Film
In addition to food and advocacy, Waters’ other passions include film. Chez Panisse was named for “Honore Panisse”, a favorite character in the “Marius”, “Fanny”, and “Cesar” trilogy of Marcel Pagnol films, which chronicles the lives of working-class citizens in 1930s Marseilles. In the films, Honore Panisse is a kind, older man who agrees to marry Fanny, a younger woman who is pregnant with another man’s child. He is Waters’ favorite character because of his kindness and generosity, qualities she wanted to emulate when opening her restaurant. Waters named her daughter after Fanny.
In 1984 Waters opened a small breakfast café in Berkeley. Café Fanny is named after the heroine of Pagnol's films - a love story involving the whole community, centered around a little standup café. Waters wanted to evoke their spirit: an ideal reality where life and work were inseparable and the daily pace left time for the afternoon anisette or the restorative game of petanque, where eating together nourished the spirit as well as the body-since the food was raised, harvested, hunted, fished and gathered by people sustaining and sustained by each other and by the earth itself. The café closed in March 2012. (http://cafefanny.com/history.html)
In 1980, Werner Herzog asked Waters to cook his shoe for the film Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. She prepared the shoe in the Chez Panisse kitchen, braising it in duck fat, herbs, and spices. In turn, many people in the film industry are friends of Waters and of Chez Panisse. Francis Ford Coppola, Philip Kaufman, and others are notable restaurant patrons, and often attend events at the restaurant.
Read more about this topic: Alice Waters
Famous quotes containing the word film:
“The average Hollywood film star’s ambition is to be admired by an American, courted by an Italian, married to an Englishman and have a French boyfriend.”
—Katharine Hepburn (b. 1909)
“You should look straight at a film; that’s the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.”
—Werner Herzog (b. 1942)
“The motion picture is like a picture of a lady in a half- piece bathing suit. If she wore a few more clothes, you might be intrigued. If she wore no clothes at all, you might be shocked. But the way it is, you are occupied with noticing that her knees are too bony and that her toenails are too large. The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution from the audience but a mouthful of popcorn.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)