Nobu Documentary Director Matt Tyrnauer on Capturing the Beauty of a Food Revolution

Nobu Matsuhisa is one of the most recognized names in the restaurant business, with more than 50 luxury sushi restaurants and 36 hotels across the globe. He’s served up classic dishes like black cod miso, rock shrimp tempura and yellowtail jalapeño to regular patrons and celebrities alike, but according to filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer, not much is known about the man himself — nor his impact on modern sushi.

“He's arguably the most successful chef of all time, just in terms of the footprint of his global network of restaurants and now hotels, and he's become a luxury brand in food and hospitality, and that's pretty rare,” Tyrnauer tells MovieMaker. 

“No one's really taken a close look at Nobu. I mean, he's been covered in the press for decades now, but this is a really fascinating, intricate world. He's extraordinarily accomplished. He's changed cuisine with an enormous amount of invention. I don't think people know that these dishes really originated with him.”

Following its world premiere at Telluride, the film made its debut at the Tribeca Film Festival on Wednesday, bringing Nobu back to where it all began: with the first Nobu restaurant in Tribeca in 1994, with business partner Robert De Niro, who is also the co-founder of the festival. The film plays again Friday and Sunday before a theatrical opening in New York on June 27 and a national rollout beginning July 4. 

In the film, Tyrnauer traces the chef’s journey from his troubled childhood in Japan to his culinary experiences in Peru and Alaska. We spoke with the director, whose previous films include 2009's Valentino: The Last Emperor and 2019's Where's My Roy Cohn?, about the difficulties of tracking Matsuhisa around the globe, translation challenges for the multilingual project, and capturing the beauty of the food the chef is so fussy about perfecting. 

Amber Dowling: How did you gain Nobu’s trust for this kind of in-depth look at his life? 

Matt Tyrnauer: He had agreed in principle to do a film and when I agreed to make it, we had lunch at Nobu Malibu and got along immediately. He was very open, very accessible, very generous with his time. What I saw with him is that once he agrees to do something, he's a perfectionist and he does it to his full ability. He'll spend as much time as he needs to to do it, which is not unlike his core mission of perfecting cuisine.

I noticed a lot of integrity in him, and I've seen this in other really accomplished people that I've either written about or made films about. They have a certain work ethic and dedication and focus. He really did bring that to his participation in shoot days, and there were many of them.

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Amber Dowling: The film travels to several countries to keep up with Nobu. What kinds of challenges did that present?

Matt Tyrnauer: There were logistical challenges in terms of just moving people around. I like to work with a pretty light footprint and not heavy equipment, because I like to be nimble. But in this case, we needed enough lights and the pretty fancy cameras, because his world is a world of beauty, and shooting food is specialized. So there were two types of kits we used, a cinema vérité kit, and a food beauty kit. So logistically, it presented some issues that way,

He flies private for the most part and he needs to, because of his schedule. So sometimes we would hop on his plane, and that helped a lot.

Amber Dowling: Did you need to hire local crew or was everyone able to travel with you?

Matt Tyrnauer: For the most part, it was the same crew. For me that’s always best, because you need to socialize. When you're basically moving in with someone for a year, you become a part of their life. That's the joy of doing this, and it's a particular world you build for yourself. So there's a kind of film world that is an overlay of the subject’s world, and when things are going well, you integrate and it's an organic process to embed yourself and become a fly on the wall. So you have to all get along, and you have to know when to disappear and appear. If you're taking up a lot of space, you have to learn how to be natural. 

Matt Tyrnauer on Beauty Shots in the Nobu Documentary

Amber Dowling: Did you need to learn any new skills in order to capture the food in all its glory?

Matt Tyrnauer: Shooting food beauty shots is not my core skill set, but I have great DPs I work with. In this case, it was Toby Thiermann and Nick Albert, and they lived up to the challenge and helped me a lot. We were suspending cameras over sushi bars and doing some tricks of the trade to get different angles that would show the composition, because a lot of Nobu’s artistry is in the composition of the plate. That’s a big part of the movie. 

Amber Dowling: Nobu alternates between English and Japanese in the film’s interviews. What was that process like?

Matt Tyrnauer: Nobu is trilingual and speaks Japanese, Spanish and English. His Spanish is arguably better than his English. I can understand some Spanish. I needed, obviously, to have the Japanese translated for me entirely and occasionally during interviews I would have it simultaneously translated so I could understand. He answered in English and in Japanese, and sometimes I used Japanese takes because he's much more articulate in Japanese than English.

He's quite articulate in English, but with a kind of unique vocabulary that he's works in. So we did all three languages, and then we chose where they would go. Some scenes were just in Japanese and we subtitled them, but some takes were in two languages, and we chose which one to use. It was very complicated actually, but I really like having the switching back and forth.

Amber Dowling: In choosing which celebrities to use for the Nobu documentary, did you have to self-edit to stay focused, given how many frequent his restaurants?

Matt Tyrnauer: I never really gave it a lot of thought. I mean, I acknowledge that any restaurant that's really famous has to trade on famous people dining there. It's just part of the business in big cities, especially New York and Los Angeles. So Nobu comes up in L.A. at the height of Hollywood celebrity culture. And his business partner is a major movie star too, Robert De Niro, but I kind of didn't pay a lot of attention to it.

We happened to be shooting one day at Nobu Malibu, where a lot of famous people do eat, and Cindy Crawford and Randy Gerber, who are devoted clients of Nobu, showed up by coincidence. It wasn't planned at all and on the fly we asked whether they would be on camera. We kind of invaded the deck out there, and we had cameras and lights, and the restaurant was going full tilt around us.

I have to say they were great. Nobu made what he calls Cindy rice, which was a dish he named after her. It's a traditional Japanese tempura dish, but he made it for her as a surprise, and we captured it.

Nobu is now playing at the Tribeca Festival.

Main image: Nobu Matsuhisa in Nobu.