“The oddest throuple in Telluride,” joked the filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer, while driving from his Beverly Hills home to the film fest in Colorado, will be Tyrnauer and the colorful characters at the center of the two vérité documentaries that he is premiering in the Rockies this Labor Day weekend: the legendary Democratic political strategist James Carville, subject of Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid!, and sushi chef and restaurateur extraordinaire Nobu Matsuhisa, subject of Nobu.
Tyrnauer, 56, a longtime Vanity Fair editor-at-large and special correspondent turned prolific filmmaker of numerous critically and commercially successful nonfiction works — among them 2009’s Oscar-shortlisted Valentino: The Last Emperor, 2017’s Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood, 2018’s Studio 54 and 2019’s Where’s My Roy Cohn? — previously had a film at the fest in 2022, his Benington College doc The End of the World. But coming with two docs, both of which are still seeking U.S. distribution deals, and their celebrity subjects, neither of whom will have seen the film about them until their premiere, makes for a very different experience, he acknowledged.
Tyrnauer is one of only a few filmmakers who have ever had more than one film in a single year invited to screen at Telluride, a fest with a small and carefully curated lineup. (This year, the documentarian team of Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk are also coming with two works, In Waves and War and The White House Effect.) That’s largely because few people can turn out two docs of real quality within a short amount of time of each other. But it’s also, Tyrnauer says, the result of “the magical rhythms and cadences of filmmaking.” The two projects started around the same time and were shot overlappingly. “Nobu’s never home — he’s jetting around to 55 restaurants and hotels in far-flung places — and we hopped on the private jet with him to do that. And Carville is on and off Delta flights every week, and we would meet up with him, too. So it was a couple of years of a lot of sprawling travel.”
Carville and Matsuhisa will meet for the first time on Saturday, when Matsuhisa jets into town from Japan, joining Carville, who, along with his wife, the esteemed Republican political strategist, Mary Matalin, will already be on the ground; Carville and Matalin, the epitome of a D.C. power — and odd — couple, plan to attend the fest’s patrons brunch on Friday morning, and then the first screening of Carville on Friday night. Nobu will screen for the first time on Saturday. And then Carville will screen again on Sunday — at the same time as the LSU Tigers football game, to Carville’s consternation. “I wouldn’t know a football game, or when it happens, to save me,” chuckles Tyrnauer. “But he has been told that he cannot have a hall pass for that.”
In some ways, the subjects of Tyrnauer’s docs couldn’t be more different: Carville, nicknamed “The Ragin’ Cajun,” was born, raised and continues to live in Louisiana, while Matsuhisa hails from Japan. Carville talks loudly and a mile-a-minute, while Matsuhisa is generally soft-spoken. And Carville knows little about sushi, while Matsuhisa doesn’t follow American politics particularly closely. But in other respects, they’re quite a lot alike. Both are septuagenarians — Carville in 79, Matsuhisa is 75 — who first attained real success and fame, after plenty of failure, in their forties. Both came to be regarded as the finest practitioners of their respective professions. And now, in their third acts, both maintain grueling schedules that reflect their desire to remain active and relevant.
Unlike his subjects, Tyrnauer, whose father was a TV writer/producer, found his calling — and a positive response to his work — early in life. “I was sort of like Woodward and Bernstein with a reporter’s notebook going around when I was in elementary school,” he said with a laugh. “I had a newspaper in the third grade. I was a film major. I knew what I wanted to do.” At and after attending Wesleyan University in Connecticut, his many and varied interests — which include American arts, culture and politics — led him to several of the subjects of past profiles he composed in print and on film. And they ultimately led him to Carville and Matsuhisa.
