Much like his onscreen counterpart in Chef, Jon Favreau has seen his share of Twitter meltdowns.
"On Twitter, I know a lot of famous people and I know a lot of people who have canceled their accounts. I've seen it go both ways," says Favreau. "I've hit that send button and had that feeling of, 'you can't take it back.' You get in the practice of never ever drinking [beforehand] and sleeping on a tweet before you send it. That's what comes from me being in my 40s. If I was in my 20s, if this was happening when Swingers was happening, it'd be a whole other ballgame for me."
Chef, out this weekend, is a big departure from the director's recent work on movies like Iron Man and Iron Man 2. Instead of being a massive Marvel tent-pole, it's a low-budget passion project that is much more human than superhuman. "I've been doing bigger movies, and then one day an idea for a whole movie hit me at once and I scribbled out eight pages of outline," Favreau said at the film's premiere at South By Southwest earlier this year. "That hasn't happened to me since Swingers."
Chef is Favreau's most intimate, personal work since that 1996 film helped him break out as a screenwriter and actor, but it's also one that reflects how many years have passed. Rather than a young man negotiating the romantic entanglements of his 20s, Favreau stars as Carl Casper, a divorced 40-something chef and father in Los Angeles trying to get out of a rut and reconnect with his love for his work—and his young son.
Thanks to the many famous friends that Favreau made over the last 18 years, this little film also comes with a lot of big names attached: Scarlett Johansson, Robert Downey Jr., Sofia Vergara, Dustin Hoffman and John Leguizamo.
Although Favreau considers himself "pretty savvy" with social media—he maintains an active Twitter account with 1.7 million followers—his onscreen counterpart Carl is completely unschooled in exactly how public an ill-considered tweet can become.
"At first, he's oblivious and dismissive of [social media], but then he sees it as a powerful tool. It's almost like a Sorcerer's Apprentice thing," says Favreau, a reference to the famous Goethe poem (and the Fantasia adaptation) where havoc ensues when a young magician uses magic that he doesn't fully understand and isn't able to control. "'Hey look, all these people want to follow me and come to my restaurant, we have more reservations than we ever had!' Well, watch out."
The fallout from the chef's social media screw-up is further amplified by another modern digital reality: the omnipresence of photo and video technology that can instantly broadcast other people's real-life mistakes for all the world to see. Favreau says it's less a commentary on technology itself, and more a recognition of social media's presence in our everyday lives. "It was purely a tool of storytelling, just like the answering machine was in Swingers," he says. "It's a thing that is now part of our individual experiences."
Early on in the film, Chef Casper leaves the upscale LA restaurant where his cooking is dumbed down and micromanaged and starts over in a tiny food truck where he can make the sort of food he wants, one customer at a time. In a way, it's hard not to see Chef as Favreau's food truck, a departure from sprawling blockbusters in favor of a small, nearly perfect movie with the sort of passion and heart unmatched in the slicker, big-budget works that preceded it.
Favreau sees a lot of analogies between food and filmmaking. An avid fan of cooking shows, he spent many long hours preparing for the film with LA food-truck pioneer Roy Choi, who came in as a consultant and ended up as a co-producer. The director came away with a deep and obvious respect not only for the work that chefs like Choi do, but also a sense of creative kinship.
"What chefs and filmmakers have in common is that they tend to be very adamant in their vision, and they'll fight anybody who tries to change that vision," says Favreau. "But if that film is screened for one audience that doesn't laugh, or if a customer sends the food back, they'll completely rethink everything. As adamant as they were five minutes earlier, the idea of having it rejected by the public is so horrifying to them that they will back off it all and blame themselves because their pleasure, their happiness comes from the pleasure of others."
He recalls the time Choi showed him how to make a grilled cheese sandwich, a meticulous process that felt like the most important thing in the world as they stood at the stove, striving for perfection.
"It's what Roy said: This is all that matters. And if you fuck this up, everything sucks in the world," Favreau says. "Comedians and chefs and filmmakers—at the end of the day they just want a stranger to enjoy what they're doing. It's a very strange way to be wired. Roy told me what it was like when he first had a line outside of his truck. It's like winning the lottery. These guys are so happy in this movie when they're cooking the food and people are liking it."
It's the same feeling I see on Favreau's face after the film's SXSW premiere: the joy at making something that is loved and appreciated, even if it's only by one customer eating a sandwich or a couple hundred people cheering at a small theater in Austin, Texas.
Ultimately, Chef is a movie about the joy of small, meaningful experiences, and the pleasure of seeing them shared; about how social media has the power not only to amplify mistakes, but to transform the craft and passion of people like Favreau and Choi into a gift that can be shared with a much larger world.
"It's a multiplier. It will multiply whatever you're doing," says Favreau. "Like when you embarrass yourself. We all have our bad moments, but most of them happen behind closed doors. When that's on public display, that's what is going to define you. In the same way [when] you're doing something good you want to share. ... You're sharing it not only with your friends or the person whose hand you're holding, but—if you hit on something very special—maybe with an entire culture."
