In The Kitchen: A Few Minutes with Writer/Director Jesse Zigelstein talking about ‘Nose To Tail’

Posted in Crave, Interviews, Movies, Theatrical, TV, What's Streaming? by - February 26, 2020
In The Kitchen: A Few Minutes with Writer/Director Jesse Zigelstein talking about ‘Nose To Tail’

Sometimes it’s important to get an unvarnished look at things…

Nose To Tail takes us into a single day in the life of a high octane and high maintenance restaurateur and chef (Aaron Abrams) who is trying to navigate the ever complicated and difficult world of the restaurant business without compromising his ideals or his culinary art.

A simple but incredibly engaging affair; Nose To Tail really takes us into a highly controlled world and lets us watch as it unravels as it features a really brilliant performance from its leading man; Aaron Abrams.

It’s the debut feature from writer/director Jesse Ziglestein and we got the unique pleasure to sit down with him in advance of it debuting on Crave later this spring to talk about what inspired the story and trying to find the right guy to play a character that we certainly may have seen on screen before, but never quite like this.

Dave Voigt: Obviously congratulations on the film, I think what really stuck with me on it was that this isn’t a film about where you are wondering where the character arc will go or anything like that but you just end up being incredibly glued to the characters, what was the initial inspiration for the story?

Jesse Ziglestein: Well I’ve always been interested in food and wine and the contemporary restaurant industry and I really felt like it hadn’t been done justice in the dramatic form, letting us see the gritty realities behind the scenes in a restaurant.  Sure we’ve seen movies about chefs, angry chefs, chefs in restaurants but they tend to have a familiar arc to them where characters get some kind of redemption after being a bastard but I really wanted to go the other way with it.  Knowing how difficult the restaurant business is I felt it was really important to try and have an honest look at the darker side of it all.

It’s a business with so few genuine happy endings, in most cases if you open a restaurant, it’s demise is already built in and predetermined.  Even if you get lucky and hit that 1% success margin that usually only means something like a 5-7 year shelf life in a brutal business with incredibly thin profit margins with the amount of anxiety and stress that it produces being WAY out of proportion for what you end up putting into it.  There’s a high degree of sincerity and love in this business because people tend to know that the rewards won’t really be of any great monetary value going in.  I really wanted to paint a picture of the world of these very ambitious but ultimately underfunded business ventures that exist out there in so many cities across the world.  I wanted to show the drive and passion in this industry but ultimately some of the ugly collateral effects of that kind of devotion to that situation.

Fairly early on I did realize that the end for this character that we follow would be pretty inevitable as we see him go down with his ship and stand on principle until he ultimately self destructs.

It really is quite fascinating because there’s a little bit of nobility in the character as well because yeah we don’t REALLY like him all that much but we still kind of do inside the dynamic of an industry that where you have to acknowledge (or be in denial of) the eventual day that it will all end.

Yeah, for sure, I think that the nobility of the character really comes down to the fact that there’s no easy redemption for this guy because he makes all the wrong decisions basically guaranteeing his eventual demise, but he’s not a cynic, he’s very idealistic.  He cares deeply, a little too much as he mistreats others and himself along the way.  In a way he’s idealistic to the point of self annihilation.

This really is the kind of film where if you don’t find the right actor to play a character like this, you’re just dead in the water.  Can you talk a little about finding Aaron Abrams for this and making it all click in just the right way?

I knew that it was going to require an actor with quite a bit of range and run the gamut of emotions that allowed for an asshole that you’d still be drawn towards and invested in, even as he pushes you away.  It needed to be someone who could pivot as needed and be draw into and repulsed by in practically the same breath.

I honestly just got lucky because there are so many great actors in Toronto and we just didn’t have the time or the resources to conduct an incredibly lengthy casting search or go heavy on rehearsals.  There’s no casting agent credit on the film but we had some help from agencies around town and they helped us put together a list of about 10-20 of the more intense middle age actors around town, and Aaron was available.  I had also seen him previously in Closet Monster so I knew that he could play a jerk pretty well…and I subsequently learned that he’s been playing assholes on TV for many years! (Laughs).  I think he relished the opportunity to really dive beyond the superficial with this particular asshole and find out what really made him tick.  He was great at shading this abrasive protagonist in a way that didn’t make him off putting.

This post was written by
David Voigt is a Toronto based writer with a problem and a passion for the moving image and all things cinema. Having moved from production to the critical side of the aisle for well over 10 years now at outlets like Examiner.com, Criticize This, Dork Shelf (Now That Shelf), to.Night Newspaper he’s been all across his city, the country and the continent in search of all the news and reviews that are fit to print from the world of cinema.
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