four episodes of “Chef’s Table: Legends,” the whole camera team has grown to take up the style of work they began.
“The consistency of the crew and of the artists that work on it is what makes the show consistent across the years,” Bricker said. “I originally started with Chloe Weaver, who was pulling focus, and Charlie Panian, who was loading and downloading footage, and over the course of the seasons, Chloe quickly graduated to DPing her own episodes. Charlie really defined the way we shoot cities from a B-roll perspective, and we would go off with his own unit. His compositions are really key to the visuals. Then on Will Basanta’s side, his first AC Alex Paul spearheaded the spinoff ‘Street Food’ and his cinematography is just gorgeous. So it’s wonderful to see these crew members working their way up and expressing themselves as DPs within the show that we built.”
That work has grown well beyond the Netflix series and its spinoffs. From food porn on “Bridgerton” to the murderous tables of “The Menu” — for which David Gelb and Will Basanta did some additional food photography — the “Chef’s Table” style of shooting has become perhaps the prestige way to cover food. But it’s really not about the staging or the plating or the “food symphony” at the end of the episode. It’s about using visuals to convey the scope of a chef’s achievement.
“To be able to make this thing together — the same crew since the very beginning, many of whom I was in film school with prior to this — that, firstly, people watch but also has had an impact on the visual language of food documentary cinematography, is a great honor,” Bricker said.
“Chef’s Table: Legends” is available on Netflix.
