Documentarian Matt Tyrnauer takes on ‘Nobu’

The Treatment

KCRW

Arts

4.6 • 639 Ratings

🗓️ 19 July 2025

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week on The Treatment, Elvis speaks with Nobu director Matt Tyrnauer about his documentary on the culinary legend. Then, filmmaker Joshua Rofé stops by to talk about his HBO documentary series The Mortician. And on the Treat, Pulitzer prize winner David Mamet hails the “wonderful” villain of a favorite 1971 crime drama.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.
0:14.0	It's the Treatment, which you can also hear at KCRW.com.
0:18.3	My guest, Director Matt Turnauer, has always kept himself relatively busy. He's just here a little over a year ago in his film, Carville, winning his everything stupid, a film that I wish had been seen by more people for obvious reasons. I think what he has an affinity for is shooting people and capturing people who tend to be themselves
0:39.3	a center of cultural movements, such as his films Valentino the Last Emperor, Scotty
0:44.3	and the Secret History of Hollywood, and his new film is Nobu. And we should say that film is
0:50.3	Nobu Matsu Hisa. But again, I think he falls into this thing that you do
0:55.6	where you tend to focus on people who are themselves cultural movements, don't you?
1:00.7	Yeah, I could also say I like to enter into worlds, and Nobu created a world and a culture,
1:09.7	and by now an empire of restaurants. There are, I think, about
1:15.7	to be 65 of them around the world. And there are not many chefs at this price point, because
1:23.9	sometimes it's $1,000 ahead in there who can expand this much and keep the quality as high and keep the reputation where it needs to be.
1:38.4	But he wasn't born on third base.
1:42.5	So there's a whole backstory here that I think is certainly the
1:47.0	foundation of the film. So often you are attracted to these people. Again, we say it's the same
1:52.3	thing about Scotty or Valentino, who are consumed with a kind of ambition that finds itself
1:58.3	once they find something to do with themselves.
2:02.3	Well, also James Carville.
2:09.1	I was making the James Carville movie and the Nobu movie virtually simultaneously.
2:10.2	Wow. And well, I didn't realize when I set out to do both, not at the same time, but you know,
2:20.3	you're sort of a prisoner to vicissitudes that throw things off schedule. So this ended up being the case. Both of these guys are in their
2:27.7	70s when I start the films. And I realized that both of them are very successful people, household names, who were total
2:37.3	failures until they were about 40, and repeat failures.
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 14 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from KCRW, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of KCRW and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.