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Behind-the-Scenes: The Food in 'Julie and Julia'

Posted by Erin Zimmer, July 17, 2009 at 3:00 PM

Unlike other recent food film releases, Julie & Julia is not trying to make a statement about rejecting corn syrup or starting a compost pile. As director Nora Ephron said in a preview for food and film bloggers yesterday (it officially opens on August 7), it's about the joy of cooking, eating, and living. And a lot of buttah.

The French onion soup appears in a happy montage scene between Julie and Julia.

"I've never gone through so much butter before," said food stylist and former Martha Stewart Living food editor Susan Spungen who worked on the film. But her biggest challenge was making cheese look melty on screen. It had to be hot enough to stretch "from the soup to the lips" (the script's orders), but not scorch the actor's tongue, and in Julie & Julia, the actors actually eat most of the food (though that red wine was all Welch's).

Food stylist Susan Spungen making meltiness happen.

Spungen resorted to her electric paint remover, a popular secret weapon for food stylists. When it's not stripping paint from houses, the hand-held gadget is great for French onion soup special effects. To facilitate meltification even more, Spungen used (shh, don't tell the French) mozzarella instead of Gruyere, which just doesn't pull off the same silly putty stretch on camera.

The ingredients necessary for Julia Child's Boeuf Bourguignon. Or in the words of Julia, the "Booooof Buuurgeeee-nyon."

Food porn on screen is pretty different from that in print. In a glossy magazine, you can see every hair on a raspberry. The job involves tweezers. But in Julie & Julia, the food on screen wasn't trying to look perfect, just stuffable in the mouth.

In one scene, Julie (Amy Adams) and her husband Eric (Chris Messina) eat bruschetta. The tomatoes looked so red, the bread so rustic (and audibly ka-runchy), and with every mouth rip, olive oil juices rain all over the table. Yeah, who doesn't want to eat that. Turns out the scene was shot in March, totally not tomato season, and those were heirloom tomatoes grown in Shushan, New York.

Julie Powell making Julia Child's chocolate cream pie.

Ta-daaa.

There are others foods in the movie you really don't want to eat. Like the aspic. "Mmm, I don't we ever have to go back there," Powell said in the Q&A after the film. Tums were inhaled in many scenes—so much that you kinda want to send them a product placement bill. On one day of filming, Messina swallowed 32 of them. He was not feeling too hot the next day.

The film hops back and forth between the Child and Powell worlds very fluidly. "It blends two stories together, like my favorite movie, The Godfather II," Ephron said with a smile. Channeling Martin Scorcese yet again, she said that in the opening scene, when Julia and her husband Paul (played brilliantly by Stanley Tucci) are in a French restaurant, moaning over a still-sizzling, just-deboned sole filet, Ephron "wanted to call up Martin Scorcese and say, 'you've never shot a fish like that before.' "

It's true. Don't see this movie hungry. Eat beforehand or at the very least, pack some string cheese.

Julie & Julia opens August 7. Thanks to Sony Pictures for the preview yesterday and Le Cordon Bleu chefs Kirk Bachmann and Brian Malarkey for recreating some of the foods in the film afterward, including the holy grail, the Beef Bourguignon.

Related

Video: 'Julie and Julia' Sneak Peek
Julie Powell's First Reactions to 'Julie and Julia' Movie
Ed's Bit Part as an Extra in 'Julie and Julia'
Julia Child: Cooking with Master Chefs on PBS

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Tags: Amy Adams, Julia Child, Julie and Julia, Julie Julia, Meryl Streep, movies, Nora Ephron