JAMES SHARMAN
SHORT FILMS YOU CAN FEEL.
James Sharman
ABOUT
FROM FOOD TO Film
Since my first day as a chef at 15, I'd been fighting this feeling that the diners were getting the raw end of the deal.
Not because the food wasn't great, if anything that only made it worse.
When I started feeling real food in my hands, I couldn't get over the magic of it all. I'd been a muggle the whole time. Before then I foolishly thought Jam was Jam, nice on toast. I'd never seen the proud smile of the person who nurtured all those berries for months. I hadn't heard the first few bubbles of sugar as the pan heats up as the berries melt together like jewels. How could I have known the molten chaos that ensues in the final moments before it finds its home in steaming hot jars.
Before kitchens, Jam was Jam to me. After I'd seen behind the curtain it was its own secret world and the people who'd eventually spread that jam on their own toast would remain oblivious. Really did bother me.
At 18 I started working in a basement kitchen in London. To my delight, I was added to the pasta section on my first day. I'd never made pasta before & was swept away by the tactile delight of the process. My first task was to make fresh pappardelle for the evening. I spent the whole day doing little else.
That evening I followed the waiter carrying the first pasta dish upstairs to the dining room. I watched from the stairwell as the couple who'd ordered took their first bite, expecting them to mirror my own jubilance... They liked it, it was great pasta. But I was outraged, indignant!
If only they could've been there! If they'd seen the way all those golden yolks broke into the flour. Felt the stubbornness of that firm dough eventually surrender itself into the rollers as it's pressed into a gloriously long sheet. If only they knew the rustic precision of each strip being cut under my knife they'd get it. But they weren't there!
I wanted to walk over & explain how something remarkable had happened in that basement earlier that day, that it had all been for them and how they'd been somehow cheated out of the true magic of the food they were enjoying.
I carried this my whole career, the better the restaurant I cooked in, the worse it became. Even Noma, the best restaurant in the world, where we, the chefs, could actually take each dish to the table and explain in our own words how it had been made. I'd still walked away with unfinished business in my mind. Sure that the guests could never really know the sensory drama that had gone into it all.
Had to close the gap.
For the years after Noma some friends and I set about travelling the world - creating the most immersive dining experiences we could think of. We dragged customers up Everest for us to cook for them, converted the carriages of night trains through Vietnam into bistros & floated a restaurant on a structurally dubious barge we'd made out onto a lake in Kenya for dinner.
There's a magic that happens when things are made with care. Food taught me this, but it seems to be everywhere if you're willing to apply the right lens.
The short films I make are my way of doing what I've always been trying to do, show the magic in how things are made.
James x
