Q&A: Director Jesse Zigelstein’s Ace Debut Deftly Explores Hipster Chef Culture

By Liam Lacey

Nose To Tail, a dark comedy about a beleaguered chef over the course of one day and night, is the debut film from Jesse Zigelstein, a York University-trained film student who currently lives in Los Angeles. The low-budget, privately financed film was accepted by a dozen film festivals in the United States and Canada over the past year; the film makes its theatrical debut this week. The Toronto-shot feature, starring Aaron Abrams as Daniel, the owner-chef with a gift for alienating people, it’s a fresh take on a familiar dish.

Aaron Abrams in a scene from Nose To Tail.

As Zigelstein says: “My critique of a lot of chef and restaurant movies is that they all have the same trajectory, the same redemptive final turn, just because it’s perceived as more conventionally satisfying and all the character’s abrasiveness get sanded down. I’m more interested in the character’s contradictions than a change of heart.”

Read our review of Nose To Tail

Original-Cin spoke with Zigelstein and Abrams at my culinary choice, a Second Cup at Queen and John Street. I had some kind of scone and a black coffee. The talent drank water. Service was minimal though the manager did turn down the volume of the music so we could talk.

Original-Cin: These are tough times for small films. What was your strategy for getting this out there?

Jesse Zigelstein: It was ad hoc. We made the film, just hoping for the best version of the story we could and we’d worry about the distribution later. We had our U.S. premier at the Santa Barbara Film Festival at the beginning of 2019 which was a nice way to start.

OC: Where you scored a big positive review from Stephen Farber of The Hollywood Reporter.

JZ: That certainly wasn’t calculated or solicited. Stephen Farber just happened to be at the screening that night. So yeah, we had some good fortune there, and. And then there was like a steady drumbeat. You know, enough reviews and enough festival appearances to keep to keep the movie alive, that it wouldn’t disappear. And after the Canadian Film Festival in March of last year, we sold the streaming rights to Crave TV so I knew the film wouldn’t disappear. But I did want to have the theatrical experience and that we got the festival run and a limited theatrical release is great for a film of this size.

Filmmaker Jesse Zigelstein.

OC: There are some interesting parallels between the restaurant and movie business, where, increasingly the indie restaurant or the indie film are endangered, either by the blockbuster experience at one end, or the Uber Eats/Netflix home consumption model.

Aaron Abrams: Whether it was a John Cassavetes or a Kevin Smith movie, there’s an indie film experience where you feel it’s personal to the filmmaker. You can sense when a filmmaker has maxed out his credit cards and it’s a passion project and it’s a different experience for the audience. I like Marvel movies as much as the next guy, but the kind of movie that Jesse’s making, this microbudget passion project, is more rewarding or at least, it’s a refreshing kind of reward.

Jesse was great about letting us have some freedom, which is the wondrous part about doing something on a microbudget. You can’t go back and do reshoots and there isn’t a lot of room for mistakes. But there’s more room for magic in a weird way because of the adrenaline. It’s like, ‘It’s showtime!’ almost as if you’re doing a play, because you have a limited opportunity to make it feel alive.

OC: So, you did this on a low budget, but you didn’t stint on getting the food and food preparation right. How did you manage that?

JZ: The food was prepared by a professional chef in Toronto named Nathan Campbell who we hired to create the food and to train Aaron, not, obviously, in the food preparation, but in the preparation skills.

OC: To make the movements look authentic?

AA: Right. They’re on their feet all day so they do things as efficiently as possible, so they don’t pass out. There were things that he said we couldn’t show because I wasn’t good at it but there were things that I could do — I could carve the pig — that were convincing. There were other things about the chef’s experience that we used. There's a scene in the movie where he goes into a freezer and loses his mind. That's a thing that Nathan told me he does to let off steam.

OC: I think restaurant people will be impressed that this shows it’s a grueling business. There’s a famous 2017 survey of London chefs that had more than half using alcohol and painkillers to get through their shifts, with high depression rates and work-related accidents.

JZ: Right. We wanted to emphasize the physical toll and the debilitating brutal stress he’s under but, you know, with no grand speeches about his body falling apart. Aaron conveys that through his gestures and his physical performance.

OC: How bad were you willing to make yourself look, Aaron?

AA: Well, I play jerkoffs all the time. I kind of revel in it. It appeals to me to find the heart of these characters. Nobody’s goal is to burn the world down. They have a goal that’s real and true to them. Danny wants love and respect but in order to get that he thinks he has to put everything into his craft. And he thinks that means pushing people away. I think all artists worry that relationships will detract from their art, but they realize they’re suffering as people because they don’t have relationships. They need both but they refuse to allow both to take place.

OC: You’re in every scene and working at a high level of intensity for most of it. What did you do between scenes? Try to relax or try to maintain the edge?

AA: Well, it’s part of my job to make people feel comfortable so if I’m going around acting exhausted everyone else is going to be exhausted. I’m friends with some of the cast members and others became friends and so we could keep the energy alive between scenes, which is important, especially on night shoots. Everybody wants to go to bed and take a nap for 20 minutes but you can’t really do that and get the energy back. You need an adrenaline boost the same way a chef needs to have to get these people their food right now. I felt like it was my job to be never tired out, which was perfect for the role. So, I was exhausted but I wasn’t tired.

OC: The phrase “toxic masculinity” feels over-used, but the movie has something of an old-school 1970s feel, in its portrait of stereotypically self-destructive male energy. Can you talk about looking at that kind of behavior in a contemporary context?

JZ: I was definitely consciously trying to broach these issues, which seem to be evergreen, which came to a flashpoint with #MeToo movement. What is contemporary masculinity? What’s expected of men in this culture, and what’s repressed and denied, which is part of a cluster of things I’ve always been interested in.

The restaurant world is a great setting for these things to crystalize. We tend to idealize these chefs and accept a lot of their bad behaviours and a lot of chefs are being called out as part of the general reckoning. I wanted to look at the bad stuff and frame it in relation to positive qualities, to see the whole of the character unfold. But it’s a drama not a slogan and I didn’t want to be too didactic, so comic elements definitely helped.