Take one "British Baking Show" and add a cup of Christopher Guest improvised mockumentary, mix in a lot of processed food products, a gallon of ambition, romantic complications, sibling rivalry, and a muffin-head-wearing mascot, and let it marinate for a decade and you've got "Cook-Off," a very funny film made ten years ago but just now being released in theaters. Its stars include Melissa McCarthy, Niecy Nash, Diedrich Bader, and the late Marcia Wallace. I spoke to co-writer, star, and director Cathryn Michon, whose open letter to Bob Weinstein calling for more women producers and directors as “to save your soul and your company” went viral, about making the film, our love for cooking competitions, and her character’s hair.
On television, The Great British Cooking Show is a worldwide phenomenon. What is it that is so endlessly enthralling about cooking competitions?
Cooking is something we all do. It's a very rare person who can’t make a piece of toast. So it is very easy for all of us to imagine ourselves as eligible for the big prize. The idea that you could win a million dollars using refrigerator biscuits and spray cheese is just so compelling. It's also not haute cuisine. I actually had a friend who became a finalist in the Pillsbury Bake-Off. I went with her and It was really exciting though she lost. She made this three cheese broccoli risotto and she said the hardest thing to making a recipe was opening the chardonnay while you waited for it all to boil.
I enjoyed the contrast between these meticulously plated, very sweet, very generous dishes and the cut-throat competition and dysfunction.
There have been scandals in real cooking contests and accusations of cheating. So this movie is not too far-fetched!
You co-wrote, acted, and directed. What was the biggest challenge?
I come from a school of you know Lena Dunham, Albert Brooks, the storyteller who also directs and edits films. I like being part of the cast and part of the world of the film as I am figuring out what direction the film will take both in pre-production and shooting and then in post-production. The biggest challenge was getting it in theaters. This film has a long, crazy history. Independent films get caught up all the time in problems unrelated to the quality of the film. Somebody goes bankrupt and the film becomes an asset. It was trapped for ten years and had to be completely remade with footage we found and reshoots and, so it's been a crazy craft project in of itself. The good thing is that people will see a better movie because we’ve had that extra gift of time and I could bring to it what I've learned making other movies.
Your character’s hair is like the movie’s special effect.
Like many things in my envied life as a filmmaker, it is a function of trying to save time and money. Hair and makeup takes time. Sharon is a bit of a drag queen and considers herself to be very fashionable person, so if we had done really complicated hairdos for her it would have taken all kinds of time. So then I just went to the mall and bought like a bunch of crazy blonde hair clips and wiglets and pieces and you know we just clipped them on even though they're all different shades and don't really match. She has very specific ideas about everything, about her fiancé, and about the competition, about her sister and that's the fun of the movie, seeing all that turned upside down.
One thing I loved in the movie was the amazing food that was used as the transitional text. Who created those dishes?
I did! I wanted the film to have title cards and I wanted to get an opening sequence that really got you to understand that the food is a character in the film. That particular sequence was actually shot in my apartment, those are my hands. For each of those title cards you shoot between two and a half and three minutes of footage. As a filmmaker with no budget I ended up figuring out how much footage I needed to shoot by making recipes in my dog's kennel and putting my iPhone on top of the kennel, shooting various amount of footage and sending them to the editor to figure out what the ideal timing was. Every single one of those things had to be shot in one take, with people handing me things.
Did the actors develop their own recipes?
That was a big part of the whole way that we made this movie. Everybody had to know specifically what they were making, even the background actors. We just had a huge table full of food that we got at the dollar store. We asked people to choose some ingredients and we had tons of utensils and baking sheets and and bowls and whatever you needed so when you see people in the movie making food, they are really making food.
We shot all the competition stuff like it was a reality show, so we had multiple camera units focusing on different contestants so that everybody would be working all at the same the time and not like you would do in a regular movie where you film one character at a time.
What are you hoping audiences will get from this film?
I like the optimism of the film. Every character really believes that they can win. The film itself is an exercise in optimism, with a ten year wait. The characters in the film inspired me not to let this little gem of a film die on the vine. At the very end of the movie a character says, “This is America.” We can’t lose our essential American optimism and that's what I love about this film.