I was the hand double for Meryl Streep in this film.

So in the black and white segments, those are actually my hands.

I had on Meryl Streep swatch and her shirt and that's me sewing up the duck.

Hey, Vanity fair.

I'm Susan sponge in today.

I'll be reviewing food styling in tv and film.

Mhm.

This next clip is from The Princess Diaries.

Very exciting.

Thank you.

In any situation, ice cream is definitely the hardest thing to shoot whether or not this is real ice cream or sorbet is is an open question because they're eating.

You would have to make something that looks like sorbet but doesn't melt.

You also could just keep resetting the scene.

But it would be ideal to have something that that doesn't melt because by the time you started shooting it could be melting.

She didn't realize it was frozen.

If it was me, I would do everything in my power to create something that looked like what they wanted it to look like.

But also could be edible for the actors and you know, it can't be like Crisco which is a common way to make fake ice cream because they're eating it.

It's very possible.

It's actual story bay because I did see a little bit of melt around the edge in the bull like monkeys.

This scene is from Matilda.

Mhm This cake really had to have a lot of screen presence smells chocolatey a in one way that they did, that was just by making it huge.

It's a really, really big cake.

I don't want any thank you.

It looks to me like it was just made in giant wedding cake pans and also they're using camera angles to make it look even bigger and scary actually.

It's hard to make something like chocolate look unappealing or unappetizing part of what's helping that is that you can see that the actor doesn't want to eat it.

But they've also tried to make the cake just look um kind of just really messy and sloppy and then the cook is wiping her nose so it just seems kind of disgusting and very like kind of sloppily made when you see an actor on screen eating or seeming to eat a lot.

You'll know that they cut away a lot and there are plenty of opportunities for the actor to spit out the food, which is often what they have to do.

I can't usually you want the actors to eat as little as possible unless they want to eat it.

This next film is eat, pray love.

Working on eat, pray love was definitely an adventure.

We did not have a set kitchen and we were really shooting on location in Rome and if you've ever been to Rome, you know the streets are small and only a couple of trucks were allowed to get near the set and a food truck was not one of them.

In this case the pasta would have been pretty warm because the doors that you see behind her, that's where the kitchen was and I was right inside.

And so I would have tried to plate this as freshly as possible for this scene.

I don't believe that they specified the kind of pasta and I just wanted something simple and iconic because this scene was all about her deciding to give into her impulses and just live life.

But I didn't really understand how important this scene was going to be until I saw the final edit and I think we did it with one plate of pasta and then they said, okay, we're done.

We're rapper, moving on to the next location.

Company moved, they say, so you clean up and you throw everything away and they were like, wait a minute, wait a minute.

We need to shoot um an insert.

It just was the parmesan cheese falling on the pasta as much as I hated taking it out of the trash.

I took it out of the trash.

I re plated it and we did the parmesan cheese falling on the pasta.

But don't worry, I didn't feed Julia roberts pasta that had been in the trash.

This is Sex in the city.

The truth is, you wouldn't prep any differently for this scene as you would for sushi that was sitting on a table.

It looks like it's real sushi on a real body.

She probably also had certain modesty garments on underneath the sushi more likely than not the prop team ordered sushi from a restaurant and they probably wouldn't have brought a sushi chef on set because it's pretty easy thing to source.

They probably had trays and trays of it in the refrigerator because it might have taken multiple takes to get the shots that they needed.

Yeah, 40 minutes later, Sushi Samantha still no smith.

If they have to eat, what do they want to eat?

That becomes almost the most important part of a scene like this.

I got Wasabi in places where one should never get Wasabi.

This next scene is from julie and Julia.

You may think that boning a duck is an impossible feat.

I was the food stylist on julie and Julia.

Don't be afraid no fear Julia.

We had a sort of makeshift kitchen right on the stage.

It was actually a little bit difficult because we couldn't make any noise while the cameras were rolling down the buck of the bird all the way from the neck to expose the back pole.

Is it hard to bone a duck?

Well, it isn't the easiest thing in the world.

You disgusting.

Oh, maybe the eggs aren't fresh Julia says the eggs have to be fresh.

They are fresh.

If you watch the film closely, you'll realize that amy Adams is actually doing most of the cooking.

I teach her some basic knife skills, chopping and peeling onions and cracking eggs just to kind of get her more comfortable in the kitchen.

We had live lobsters because there was a scene where she had to actually pick up live lobsters.

And yes, they were real live lobsters.

It looks just like yours.

I was the hand double for Meryl Streep in this film.

So in the black and white segments, those are actually my hands I had on Meryl Streep swatch and her shirt and that's me sewing up the duck in the wide shots.

Merrill is doing a few things but you don't see the more intricate parts.

And then I was trusting the O.

T.

Allen Armand and it fell on the floor.

You always have to have a lot of backups for resetting.

I think we had eight of those actual finished ducks for the dinner party.

I mean it's not like a super expensive items, believe it or not, that would affect how many you get.

If it's something that's kind of cheap, you might just get 10 just to have them.

But if it becomes expensive, I mean you do always have a budget that you're working with so you don't want to be wasting money.

I have to bone a whole duck when at some point this next scene is from Emily in paris oh this steak isn't cooked at all.