Carville, film lovers may recall, was the star of another documentary 31 years ago, Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s The War Room, which chronicled the 1992 president campaign of Bill Clinton that Carville oversaw. (Remember “It’s the economy, stupid”?) The long shadow of that classic may have scared away other filmmakers from further documenting Carville, but not Tyrnauer. “James was the protagonist of a great documentary that people remember decades later, which is very rare for any film,” Tyrnauer acknowledges. “But we’re now 30-plus years on, and James Carville is a household name, not an emerging comet in the political universe. He has had a giant, arching career in the public eye, and a marriage that is almost unique in its political-public nature. And he hasn’t been checked in on for quite a few decades, really. So I thought that there was a lot of fodder in there for this. And then the election of 2024 struck.”
Tyrnauer never imagined that his Carville doc would end up focusing heavily on its subject leading the charge to convince Joe Biden to bow out of the 2024 presidential election, beginning more than a year before a disastrous debate led many other Democrats to adopt the same position. But that’s how things evolved. “I was shooting with him at his home in New Orleans,” the filmmaker recounted. “It was May 2023 when an ABC News-Washington Post poll came out and said that Biden was losing to Trump. James read the numbers on camera, and then we went to film him doing his morning round of phone calls — which he does every day — to the same group of people who are the foxhole buddies from the ’92 Clinton campaign. At that time, something clicked in James where he realized, with all his expertise, that Biden was in real danger of losing; that this is a ‘change election’; and that nothing says more of the same than Joe Biden versus Donald Trump. So he began pressing, and that became a major storyline that I began following in this film.”
Concurrently, Tyrnauer was jetting around the world with Matsuhisa, whose evolution “from a mom and pop restaurant [owner and chef] to spectacular overnight breakout success to slowly scaling to one of the greatest restaurant empires ever known” fascinated the filmmaker, as did the fact that Matsuhisa’s hallmark restaurants opened in the filmmaker’s own Los Angeles community back in the 1980s. “It’s where I’m from, and I love that era,” he explained. “The punk food revolution era of LA is really fascinating, and I was a little read in on it.”
What he was not familiar with before embarking on a film exploring “what it is about the character of the man that allows him to be so successful” were many of the specific details of Matsuhisa’s life — least of all that he “was a spectacular failure for the first half of his life.” But, Tyrnauer continued, “When I began to debrief Nobu on the particulars of his life, I found a really soulful, thoughtful person, who was able to access his emotions, and was very generous with his honesty as an interviewee.”
That’s not all Matsuhisa was generous with, Tyrnauer emphasized: “One of my problems with Nobu is that he’s so generous that I had to stop going to Nobu [restaurants] because I couldn’t sneak in there without being given an elaborate free meal, and I became embarrassed after a while.” (Tyrnauer’s personal favorite item on the chef’s menu: the tuna tartare with caviar.)
Tyrnauer decided, he said, that, “in order to understand what it’s like to be Nobu, to observe Nobu, and to connect with Nobu as a sushi chef, I should somehow sit across the sushi bar from him, and that should somehow be in the film. I wouldn’t be in the scene, but I would be the customer, and he would do his thing, and I would interview him while he was in action. So we did a shoot in the omakase bar of [the restaurant] Matsuhisa. We had cameras hanging from the ceiling and floating around and over my shoulder, and we shot him from a lot of angles.” He added, “I sat there for hours on end. The crew was incredibly happy, too, because I couldn’t possibly eat everything that came across the counter — I mean, there was caviar flying everywhere!”
Spending time with Matsuhisa brought back memories for Tyrnauer of his first documentary feature, which was also told in the vérité style, and its subject: “I think there’s some very clear parallels between Valentino [Garavani, the famed designer] and Nobu, the films and the people. I think they’re both great creative artists in their own fields, at the top of their field, in a very rarefied part of the culture, both with high price points and perfectionists.”
Now, as Tyrnauer prepares to reconnect with his subjects in the high altitude of Telluride, he’s not quite sure what to expect, other than a good time. “They’re both great guys and really wonderful to be with,” he asserted. “I haven’t really talked to them about one another. I think we’re just all going to be content to be thrown together in the surreal fishbowl of this perfect town in the mountains, in the midst of the best film festival imaginable.”
