Director and co-writer Christoffer Boe consulted with an unusual combination of professionals for the creation of his latest film, A Taste of Hunger — chefs at renowned Michelin-starred restaurants and marriage counselors — to dig into what it means to “have it all” in a modern marriage.
Co-written by Tobias Lindholm, A Taste of Hunger unfolds amid the high-intensity atmosphere of Copenhagen’s restaurant industry; “One of the most interesting food scenes in the world,” Boe said.
Carsten (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and Maggi (Katrine Greis-Rosenthal) are married restaurateurs fighting for the coveted Michelin star and their marriage in this film, which provides a complete sensory experience.
Employing flashbacks and intertwining storylines, A Taste of Hunger is broken into four flavor sections (“sweet,” “sour,” “fat,” and “salt”) — a tool the writers used to break up the screenplay into manageable parts for each to work on independently before bringing the entire piece together. However, despite the satiating backdrop of the film, Boe and Lindholm began the screenwriting process with modern marriage as the centerpiece.
“We wanted to do it about the sort of impossibility of the modern marriage and modern relationship, that it’s almost impossible to see how it could work with all the different ambitions that we put into it,” Boe said, adding that unlike American cinema’s preoccupation with careers and relationships, “in Denmark, we often neglect the workplace of people.”
Desiring to explore how “work also defines people,” Boe had to “find an interesting arena” for the film’s characters to exist in. For this, the writers drew on existing realities in the Denmark food scene, where there are several incidents of partners who work together, in addition to an intense, time-consuming atmosphere that makes it difficult to meet individuals outside of the industry.
Though Denmark is a small country, it currently holds the two highest-ranked restaurants in the world, according to Boe.
“It’s just very mind-blowing and interesting how they became so ambitious and how they became so successful.”
Boe was enticed by this setting because “we hadn’t really had this arena portrayed or used as a background in Finnish cinema” despite the fame that the restaurants in Denmark — and Copenhagen in particular — have acquired.
To better understand and portray the high-stakes world of Copenhagen’s culinary scene, Boe and the film’s actors went to some of the city’s (and world’s) best restaurants to do research. They ate the food, observed the atmosphere, and spoke with chefs to understand “what it entails to have a business at that kind of level and the work they had to do to get to that point.”
“We think we work a lot in the film industry; but the work in the restaurant world, it’s obscene,” he said.
Rasmus Kofoed, the head chef at the second best restaurant in the world, Geranium, prepared the menu for the entire film using aesthetic references from Boe. A Taste of Hunger also included extras (such as waiters and chefs) who actually worked in the Copenhagen restaurant scene and who helped confirm the authenticity of certain interactions, such as when one character was fired for not testing over-fermented lemons before he served them.
“I actually asked everybody in the room, ‘Could we just do that?’ and they said, ‘Definitely. He screwed up, he should be fired,’” Boe noted.
Another group of professionals that Boe and Lindholm consulted throughout the filmmaking process was marriage counselors; understandable for a film focused on “modern marriage and the struggles that we all have of finding happiness in that.”
The two went to couples therapy to learn why so many people get divorced, and also sat down with their wives for feedback about the script.
“I thought it was quite fun and interesting,” Boe said.
“They were very insightful on our blindsides about couples’ relationships.”
Boe also edited the film with his wife, My Thordal, for six months once the project was done shooting.
“It became a very private project in that sense,” he said.
Mixing together themes of love, ambition and food, Boe effectively uses these consultations to infuse his film with beautiful imagery and reverence for the atmosphere he sets it in, as well as empathy for the characters he populates it with. It’s this attention to detail and appreciation for his characters’ hardships that ultimately make the film compelling.
“I have a really high regard for what they’re doing,” Boe said of the chefs and restaurateurs in Copenhagen.
“In some ways it’s very indulgent and decadent to use that amount of time and money and energy on something that you could basically fulfill your need by using two bucks.”
“What they do is something that’s very complicated, but I love what it says about the human spirit — that we’re never satisfied, we want to strive to try new stuff and even something as basic as food is something that we’re never done with.”
Magnolia Pictures released A Taste of Hunger in theaters and On Demand on Jan. 28.