Um mm Excuse me, pardon, monsieur in this scene.

We are to believe that Emily has received a steak that is very rare but you never see the steak, you barely see the food.

So it's it's totally the actors reactions and the dialogue that is giving context to the food and we're just kind of buying it.

Is there a problem?

No, no, I love it.

Everything is perfect.

You haven't touched it.

The fact that there's no real close up of the food in the scene tells you that they're not really so concerned about the food.

I'd be happy to burn it for you.

But promise me you'll try it first.

Yeah, try his.

Meet Emily.

It's much more about the dialogue and the characters and even the humor of the scene.

Nothing is real.

I mean, the way that this chef, it comes out of a small little bistro kitchen perfectly clean and his sleeves are rolled up on his biceps.

I mean, it's just it's definitely not real.

It's all there to serve the story and it's not about the food.

I knew you'd like it if you give it a chance.

Next up eat, drink, man, woman, this is probably one of the best cooking scenes ever shot.

You see so much real, real food here.

This is an expert chef.

It's the very beginning of the film.

So it's the introduction to the character and the story and this this is how it all starts and you are immediately just drawn into the rhythmic cooking that's going on.

There are so many different actions in this scene and any action is more difficult to shoot because you only get one chance and then if you didn't get it you have to just reset and do it again.

Mhm.

A scene like this would have taken a long time to shoot.

It would all be charted out on a shooting schedule.

So the person doing the food would know what to have prepared and when all of those kind of things would kind of dictate how you would source your ingredients and how to basically prep your job is the food style is to be ready.

I never want to keep this very huge and expensive crew waiting.

This next scene is from inglorious bastards and I stopped our only like them.

This scene is very interesting.

It's part of this long, uncomfortable conversation between these two characters and they go to the trouble of showing you how beautiful and delicious this apple strudel is.

Mhm mhm, upgrade the whole point of kind of building the strudel up was to show how menacing a character he is because in the end he thinks nothing of putting out his cigarette on the strudel.

That's a swell.

This is a really good example of food sort of playing a character in a scene because you know, it was there to really tell you something, it was no accident that you saw these loving close ups of the struggle and the cream just so they could show you a close up of the cigarette at the end.

This next scene is from Marie Antoinette.

The Asparagus tower is very central visually in the scene and in the 18th century food was both of decoration and something to eat.

It just sort of really helps set the scene and it sort of adds to like the absurdity of what we think of as Marie Antoinette let them eat cake.

The idea is to sort of find this sweet spot between historical correctness and theatricality to help tell the story and paint a picture.

Everything is just kind of pretty and flouncy and roughly and and so are the clothes.

So it's all of a piece.

This next scene is from the grand Budapest hotel.

This was also when I met Agatha from what I understand about the way wes Anderson works, there sort of elements of reality and fantasy kind of interwoven together.

And I think these pastries are kind of a perfect example of that when trying to figure out what exactly a pastry like this might look like in the film.

Most likely you might start with sketches, they would have auditioned different versions of the pastry since it's so important.

It's really like almost like a character in these scenes.

Not only was Agatha immensely skilled with a palette knife and a buttercream flourish, she was also very brave in a case like this where the pastries are just set dressing, I would do whatever I had to do to make these indestructible and last as long as possible out of this boil.

Mendel's is the best.

This next scene is from crazy rich asians forget about these girls camp out here in order room service.

It's highly likely that these two shots were shot at different times.

If there's no reason to have the actors in the room with this probably smelly fish, why would you, I would think even for the film crew, they would have tried to keep the smells to a minimum.

You wouldn't really want like smelly rotten fish in the room with the crew.

This definitely looks like a real fish and this scene to me, the guts and blood are probably fake, but you never know it could be anything, it could be paper towels soaked in fake blood.

This is sometimes where the special effects department would actually get involved.

Usually they can create like fake gross stuff that isn't as gross as it looks.

Next up is Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory hurry up.

Violet, Wait grandpa, each of those props that you see all of the supposed candy in the garden and they're going crazy over it.

If you look at it, it really, it just looks like plastic and vinyl.

It more creates this fantasy world and if you look closely at what they're doing, they just opened up one of these plastic mushrooms and put something inside and even the chocolate waterfall doesn't really look like chocolate.

It just looks like brown water, You've ruined your watershed one cup.

It's polluted is chocolate.

None of it really looks like food or really like anything but you kind of buy it.

And again, the actors reactions are having a big effect on how you interpret the scene.

Next up is the founder robbery speed.

That's the name of the game.

The first stop for every Mcdonald's hamburger is the grill.

I feel like this scene is very successful because I really did feel like I was in that kitchen back in the first Mcdonald's because it really showed you a lot of detail behind the scenes berger crossing.

You see hamburgers that were clearly made by hand.

That is probably how they were made in the beginning before they became a huge conglomerate that lends a real air of reality to the scene because if they showed burgers the way they look now at Mcdonald's, these sort of perfect circles, I would have a harder time believing that that it was real to me.

Just the shape of the burgers really is the one thing here that tells me that, oh wow, this is like the first Mcdonald's next time you see a plate of food in a movie, think about all that went into it and remember that nothing is accidental when you see it on the screen.