Jon Favreau does it all – produces, writes, directs, acts – and he knows for the most part what mainstream audiences want. So it was no surprise to learn that his latest film Chef won the Heineken Audience Award for best narrative film at the 2014 TriBeCa Film Festival. At a Q&A session during TFF2014, Favreau talked about the film and, interestingly enough, comparisons between the protagonist and Hollywood filmmaker. In the film, the chef gives up creative control of his food art for a prestigious position in a five-star “corporate” restaurant. He no longer has creative control over what he makes in the kitchen; he’s told what the menu will be. The problem is he never quite reconciles himself to the fact he “sold out” to the corporate machine. A social-media snafu starts a chain of events that give the protagonist a chance to redeem himself. So, what is the allegory?
Favreau began his career as an Indie filmmaker. In the twenty-plus years he’s been making films, he’s progressed to mainstream, working with mega-Hollywood studios like Universal, Paramount, and DreamWorks, but he’s still an Indie filmmaker at heart. With this latest release, Chef, perhaps Favreau has written a protagonist that voices the filmmaker’s own yearning to return to his roots?
If you’ve seen Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster Inception, to say the film is ambiguous would be an understatement. However, Nolan himself has discussed its allegorical connection to filmmaking – a movie about making movies. When we watch a film, don’t we all lose ourselves in that cinematic reality – watching a film is like slipping into that dream world. But Inception goes further than that. Many film lovers have noticed that the characters represent key roles in filmmaking: Cobb the director, Fischer, the viewer, Saito, the producer, etc. This idea of Inception as a metaphor for filmmaking isn’t new; you can find lots written about it on the internet.
There are other allegorical films out there. What are your favorites?
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