AN ACTOR'S DIET FOR ME

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Film and TV caterers aren’t just for the stars: they’ll cook for the rest of us too. Matthew Sweet goes on location ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Summer 2010

If you want to eat like a film star, choose your idol carefully. Acting is not a profession noted for its rational relationship with food. Jane Fonda survived “Barbarella” on apple peel. Lunch for Marlon Brando was a Chinese takeaway, two roast chickens, a jar of peanut butter and a bottle of milk: during the shooting of “Mutiny on the Bounty”, he split 52 pairs of trousers. John Travolta, according to his ex-wife, “feels uncomfortable” in the presence of ice-cubes that are not perfectly transparent. For some people who emote in front of cameras, food is just another substance they can use to mark out their territory from ours.

The greatest stars, says Judy Crane, eat from the catering wagon alongside the sparks and the chippies and the extras dressed as Roman legionaries. Judy ought to know. She and her partner Russ Boswell have been satisfying the appetites of film people across Europe for two decades. Their purpose-built kitchen on wheels has served swordfish in Segovia, sausages on the Isle of Man, lemon-baked perch in Belgium. “Antonio Banderas stood right where you’re standing when I made him his ham-and-cheese toastie,” she tells me, as I loll against one of her aluminium worktops. Judy likes Antonio. And not just, I sense, because he said nice things about her chocolate cake.

eating food Movie location caterers are very like the firms that feed guests at wedding receptions and garden parties—except that they come with menus resistant to last-minute changes in the shooting schedule, and staff who can handle a prima donna on a macrobiotic diet. If your army of guests is sufficiently numerous, many of these firms will also consider rolling up at a location where the only movie being shot is the home variety. But would you want them parked outside the venue on your wedding day? Might there be a reason beyond pernickety egotism why the biggest film stars employ their own private sashimi-chefs and crudités-wranglers? Judy and Russ have invited me to a car park on an industrial estate in south-east London to judge the quality of their work. I will be doing this with the help of a secret weapon: one of Britain’s finest sets of tastebuds, which come attached to an expansive Yorkshireman and Intelligent Life contributor called Christopher Hirst.

Russ and Judy arrive at 5am and connect their truck to the water main. Chris and I roll up just before lunch, due at 1.30. Pink cuts of meat await the heat. Stacks of shredded vegetables totter by the wok. Handfuls of berries are poised to enter a thicket of salad leaves. Cauliflower cheese does what cauliflower cheese will, in a moderate oven half an hour before serving. “It’s all calm now,” says Russ. “And then it’ll be kit, bollocks, scramble.”

A few streets away, the people who will eat this food are toiling under arc lamps. They are the 70-strong cast and crew of a British film called “Foster”, to whom Russ and Judy will supply breakfast, a mid-morning snack, lunch and afternoon tea, all for £15 per head per day. “Foster” is the story of a bereaved couple whose lives are transformed by the incursion of a mysterious young boy: it stars Richard E. Grant, Toni Collette and Maurice Cole. To the film fan, they’re the title characters in “Withnail and I” and “Muriel’s Wedding”, plus an exciting young British newcomer. To Russ and Judy, they’re an uncomplicated omnivore, a no-wheat, no-dairy special case, and a serious nut allergy.

Russ picks up the phone and goes through the menu with one of the assistant directors. Pork with an onion and mustard sauce. Seared salmon with dill. Butternut squash casserole. “And as we all know,” he says, drily, “there are no nuts in butternuts.”

At 1.30, the car park remains empty. The morning’s filming has over-run. Toni Collette has been given the afternoon off and will be lunching elsewhere. Pork, salmon and cauliflower cheese will be forced to maintain a parking orbit for a further 30 minutes. This would send most restaurateurs into a deep depression, but Russ and Judy can take it. They are equally unfazed when Chris Hirst arrives, scudding over the cracked concrete like a lunch-seeking missile. And once service has begun, we join extras, make-up artists, riggers and technicians in the queue—except that, unlike them, we have everything on the menu.

Aboard the double-decker bus that acts as the crew’s mobile dining room, I take notes as Chris attacks food piled on polystyrene plates. He is puzzled by the mustard sauce on the pork, which he thinks might have been better spooned over a rabbit. But he pronounces the salmon well-cooked, rumbles enthusiasm for some fried potatoes that betray the years that Russ and Judy spent in Spain, and gives the salad a nod of approval: “It’s high-class girls’ food for high-class girls.” Then he sinks his fork into the orange hunks of the butternut squash casserole. “Rather good, for those that like vegetarian food,” he muses, as if the existence of such people is barely conceivable. “And it’s all very impressive when you know the confines they work within. It’s somewhere between the pub and the restaurant—and I half-expected bacon rolls.”

We canvass opinion among our fellow diners. An actress sitting at the next table tells us about the star on her previous film, who took one look at a platter of Tesco Value biscuits and hurled them to the floor. The next tea-break featured Jenga towers of Duchy Originals. We commiserate with her about the unreasonable behaviour of some of Equity’s most over-rewarded members. She shrugs. “Duchy Originals are really nice biscuits.”

kitchen on wheels The makers of “Foster” seem satisfied. And so, therefore, are Russ and Judy. It isn’t always so easy. When they were in Malta serving the 250-strong cast and crew of the American mini-series “Helen of Troy”, a cameraman asked for an egg-white omelette with a dash of pepper, and got sarcasm for breakfast. (Obviously he hadn’t seen the scene in “Get Shorty” in which Danny DeVito embodies the finicky vain-glory of Hollywood by asking for the same dish.) Then there was the actress on the Stella Artois commercial filmed in Segovia, where the cold froze the washing-up water. She had them working all week to supply wheat-free, gluten-free food—and was then spotted at a party with her face full of white bread roll.

As I’m being told this story, the lanky form of Richard E. Grant crosses the car park. “He doesn’t look like he eats much,” observes Chris. The mobile kitchen and the buffet table now have a devastated look. For the star of the film, with the second half of today’s shooting ahead of him, the earliest hope of sustenance is a four o’clock sandwich. For me, however, it’s a wrap.

SET MENUS

Ace Film Catering is Russ’s and Judy’s working title —they’ll feed you pork with mustard sauce, and much else, from £15 a head.

Locafête is a 30-year-old stalwart of the French film industry. It has served steak frites to Sean Connery’s Bond, among others, and will do private parties from €19.

MI Catering (07886 776507) put pan-fried duck breast with mashed celeriac and balsamic jus in the mess-tins of the “Green Zone” grunts—and will do the same for you from £14.

All prices quoted are per person, for breakfast, lunch and tea—though there may be a minimum spend, usually around £700-800. For a directory of other location caterers in Britain, Europe, America and Canada, try ,.

(Matthew Sweet presents "Night Waves" on BBC Radio 3.)

Picture Credit: Abbe Trayler-Smith